a favourite shade of blue

a favourite shade of blue

Saturday, March 13, 2010

machine embroidery

I have heard machine embroiderers ask how to incorporate their machine embroidery into their quilting. It is as simple as just doing it. Make your embroidery blocks and treat them as any other type of quilting/pieced block. In this piece I had six lovely toile blocks that were purchased from Emblibrary.com. The six designs are scenes of London England
I wanted 12 blocks for this lap quilt, so 6 were done on white or off white fabric background and embroidered in dark grey thread while 6 blocks were embroidered on a black background with a silver thread. For the embroidery work that I have done so far I have used a rayon thread that has a lovely sheen to it and which suits me fine but others have said they prefer polyester thread because it does not fade. It it is a matter of opinion which thread you use. Machine embroidery requires a large number of threads as it uses so many colours for shading. My machine does not care what thread it uses so I have many colours in a variety of thread brands. One set was given to me by a friend who was dying of cancer and said she would never use them again. It was a beautiful gift at a time when I was just starting out and it gave me a great boost with my initial threads so whenever I use her threads I think of her with love. Another friend gave me a bag full of threads from one of her friends who asked her if she knew anyone who embroidered since she was no longer doing it. I gratefully accepted and then shared them with two of my friends as there were many similar colours.
Back to my quilt. After I had done the embroidered blocks, I found the greatest red stripe for the sashing and outer border, and on sale too. I cut it across the stripe to get the look I wanted and then did the binding in black. My friend Lynn quilted it for me. I made her socks in exchange for the quilting.:>)) It is one of my favourite quilts. I gave it to my son and his wife but maybe I'll do another one for myself. I saw the red stripe the other day and it was still on sale. What do you think? Should I run down and buy it?
Stay warm tonight if you live where it is snowing again.
Bon Soir.

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