Thread painting with
DecoBob
Finishing up my Caran d’Ache Neocolor 2 Water
Soluble Wax Pastels Tulip
To paint my tulip, I traced the photo onto PFD (prepared for
dying) white cotton fabric and then used the wax pastels to
shade in the different colors. Once finished, I used a paintbrush
to paint water onto the fabric, which caused the wax pastels to
bleed into each other causing a watercolor effect. It was so fun!
Now that the tulip is dry, I’m going to use my Tutti, Fruitti and
Spaghetti threads to do some thread painting with DecoBob in
the bobbin.
Thread painting and free motion embroidery basics
There are lots of videos online that show how to do free motion
stitching, thread paint, and embroider. In my posts back in September, I talked about some videos that I found on YouTube, but
here’s one more that’s very good.
Starting with the background
Since the lines of stitching in the background would be fairly
straight forward, I decided to use my green threads to do that
stitching first and then work my way to the more complicated
shading of the tulip. I dropped the feed dogs and put on my free
motion quilting foot.
I did some sample stitches on a scrap piece of fabric to get my
tension just right and then started to stitch on my tulip background. Since my fabric had been treated with polymer medium
(to prevent the wax pastels from rubbing off on my fingers), it’s
fairly stiff and I don’t need to have a stabilizer on the back.
Start with the medium tones of threads
For my tulip, I stitched with the medium tones of threads first and
then added the darkest and lightest threads at the end.
Make sure to raise your foot!
One thing to keep in mind when you’re changing thread colors
often is to make sure you always raise the foot of your machine
before threading. This ensures that the tension discs are open
when you pass the thread between then and will ensure that
your tension is always correct. If you find that your tension is suddenly not right, the best thing to do is to re-thread your machine.
Stitching the background
DecoBob thread to the rescue
Since the DecoBob is such a fine thread, even lots of stitching on
the front of the piece did not cause a great build up of bobbin
thread on the back of the piece.
Even though the DecoBob in the bobbin prevented a build up
of threads on the back of the piece, once all the stitching was
done, the fabric was a bit rippled just from all of the threads on
the front. A quick press with the iron, a pressing cloth and steam
made the fabric lay nice and flat!
Close up of stitching on the tulip
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spring 2015