overstitching

Finding a Path: The Way You Stitch Matters

| ellenanneeddy

I’ve been working on a koi fish quilt for a while. I wanted those heavily scaled koi with repetitive black background under orange-red scales. If it sounds easy, I’m saying it wrong.

This is a zoning issue. You have a black zone and a colored scale zone. They need to be crisply separated.

The gold standard approach is to make each scale separately, tie them off, and start the next one. By one. By one.

It does make a nice separation. It also asks the question, “How long do you expect to live?” It takes forever.

The other answer is to do one zone at a time and find a pathway through your stitching that makes the least mess getting from one spot to another. You need to find a stitching pattern.

It’s different every time. You want to cover the areas where you’re moving from one square to another with the smallest, least visible stitch.

What works best is the stitch moving your zigzag directly out from the side. You’ll get a straight line that later can be covered over. Or if it’s tiny enough, ignored.

I chose to take black thread afterward and clean up the image. This is half fixed, half not. I’m sure you can see the difference.

It’s always simpler to blend colors. But sometimes what you want is that crisp distinction between zones.

Fussy Stitching: Where Precision Counts

| ellenanneeddy

Normally, when I do a large embroidery, I’m working from the back. This works because I’ve got my pattern drawing on the back and it gives me all the information I need to fill it in. That assumes I can see my stitching.

Well, I do things the way I do unless I don’t. After a week of working on these guinea hens, I turned them right side up last night and stitched from the top.

Why? The stripes on these things are making me crazy. It’s sort of like matching plaid pant seams. Do you remember that hopeless enterprise? These birds depend on precise white stripes. The white doesn’t show up against the stabilizer, so you can’t see if it’s dense enough or smooth enough. What I thought was a bold smooth line looked raggy. These birds are fussy.

But I think they’re worth it. I also wanted you to see that you can overstitch. And sometimes that’s the answer.

I overstitch for a number of reasons: to outline a piece, to clarify the edge line, to add extra texture, or to put in highlight. I can put down a wonderful range of colors. But sometimes thot range needs the context of texture as well.

I wanted the dots separated so they went on first. The stripes went on, but I had no idea how raggy they looked from the front. So now, I’m going back to redefine them so they’re smooth and dense enough to please me.

The point of this is it’s not over until the fat lady sings. Until you say it is. So don’t be afraid to restitch, redirect and redesign something that isn’t quite right

Wake It Up! Sparking Color With Overstitching

| ellenanneeddy

I love creating color with thread. The threads available make an endless choice of colors. You’re eye blends the bits f thread that peek out from their layers. It makes colors that are rich, dense, and complicated. What’s not to love?

But sometimes it gets too monochromatic. I was working on this heron and I wanted some fish companions for him.

When I picked out my threads for these, I wanted them red to stand out from all that grey in the heron. Red is funny. Like every color, it can lean either to the sun or the shade. A balanced red would use threads of both tempuratures. I used both kinds, a little purple and teal for shaders. And I threw in a green just to spark it.

By the time I got to the green, the whole mass was bland. Pretty. Stripy. Bland. I put in the green and it just woke up. Then more reds and finally oranges.

The green stitching on top is garnet stitch, in small circles. It changed everything!

Yellow overstitching creates a swirl on the fish face that helps round the face. Overstitching adds a color layer, but it also breaks through that bland smooth color.

It helps, of course that the yellow complements the purple, and the green complements the reds. But the textural elements also wake up the fish and feed our eyes.