Wednesday 19 September 2012

A little ring of metal

This little metal ring has made me exceedingly happy today! 


It's a free machine embroidery foot which arrived in the post yesterday.  
When I first bought such a foot for my machine, the only one I could find to fit a Singer was this one.


It's really hard to see what you're doing and I've never liked it very much.
Disaster struck last week when the machine made a horrible sound and ground to a halt.  
The foot and needle must have become slightly misaligned, the needle had pierced the plastic of the foot and become firmly embedded in it.  It's now utterly unusable as the shape of the hole has changed so much that a needle can't fit through it.


Reluctant to buy another foot exactly the same, and irritated by the inability of my machine to lower the feed dogs, I was actually thinking of buying a new machine that's more suited to being used for free machine embroidery. I was Googling away, trying to justify the expense, when miraculously I came across a 'proper' foot for a Singer.

I still can't lower the feed dogs (they have a cover) but I fitted the new foot this morning and had a very quick play with it.  It has completely transformed my machine!  


It is a million times easier to use and has made me very, very...


I couldn't have done that with the old foot!

Saturday 8 September 2012

'Under the Sea' wall hanging


I had so much fun making this, which is just as well as it took forever!! 
It combines lots of different techniques...

The fish and seahorses were made by fusing all kinds of fibres with my embellisher, cutting these to shape, 
hand stitching them on to the background and lightly stuffing them.



  The jellyfish was made by fusing angelina fibres.



The sea bed is a combination of shibori felting and pebbles made from circles of fabric, 
gathered and stuffed into pebbly shapes.



These tubular sea plants are made of small, thin lengths of felt which were rolled 
into tiny tubes and wrapped with gold thread.


Finally the shoal of small fish are made from shiny gold fabric, carefully applied with tiny stitches.


The whole piece was finished off with silver bias binding and backed with turquoise felt.