Teaching Tuesday - where are these lines going anyway?

In a previous life, I was a junior school teacher. One of the things I remember having to do on my PGCE, and subsequently inflicting on the children in my classes, was to talk about "travelling" in PE.

Basically, you get a load of children in a school hall, and ask them to "travel" across the room, or from one bench to another, or across a series of mats or obstacles. They then devise different methods of "travelling" (forward rolls, walking backwards, hopping etc) without bumping into anyone else. It's one of those things that you try to forget, but pops up again years later - when teaching machine embroidery, f'rinstance.

So, how are we going to travel across our calico (or whatever we're stitching on) today? Ideally you work this out before you start, or at least have some idea.

The sewing machine stitches a continuous line and with free machining, we have total control over where that line is going. But to be able to make it look like something, or outline a shape with many parts, you need to work out beforehand how you will travel across the fabric - i.e. how you will join up the different shapes and lines with your one continuous line.

The dreaded vermicelli is a line that needs thinking about - trying not to back yourself into a corner

Junior school teacher again - look at that handwriting practice...

Stars, hearts, and other little shapes all need to be joined somehow and somewhere. Sometimes you will need to double-back along your line - that's fine, and adds to the charm.

If you don't work out how you're going to travel before you start, this sort of thing happens:

Not sure where the deely boppers came from...

Next week, my new way of using up all those hoarded little scraps of fabric. Ahem:

Teaching Tuesday - and breathe...

One of the most important - no, THE most important thing to remember about machine embroidery - is to BREATHE.

Maybe it would be a good idea to do a spot of meditation before picking up the calico - sit up straight, rest your eyes, gently place your hands on your uncrossed legs, shoulders down and breathe - and breathe out, fully and completely, and rest a while before you allow your lungs to fill again.

Now we will begin! What we are aiming for is the perfect combination of the machine speed (your foot on the pedal) and the line speed (how fast you move the fabric with your hands).

The problems start when your eyes look at the line, see it wandering about not looking like what you wanted it to look like, so then your brain starts to panic and says "oh no! I can't stop, the line is going everywhere and nowhere and I don't know what to do aaaaaaghgggghhhhh!". Breathe.

I highly recommend that before you start to stitch, have a definite idea of what you are going to do - wiggles? Your name? The dreaded vermicelli? It helps to draw it out in pencil on paper first.

I won't tell you exactly how to set your machine up for free machining, as there are lots of other resources out there that can help and all machines are different. Just remember to drop/cover the feed teeth, loosen the top tension by one notch, change the presser foot to an embroidery foot, and stabilise your fabric somehow - it should be stiff enough to stay completely flat when you start to stitch.

When you are ready:

• Make sure you are holding the stabilised fabric or hoop (see last week) flat not tilted, and firmly and confidently - but not so tightly that your knuckles turn white. 

• Start to stitch, remembering to hold your threads (see last week again). This is a bit of a juggling act with holding the fabric, but it's only for the first few stitches.

• Start to run the machine at a moderate speed - not full speed flat out, and definitely not a crawl. Faster rather than slower, but not so fast that you panic and feel out of control (see above).

• Move the fabric gently, confidently and smoothly. Not too fast, but keep it moving. Try not to jerk it about, and keep it flat.

You will know when you've got it right - it will feel smooth, controlled, and your stitches will neither be too big or too small.

Moving the fabric too fast, and/or stitching too slowly = stitches are too big.

The lines are jagged, and you will most likely bend and then break the needle. 

BUT watch out for the other extreme: stitching too fast and moving the fabric too slowly = stitches are too small.

The stitches all pile on top of each other, and you may start to pull up the bobbin thread (sometimes we want this to happen, but not today!) If you keep going like this, you will get hard and lumpy heaps of stitches and may end up breaking the thread. 

Unfortunately the only way to crack this one is to practice, as much as you can. 

You can breathe out now! Next Tuesday, where are all these lines going anyway?

W is for what happened to Tuesday?

I'm trying to get myself sorted out (hmm, never said that before...). This blog is on my list of things to sort, as it's been a bit unloved and neglected over the past year.

I've toyed with the idea of doing Gina's Random Crap Monday posts, and I may yet. But for now I've settled on the ambitious target of two posts a week - a Teaching Tuesday and a Five on Friday.

On Teaching Tuesdays I will endeavour to share with you a tip or a technique for machine embroidery (mostly, but I may include other things).

And because I keep mental notes of all the different things that could make a blog post but never get round to posting any of them, it all ends up being sporadic and random. If I do a Five on Friday I can neatly parcel up all the other things I do in a week into one post. (I think a Work on Wednesday post might be pushing things, and I don't like the W word so let's move on!)

So, without further ado, the first Tuesday tip - on a Wednesday, and there are two of them...oh it's going so well....

At the moment I'm working on these little collages I started on holiday. I didn't get very far as it was too windy for collage, and to be honest I was quite happy just sitting in a chair with a glass of wine gazing into the middle distance for most of the time...

Stabiliser

I use a paper tearaway stabiliser behind nearly everything I stitch. It works for me. It's cheap, it - er - tears away when you are finished, and it provides a rigid enough support to stitch without a hoop. And in my book that's a good thing. There are times for a hoop, but mostly I try to avoid it.

Always give yourself a generous border - to hold onto firmly, to avoid puckering, and to give yourself room for manoeuvre: 

And here we are with all the machine stitching complete (this is a different collage btw, but similar). You will notice that I have lots of trailing threads. 

Tidying thread ends

Some people pull up the bobbin thread when they start to stitch, some people stitch on the spot to anchor the starting threads. Some people fly by the seat of their pants and leave them all a-trailing. I'm a mix between lazy, fussy and paranoid, and I like to tie my thread ends off neatly on the reverse. 

Firstly, when I start to stitch, I always hold my threads (top and bottom, I don't pull the bobbin through). Sometimes, and if I can, I stitch over the first few stitches again and then trim away the starting threads. If I can't be bothered, or because the stitched line is too fine and doing this would create a blob of stitching, I leave all my threads until I've finished. As I have here:

This is the back. (I quite like the pic from the back, what do you think?). 

So then what do I do? First, what I don't do. I remember being mortified and embarrassed at a class years ago, because after stitching something, I then spent ages with a needle threading all those top threads through to the back to tie off. So don't do that.

What you do is this:

Pull gently on the bobbin thread. The top thread will pull through in a little loop:

and when you have pulled that through, you will have two threads which you can tie off and trim neatly

et voila:

Nice and tidy.

I will now add some little beads by hand, maybe a bit more hand stitching, and when I'm completely happy with everything (ha!) I'll carefully tear off the stabiliser. 

Job done.