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.
Remember when I said I needed to calm down the mockingbird quilt I’ve been working on? The background was pretty wild. I don’t quite know what to do with deserts. so I don’t know when I’ve gone over the top.
But I do know how to put out a visual firestorm. You go for the complementary color. The eye gets excited by all that contrast, but it cools off all that flaming color blaze.
With all that red, the complement is green. Which means cactus.
I’m not a cactus person. I’m not a desert person. So I’ve spent a week looking at pictures and identifying how I want to make cactus. It’s all about the texture, so it’s all about the stitchery, which means it’s all about the angle of the stitch.
We’ve talked about stitch angles a lot. The Thread Magic Stitch Vocabulary Book has an explanation of that you might find helpful. Moving straight through the machine gets us a hard thick line. Moving out from side to side creates shading. Moving through with an angle gets us a curved line. Here is a link to the blog about Zigzag Stitching.
Straight stitching in spirals creates textures on paddle cactus. The outside is shaded with an outline on the angle, stitching side to side to shade, and some straight-through smoothing.
I used a spikey shading headed upwards to give the feel of rough texture, and used straight stitch for the spines.
This is under the heading of sneaky secret tricks. I rarely use an applique foot for applique. Instead, I use my darning foot and cover the raw edge in a free-motion stitch.
Why? Mostly because I rarely use a straight edge in my work, except for borders. I’m a curvy girl and I think in terms of curves.
I wanted a curvy vine for my butterflies to fly over and for the flowers to nestle into. layered on another piece of green hand dye, stitched out my vine in a straight stitch, and cut away all the excess. It’s best to get rid of all the extra fabric you can. I use pelican scissors to trim as close as I can get to the seam. Pelican scissors have an odd bend that lets you cut right on the edge.
Then I picked a light, dark and medium set of threads for the edge. Vines have two sides, and one can be done light and the other dark. If it’s a complicated vine, it may take a wider range. You want colors that could be the same if they were in a darker or lighter environment.
Stitching the top and bottom line of the vine in different colors gives it a visual distinction that makes it look dimensional. And because it’s free motion, the line is fluid and follows the curve more graciously.
Here’s my piece, almost ready to back and bind. Free motion applique is just what a curvy girl ordered.
I’ve never gotten over sheers. As I child, I couldn’t imagine how I could ever wear them. outside They required a life I couldn’t imagine. Or really want. Someone who sat politely in a clean room and was polite to incredibly stuffy people, who made a life of being “beautiful”. It never appealed. But organza! And sparkle fabric! And shot sheers? I was mesmerized.
When I started working at Vogue Fabric in Evanston, I was a quilter and a cotton girl. It was some while before I thought about what would polyester sheers look like on a quilt. But they were pretty. I think I saw Ann Fahl use some tulle on a quilt as shadows. It was eye-opening.
Then I got to thinking about the things that really were see-through. Mist, water, air, clouds, and of course, flowers. Yes you can applique sheers. They’re perfect for direct applique with fusibles.
I’ve been making flowers with sheers for a while. The technique is fused sheers on felt with a lot of free-motion zigzag stitching. It’s not hard. It is time consuming, but you have all the colors of thread for your crayolas. And it’s pretty.
The Sandwich
The surface you stitch on is the sandwich. For this technique I use a layer of Stitch-and -Tear, a layer of felt, and sheers and lace backed with Steam-a-Seam 2, I used to put in a layer of hand dyed fabric either to match the sheer or the background, but I’ve found it unnecessary if I’ve chosen my felt well. The color of the felt will naturally show through. That tends to accentuate the color of the flowers.
Working on a separate sandwich means I don’t have to worry about distortion.
Zigzag stitching always pulls up and distorts the piece. No matter how much it bumples up, I can cut the distortion away at the edge of my stitching and it will be flat enough.
The stitching on them is free motion zigzag gone wild. And the shading is made to make each petal individual and each flower its own star. The color of the flower is largely defined by the sheer and the felt behind it. But the shading of the petals is all threadwork.
For more information about making flowers from sheers, see
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
We worked with garnet stitch to do octopi several weeks ago. That was an all-over garnet stitch that could be shaded across the piece. But what if we want separate spots and smooth shading around them? How do we go about that?
What we need to do is to define the spot clearly, and then shade around it. But shading with one color around the spot negates a color range shade. We need to put in our spots and then shade around them defining different sides of the spot with different colors.
We start dark to light with the darkest threads first. The first color needs an outline stitch done at an angle to define the shape. Then we’ll shade out to the side, and then smooth the line between the outline and the shading.
But after that row, there’s more shading than outlining. When we come to each spot we outline the spot on that side and shade past the edges of it. Then in the next color row, we outline it from the other side and shade it into the earlier colors. The spot is clearly in the color range but it’s defined by the outline around it that fits the shading as it changes.
It’s a cool trick for including spots in a smooth range of colored stitchery.
We’ve been talking about the variability of the zigzag stitch in free motion. Most of the time, I’m filling in a space where I want a line of color to show up. This is a trick that will give me a soft blend of color across the image without a hard line. I’ve heard it called the long stitch, although the old-fashioned description you hear with free motioners is the long short stitch. As with all free-motion zigzag stitching, the difference isn’t a setting on the machine. It’s how you move your fabric through the machine as you’re stitching.
Most of the time when I’m filling a space, I stitch a zigzag line at an angle around the edge, I shade the piece by stitching from side to side, and then I smooth the edges with a zigzag that moves straight through.
But when you just move from side to side you get a long blending stitch that flows into itself. The breast of the bird is done from side to side. The feathers are done with an outline, shading, and smoothing. You can see the difference.
The Thread Magic Stitch Vocabulary Book went up yesterday on Kindle and is now available! I’ve been sharing my chapters with you so you can get a taste. This is the classroom book that shows you most of the technique
es I use for my work.
I will be teaching the class, Thread Magic Stitch Vocabulary Book for the Gems of the Praire Guild in Peoria on May 4th with a lecture on May 3rd.
This is my first guild gig in about 10 years. There are a lot of reasons for that, and I don’t know that I’m back to a gig I have to travel for yet. But I am so excited to be back in a classroom, and I’ve found there are so many techniques that have changed or modified over that period of time. And so many more things I can do with those techniques..
So I did this booklet, especially for this class. But it should stand alone as a set of exercises you can use to build your skills and stretch your abilities. There is a full toolbox of free motion techniques you can include in your work with just a little practice.
You can see several chapters up on earlier blog posts.
Skills covered Free motion straight stitch Free motion zigzag Bobbin work Hard edge applique Soft edge applique Working with Angelina Fiber Working with dyed cheesecloth Couching Adding silk flowers and leaves Globbing
I tried to write a book that would cover a lot of information in a small space. I’m hoping you find it useful. You can order the Kindle Stitch Vocabulary Book right now. The print book will be out at the end of the month, and it’s part of your kit if you are taking the class.
I’m so excited to be sharing this material with you and to be out teaching again with the best people in the world. Quilters!
Most people don’t think about free motion being an applique technique, but it gives you lovely curved edges with great textural lines. Here’s a sneak peek of the chapter on Hard Edge Applique.
