May 14 07

More On Thread Trix!

Ok, I haven’t had much time to play, but I have a lot of ideas in my head. These thread tricks are what I call hyper-quilting. This involves overquilting a stitched motif with a high contrast decorative thread to really give it that “wow” factor. Sometimes it might be a more subtle effect and other times it is an in-your-face kind of effect. Here are a couple more examples:

plain-hearts.jpg

The above example is the loop-d-loop plain old hearts motif. Now go back in, stitching just next to the loop-d-loop lines you’ve already stitched, and then decorate the heart as below:

splayed-hearts.jpg

This scale is probably not showing this hyper-quilting to its best advantage, but I think it illustrates the design. If you’ve studied the Free Motion Fun…With Feathers! DVD, then this should look familiar to you. I have borrowed the splay of fireworks embellishment from the feathers and just added it to the top, center indentation of the heart. I also did in-lining of the heart but you could leave that step out. If you look in the line drawings for the Loop-D-Loop family on the first volume of Fast and Free, you’ll see that there are additional heart variations that would be well suited to this kind of hyper-quilting.

Here’s another example that I think looks better. What you see below is a whimsically stitched vine. It began with a light chalk line in a pleasing curve, (easily traced by using your flexible curve ruler), and I used this as my “rough pathway” for my vine. Note that the vine is actually a loop-d-loop in which I’ve just periodically thrown in some leaves:

plain-lop-d-loop-vine.jpg

(Remember, you could do this same thing with a multitude of different shapes of leaves). Ok, so now we’ve got this semi-boring vine and we want to jazz it up a bit. Piece of cake! Pick another high contrast decorative thread and begin stitching alongside your original loop-d-loop. When you get to the actual leaf, use this second thread to stitch in some interesting vein-like lines as below:

veined-vine.jpg

Doesn’t this thread embellishment make this vine about 20 times more interesting? Try it, this is fun stuff to play with!

2 Comments

  1. Caitlin O'Connor Says:

    That is so groovy! WOW!! What a difference that extra stitching makes. I can’t wait for the feathers DVD to arrive!

  2. paulette doyle Says:

    WOW!! Incredible!!! Thanks for sharing!!
    Paulette