yin and yang and a satin stitch tip

Watercolour paper on card, concentrated liquid watercolour dripped and dried between colours, hand made stamp.  This is my own take on the yin-yang symbol, which you might have seen before in my sketchbook

No leaf today, but there are two leaves in the stamp. 
Instead, I'm going to tell you about my trials and tribulations with satin stitch edgings.
I have tried every method known to man, but my corners get eaten up by my machine!  I have tried the embroidery floss technique, I have tried the sew first cut second method,  I have tried using water soluble stabiliser, and heat aways and tear aways.  I have tried so many ways to do this seemingly simple thing that all other sewing machines seem to do so easily, that I thought I would never get it.
When all of a sudden it occured to me.
When I am quilting or thread painting something small, I often put a larger piece of paper-scrap computer paper underneath to stabilise.  It seems to have more strength than the tear aways, which crumble as soon as you look at them.
Anyway, I thought, why don't I try this with satin stitch edgings?

You can see in the picture that I have gone around the corner really nicely, with the paper underneath.

The paper tears away quite nicely, as you can see.

Then, because this happened to be a satin that liked to fray, I had a little trimming and a touch up with a permanent marker to match the thread and voila!

A great satin stitch edging (which I showed on my ATC the other day)
With some pieces, I leave the paper on the back.  It depends on the purpose.  With an ATC, it gives extra strength and somewhere to write on the back, so I glue it on before I start.  With other pieces, I take the paper off the back afterward.
I am pretty pleased with this method, because after so many tries, I finally found a method that suits me, and secondly, scrap paper is easy to find!
I vaguely remember reading somewhere that Once upon a time, before we had all these mods and cons, paper was used as a stabiliser.

Leafy Lace

On Saturdays, I will endeavour to post something to do with stitching, whether hand or machine.
Today i am posting about another WIP which is a piece of thread lace.
It is quite a large piece of lace.  The leaf measures about  11 or 12 inches from the tip to the end of the stem.
I started by laying out some heavy water soluble stabiliser and placing knitting ribbon on that in the shape I wanted

I hate using the plasticky stabiliser as it sticks and does not feed nicely.  I solve this problem by laying some more light water soluble stabiliser of the non woven type top and bottom.

In the picture above, I have also stitched the main ribbon lines down.

Do any of you out there have this problem?

or even this one?

Then you know why this post has taken me over an hour to write.  Hopefully tomorrow, Tammy will find another place to fall asleep, lol.

be creative every day!

Water, Water, Everywhere

You know, the main reason I set up my blog was to keep myself on track.  So I have finally made myself up a routine to follow so I get things done in all the many areas of my interests.  My Friday Focus (forgive my alliterations as I am partial to them) is where I intend to post about new techniques and experiments, be they fabric manipulation, surface techniques, sewing, etc.
This week i am posting about manipulating fabric for texture and depth.  In my Quilt Uni course, this week we are looking at scrunching fabric and I got to thinking about folding and pleating techniques.  I got an idea for pleating a strip pieced fabric to get an impression of water.
In my first experiment, I used three values of  2.5in blue fabric

I strip pieced these and pressed the allowances to the dark, then cut them in half

I joined these together

And then sewed pleats in at the seams

I then tacked the pleats up and down to create waves

Although they do look like waves, they were a little too regular for me, so I untacked it and tacked it differently, alternating the ups and downs on each row

I like this one much better, the curves are more pleasing, but it was still a bit too regular, so I did it again...

This sample was a bit more to my liking, and with a bit of Free motion and some embellishment, would be OK.
However, I still wanted more wavy sort of Textures, so I started again with some thinner 1.25 in strips

This time, I did not strictly pleat, but used a piece of iron on stabiliser smaller than the fabric and ironed random pleats into place on it

I started free motion scribbling on it, but It was too uneven and thick in places, so I sandwiched it between tulle layers and put it in a hoop

It was still difficult to free motion, but I finally got something approaching what I wanted

With a bit more embellishment (and practice)  this would be great for a sea landscape.
The next thing I wanted to make was some water in a  river pool.  My idea was to create curved tucks around a central point, however I got something quite different.

As with my second sample, I used a piece of interfacing smaller than the fabric.  then I used a basting stitch to crumple the fabric into the smaller space.  This is a slight modification of one of the techniques in the Quilt uni Course, but is called furrowing in the art of manipulating fabric by Collette Wolf (Which is my bible for such things).  It is also similar to making twisted roses in Fantastic Fabric Folding by Rebecca Wat or chopkeys in Folded fabric elegance by Rami Kim  and
here is the final sample

I did like the texture better before pressing as it was softer and more fluid.  However after some stitching to stabilise, it could be pouffed up again
I still hadn't worked out how to get my curved pool tucks, but as i was writing this it came to me, so i went and did a quick sample

I cut a wedge shape and gathered along the edges, then rolled the gathers into curves by pushing the gathers to the to and the centre of the tucks to the bottom, and voila!   With a wider wedge and some stitching in between the tucks to define them, it will be just what I want.
I have designed a small quilt/hanging to use some of the techniques in the course and I will try and remember to post it on Sunday, 'cos Sunday is sketchbook day.
Tomorrow is Stitchin' Saturday and I will look at a Free motion stitch in detail.