I spent the week fighting with a sewing machine, and a thread. That’s not anything new. I spend a lot of time fighting with a sewing machine and thread.

But I have learned some sneaky tricks. And one of the best of them is bobbin work.

Why is bobbin work stubborn? Because you need to just leap in and do it. It can feel a bit weird and it takes getting used to. But it makes all kinds of stitching that’s really hard, quite doable.

Bobbin work is for thick threads. Thick threads go through an adjusted bobbin case, and you stitch from behind. It’s a great technique because the thread builds up quickly and is instant gratification.

But it’s also the answer for any thread that’s too fragile as well. Your thread goes through your needle 50 times before it lands in your fabric. Your thread comes off the bobbin straight into your fabric. So if you have a thick thread or a fragile thread, bobbin work is your friend. It will make you feel completely different about metallic thread, older rayon, or something with an attitude.

It’s also good because you can tie off each thread, as you finish. Since I use it to shade creatures, I use 10 or more colors at a minimum even for a small image. That’s forty poky thread ends looking up at you if you’re working from the top. No thread ends except on the back of bobbin work.

It has it’s peculiarities. All of the work is upside down, so it’s facing the other direction. That’s not hard. Your pattern is in the back and you can see everything on both sides. It does take a bit of faith about thread color, but you get a sense of that before too long.

Over the next couple weeks, I’ll be discussing several kinds of bobbin work and giving you some of the secret handshakes. It’s one of my favorite ways to work.

Here’s some facts about bobbin work.

Bobbin work is done upside down. So your pattern faces the opposite direction. Your stitching goes all the way through, and your pattern is in the back so you can always see where you’re going.

Your top thread should either match the bobbin thread or be something that blends with it. Because you will always see both threads on the right side. In bobbin work, the thin thread looks like it is couching the bobbin thread. You should like what you see, either way.

Unless it’s a very small image, I usually treat bobbin work as an applique. Like all stitching it puckers up like it wants a kiss. As an applique, I can cut the distortion away with the background

I use a sandwich of Totally Stable with my pattern drawn on it, Stitch and Tear, light weight felt, and hand dye as my surface for bobbin work. It makes a stable applique can is easy to cut on and stitch down.

I zone my colors on my pattern so I know where the colors go generally. After that, I set up a range of colors for that zone and progress through the space with them. The zones on the frog are the spots, the green body, the pastel tummy and the eyes which are always a separate zone done in sliver, a wet looking thin metallic.

Over the next several weeks we’ll discuss thick thread, thin metallic and hand dyed pearl cotton as ways to use bobbin work to create amazing creatures.