A Landscape of your own - 2

Well, I have finally gotten this tutorial together for you.  Today we will look at free motion embroidery on our landscape.

Since I am not videoing the stitiching for this tutorial, I have included short videos of the pattern on a whiteboard to help with visualising the motions.  Remember, drawing is great practice for free motion embroidery.
So far we have cut some strips and arranged and fused them.  It is a simple landscape, but a really easy one to start with and one that can be changed in many, many ways.

The first part I do is the sky.  This is a very simple treatment for sky, a sort of flattened stippling.  Look at the video of drawing this pattern on the white board.

Next the far away hills.  I have used an up and down motion to cover the whole hillside.  I used a grey thread and allowed the purple to show through.  I also used two different greys in the bobbin, which was loose so the colour spotted.  Darker towards the bottom and lighter towards the top.  The reason I use grey, or sometimes a grey blue colour here is that these colours will make the hill seem far away.  See the whiteboard video for this stitch pattern.

The next hillside was with a matching olive green thread and grey in the bobbin.  The bobbin thread was loose so it spotted from time to time, helping to meld the two into the distance.  I used granite stitch along the edge of the hill here.  Watch the whiteboard video of this pattern.

On the next hill, I again only stitched the top edge.  Variety in textures will give depth.  The thread was a slightly lighter thread with no spotting, starting to move forward in the picture with brighter colours.  The pattern here was a  horizontal zigzag (using straight stitch) down the diagonal slope.  Watch the video below for a clearer idea of the pattern.

In the layer above, I used a bright green with balanced tensions (no spotting) and drew grass shapes of uneven heights.  The white board video is below.

In this last layer, I actually did two different threads.  The one above in a dark green with the same pattern as the previous layer, and the one below, where I used a variegated thread.  The pattern is the same again, grass shapes, but I spaced them apart.  You can also see at the bottom the stitches going left to right, where I was marking time waiting for colour changes in the thread.  Again, this has led to a serendipitous change in my plan, which I will discuss, but first, here is the pattern video.

Below is my practice fabric.  I always have a practice fabric, made up the same way as my piece, so that I can test out tensions and patterns on it before I begin on my actual work.  When you change colours and bobbins and bobbin tensions frequently, you need to test everything on a similar piece of work - every time.

OK, so here is the piece in a piece of mount board 3x5 in.  The serendipitous part is that when I put this on the scanner, the fabric slipped a bit and uncovered that little bit at the bottom.  Now that I have seen that bit at the bottom, it looks like the side of a road to me, so road it shall be, and perhaps we need a fence post as well? 

All art, if it is good art, takes us on a journey, and sometimes that journey is not where we intended, but somewhere better. 

I will show you the decorative stitch tutorial tomorrow, hopefully.
vicki

Tension......................

Well after a few tries I have my second sample done.  This one, I think I will redo later with some fabric and coloured thread.  At this stage I am just experimenting with lines, being very patient because my fingers are itching to get on with more interesting stitching.
Here is my inspiration for this piece.

 

Here is my sketch

 

And here is my stitched sample

It doesn't look like much, but I'm only practicing at the moment and you would not believe the troubles I had today.  I ended up pulling the whole machine apart and cleaning out the tension assembly, but before that, I
changed the thread
changed the bobbin
adjusted the tension top and bottom
changed the needle.
each about  five to ten times. and this is the result!

Underneath, you can see where I originally started this sample before everything went pear shaped!
When I finally got my tension fixed, and finished the horizontal lines in the sample, I decided I needed to do something a little less like work, so I started doing some scribbling on a small landscape I had fused a few days ago as a stitch sampler.  In the sky I have just done some straight stitching and on the top of the first green layer, I have done garnet stitch, which is a technical way of saying I just scribbled in little circles to create the effect of trees or shrubs.

Obviously I was just using scraps for this and my cutting wasn't particularly tidy. but I must say I am much happier with this result than with my other sample.  I just have to keep reminding myself that later on I will redo these samples with lots more techniques and then they will be something to look at.