I've always been impressed with the way hand-embroidered quilts look. Someday I'd like to do one myself. But until there are thirty hours in a day, and/or I wean myself off sleep :), I'll have to figure out a faster way to get that look.
That got me thinking and tinkering a bit with embroidery floss and my sewing machine. Perhaps, I could mimic something like a chain stitch, and here’s what I came up with. I think this has some potential as a super fast hand-embroidery substitute!
I made up one of my scrap-friendly patches of strips, big enough to cover a 14” x 24” bench pillow. I used all different neutrals, in whatever widths I had lying around, to give it an eclectic look.
I quilted it with ¼” lines through the batting and backing. The thickness helped to stabilize it through the next steps! I found a heart cookie cutter and marked hearts all over the backing in a random pattern with an erasable fabric pen.
Now for the fun part. I wound a bobbin with Pearl Cotton floss. You can wind the bobbin by hand, or just hold the thread between your fingers, while the machine winds it. You just don’t want to run it through the tension guide, because as thick as the floss is, it will wind too tight.
The bobbin case has a large hole at the top. Typically, you would pass the thread through the tension guild on the bobbin case, and it would snap into this hole. In this case, I bypassed the tension guild and strung the floss right through the hole.
If your bobbin case has a hole, thread the floss through that at the end of the “finger”. It will add just enough tension so the floss doesn’t sluff off the bobbin.
Thread the top side of the machine with regular thread (matching the floss color).
Stitch around your design from the back side, so the floss is on the front.
I used a large-eyed needle to pull the floss ends through to the back side. Then, I tied off the two ends of the floss and the two ends of the regular thread together.
It looks nice and tidy from the front.
I added a backing and a zipper, and now I have a new seasonal piece of decor!
Happy Sunday everyone,
Krista
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