Getting new samples ready for It’s Sew Easy TV season 6 taping, I am finishing designing new dresses and experimenting with embellishing with embroidery. I have had this purple raw silk for years and really like the color, but it’s SO bright by itself! I will probably color block with black for one of the designs, but for this one I wanted to try adding a touch of embellishment. This is the start (obviously I have not pressed out the embroidery hoop marking) …
I found this flower in the Brother Quattro sewing machine. The flower was originally a medium size, so I tried to make it as large as possible for one of the flowers and as small as possible for the other. This was so easy to do! Using the touch screen I was able to enlarge the flower and move the design to the top left of the screen, which will embroider in the top left part of the hoop.
You can see below how the first larger flower is embroidering on the top left side of the hoop.
First flower looks great!
For the second flower – I turned the shape upside down, made the flower as small and narrow as possible, and moved the shape to the bottom right side of the hoop.
Looks pretty good!!!!! I used a silver metallic thread, although you can’t see that very well from the photo’s – clean and simple.
As far as designing, I cut the bottom of the dress to allow for a straight skirt or adding darts or pleats to the waistband. I am definitely adding the darts 🙂 I will post photos when the dress is finished.
Congratulations Wilma Coats the winner of my Creative Serging Class on Craftsy! Again, here is a coupon if you would like to join us in a fun, creative online class.
First off, thanks so much for the embroidery tips! I started with simply adding letters on sueded silk, just trying to get a grip on rotating the word and changing the overall size. I am happy to announce, embroidering letters is much easier than I thought.
I choose a font from the Brother Dreamweaver XE and all you have to do is push the letters on the touch screen. Changing from upper case to lower case is a breeze. Then another push of the button and the entire word rotated directions. (I know I said no monogram towels for Christmas gifts, but I think I changed my mind – this is way too much fun! Now I just need the machine to offer spell check :))
So here is where I screwed up … I was in a hurry and grabbed a bobbin that was 1/3 full. Instead of taking all that thread off the bobbin and starting fresh, I added more thread to that bobbin. Not a big deal, unless you run out of bobbin thread! This sewing machine has an automatic sensor that tells you when you are going to run out of thread. Very cool feature, unless the machine doesn’t know you are going to run out of thread, which is exactly what happened here. I was lucky the thread ran out at the end of my first “S”, but I still had to line up another “S” or change my idea to Princes (on pink fabric). I played around with the laser light and found that I could tell the machine where to start the last letter. Not too shabby!
I have big design ideas for my newly found passion for embroidery, but for the first few tests I am going to work on small pieces of fabric and share with those of you that are as much a novice as I am on this.
A few emails rolled in about how exactly to embroidery the jeans and I thought this photo might help. Remember there were 3 hoopings on each leg. The front pockets were already attached and the back was finished, except for the back pocket. I waited to add the back pocket because I was worried the fabric would be too thick under the embroidery hoop. You can see how the design started large near the hip, then smaller, and then even smaller at the ankle.
I am off to buy more embroidery thread and needles. Thanks to many of you for your advice, I think this is going to be fun. In the next post I will show you what the Princess is for and add more texture to the fabric. Have a great week! Cheers 🙂 Angela
You can see below how the first larger flower is embroidering on the top left side of the hoop.
First flower looks great!
