May 06 07

Playing Around With Thread Tricks

I haven’t had much time to play around in my sewing room, but I grabbed an hour this weekend and had some fun. I’ve been thinking about ways to jazz up a simple motif with threads that wouldn’t require much work, and I came up with a little variation that was pretty fast and easy. It all started with this background fill motif:

img_0515.jpg

This is a slight variation of the loop-d-loop blazing sun. (Doesn’t this make you think of a “ka-pow!” kind of motif you’d see on Batman?) The difference is that the rays emanating from the sun’s center don’t actually come all the way to the center. I learned this variation last week while I was teaching a class, and I think that it’s actually a little easier to stitch. Either way, it’s another variant and it’s well suited to this thread embellishment. One way to jazz it up would be to stitch the baseline loop-d-loop and only stitch the sun’s center before moving back to the next section of loop-d-loop. Leave a lot of space around each of the sun centers because you’ll be coming back later with a different color thread to do the rays. Once you’ve finished doing all your background fill stitching, switch to a second color of thread with good contrast. Now stitch, just alongside your original loop-d-loop, and when you get to the sun’s center, stop and pause and think to orient yourself. What you’re going to do is use this second thread color to stitch the rays, as below:

red-and-gold-blazing-sun.jpg

This is a pretty versatile technique and could be used pretty easily in any design which has structures coming off a center circle or oval. I used it again on a dogwood loop-d-loop. I used one thread color to stitch the center and some decorative “whatever” just outside the center of the flower:

pre-dogwood.jpg

Then I went back and stitched the dogwood’s petals in a new thread color:

dogwood-in-2-colors.jpg

I don’t think these thread color choices are too great; I needed something high contrast so it would be easy to see, but I think this may be worth some further experimentation…back to my laboratory with Igor…

3 Comments

  1. Helen Says:

    I love that 2 colour loop de loop. It looks great!

  2. Joan Says:

    This was a delight to read through. Thank you for the wonderful ideas. So little time…

  3. Brenda Says:

    I am definately getting inspired and ready to go try this out!! Thanks for sharing!