So when I look at a design and try to come up with the beginning stitches I always try to remember that our craft is about poking a lot of holes in to fabrics of one type or another. Then we take those holes and shove 2 pieces of thread into them, pull them tight and tie a knot below the fabric. Now repeat 1,000’s of times in a few square inches.
Each time this occurs you have a perfectly smooth fabric being dismantled, stretched, pulled and distorted as we still want it to look perfectly smooth. Physics argue if that is possible much less common sense. This is commonly referred to as “push/pull”. It is the condition that causes the fabric that we assaulted to distort and “push” and “pull”. It will change fabric width and height AS THE DESIGN SEWS. Imagine trying to build a house on Jello.
Always keeping that in mind our job is to help prepare the fabric for the experience it is about to go through and to create as seamless a surface as possible for our design to live on. This means laying down underlay stitches in such a way that they tie the fabric to the backing while also acting like hands smoothing out material on a table. Think about the imperfections of the surface as well as how elastic or how thick the material is.
That aside you need to think about how big your design is since larger designs have more push/pull or if you are stitching on a hat.
Hats can be a real challenge since you take the above factors and throw in the fact that you fabric is curved, already sewn into a shape and not properly hooped on all sides so the fabric moves in the hoop while stitching. How do you prepare for this?
Start by remembering the basics of hat construction. The most solid part of a hat is the part by the bill since it is sewn to the bill and also the hat hoops secure to that area of the hat. Prevailing opinions are that stitching should start from the bottom (by the bill) up and from the center (by the seam) out on hat fronts. I like to start at the seam and run a zigzag stitch across it to fill in the gap and create a bridge (see below).
after the above underlay I will build the design in such a way that maximizes it’s strengths and minimizes it weaknesses. I will cover that in a future post.
Our next post will focus on underlay for left chest and jacket back designs. That one coming soon.
2 responses so far ↓
1 Posy Lane // Aug 18, 2008 at 11:02 pm
Are you controlling the digitizing software to “flow” the stitches the way you want them? If not, how are you controlling the stitch flow?
2 sierrastitch // Aug 18, 2008 at 11:26 pm
A lot of it depends on the tool I use in my digitizing software. In the example above I am using a single running stitch and laying the points down one by one. In larger designs (which I will cover this week) I use a lot of light fill stitches to build the foundation. In those cases I use the “complex fill” tool in my software where I can set the beginning point, end point and direction of stitches. The article later this week will show this.
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