Let’s Make Leaves!
This week it was time to experiment, to take things off the fabric and get creative!
I’ve been following textile artist @janine.heschl (Find her on Instagram) for a really long time now. She is a wildlife embroidery artist who sometimes makes her work textured by using this process to make embroidered moss before sewing it onto her pieces. I wanted to try this out for myself and try different shapes and colours of thread to make shrubs and trees. Let’s get into my experiment!
For this method, I needed water-soluble film. This would act as the ‘fabric’ to sewn into and then when water is added, it simply disappears and you’re left with your creations in just thread that can then be sewn onto other projects.
I tried a few different types before settling on this one. Some were too thin and wouldn’t work at all to sew into without another fabric to stabilise it, and some ere really slimy when water was added and I really didn’t like the texture.
Avalon Ultra was the best I could find (although there is probably more out there that will work just as well0 and is available in lots of places online.
I treated this just like fabric and stretched it over an embroidery hoop, which was actually pretty easy and I haven’t had any rip (and now I’ve done over a dozen of them!).
I worked on my Bernina B08 as usual and set it up for free-motion embroidery with a darning foot and plate to get rid of the feed dogs. I did have to change my tension settings, but it was a ‘figure it out as I go’ situation, and every machine will be slightly different!
Now I started with making the little leaves. The most important thing is that each leaf is connected with a strand of thread to make it easier when these are connected to the piece afterwards.
As you can see, I created the leaves in a spiral. As well as looking really cool in the hoop, this just maximised the amount of leaves in the space. Although I may look into getting a big square embroidery hoop as I think this would look awesome, and would mean less wastage when cutting away all the excess that isn’t in the hoop.
I wanted the leaves to have a bit more dimension so I layered up the thread colours, but fully completed each colour first before moving onto the next.
All done! I added more colour to the leaves closer to the centre to add more variation.
Now it was time to take the film out of the frame and soak it in water. You could do this by running it under a tap, but since I have an issue with the texture of the water changing, I just let it soak for 10 minutes and then ran it under warm water to get the rest of the residue off. Then you’re left with just the daisy chain of leaves.
I’m really happy with how these turned out, and now I’ve made so many more of these, it’s time to add these to the piece!
I’m keeping the whole piece partially secret right now so that the unveiling of the artwork isn’t entirely spoiled for January, but I have more exciting things to be getting on with that I’ll be showing you over the next few weeks.
Thank you for reading along,
Jodie :)