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.