The Final Pear
I have been busily machine stitching to finish my class homework. We are supposed to try out various methods and techniques of machine embroidery. On my personal blog, I posted the first two pears. One was done with granite stitch with instructions from a 1945 Singer sewing machine book. The second was done with mossing stitch learned from an article by Ken Smith.
This last pear was done using Carol Shinn’s technique from her book Freestyle Machine Embroidery. She usually uses a digital photo printed on fabric and then affixes that to a heavy canvas. The canvas is cut on the bias to prevent excessive distortion. I decided to paint my pear instead of using a photograph. The photo above shows my painted pear. I used acrylic paint for the pear and Dye-Na-Flow paint for the background.
I haven’t used her technique for a while and I always forget how much the piece shrinks in one direction. Because all the stitches are done in the same direction, the piece shrinks in the direction of the stitching. This is the first layer of stitching that I did. I stitched vertically. You can see that the pear is getting shorter already.
Here’s the finished pear. It hardly even looks like a pear shape it shrunk down so much. I guess I should have stitched horizontally since it was already a bit squatty for a pear. Comparing all three techniques was interesting. Carol Shinn’s technique was actually the shortest stitching time. But obviously you must take the shrinkage factor in to consideration. If you want to see the other two pears, check out my post here.
6 thoughts on “The Final Pear”
Wow – that’s some shrinkage! I’m going to stick my neck out here and say that I like the pear after only one layer of stitching – it’s far more interesting.
Actually I think I like that one better too.
That’s really interesting 🙂
I like the pear after one layer, too. I wonder if you could take the distortion into account before hand and distort the photo to print or copy to allow for it?
Yes, that is what I should have done. I always forget just how much it distorts.
I like all 3 but I like the stitching with only one layer best too. Would it have been OK to leave it at that point for your homework or were you supposed to completely cover it? The finished pear looks like the ones we get on our tree here. It went wild about 30 years ago and the pears are almost round now. So just change the name to wild pear and you are good to go.
Thanks Ann – wild pear it is. I needed to do the entire technique for my homework. But it’s good to do the whole thing to see the differences and how it works.