Thread Painting Workshop With Karla Spinks

In October, Conversations-in-Cloth arranged to sponsor a class with local thread-painting (aka free-motion embroidery) expert Karla Spinks. Read/See more about the workshops.


My little Blue Bird, free-motion embroidery.
Here he is mostly cut free from the stabilizers and is ready to be appliqued to a background. Maybe that will be a art quilt / journal quilt in 2011?

"Look, Ma! No hands!" Well--not quite. But I will say this little bird is completely free-hand. Although I have an embroidery unit on my sewing machine, I never learned to use it, although my Aunt Rosita is the Queen of computer-driven embroidery.


Karla had us start out by thread-painting some flower fabric. Once we had that mastered, we could move on to something more challenging. Most of us chose birds.

Karla asked us to bring in samples of our own work, and I realized that I already had quite a few examples of free-motion embroidery.

Here are some samples from my thread painting present and past :

Horses




Gramma Pickles


Little Gardener :






Chickadee-dee-dee




Celebrate



Day at the Lake II





Oliver (aka Bubble Boy)







My advice : It just takes time and practice. A few weeks ago, I heard something on the radio about talent and success. The conclusion was that talent only takes you so far. Most things take practice, time and effort.

Theresa says that when she's teaching, she tells her students they can call her after the class, but not to whine. They have to put in 4 hours of practicing until they really start to get the hang of it. People in the class were amazed that my little bluebird came out so well, but I told them I just have more hours of practice at this already. They'll get there, too! This is not something that happens overnight (unless you do have a computerized embroidery unit).

Here are some other tips I picked up from the class :
Karla says :
* Heavy foot and slow hands. If your stitches are not nice, speed up.
* You don't need locking stitches to start because you go over and over and over and over it.
* Hollis rips more than she sews. She doesn't ever cross threads.
What needles to use?
Hollis Chatelain uses a size 90 needle, but they leave bigger holes. When I first started doing free-motion embroidery, I had a lot of problems with breaking the embroidery threads and other issues that seemed to be solved by using a 90 needle. Now looking back, I was probably not threading my machine right through the tension discs (It takes a while to learn the ins and outs of a new machine.) In my experience, the size 90 needle does leave bigger holes initially, but the fabric eventually relaxes and closes in around the threads. Karla says that Bob at Superior Threads recommends a size 80 needle, so that's what I used for the workshop. And it's true--smaller holes.


The members of CinC, with a few guests. We were at Julie's Sewing Center in Appleton, WI.

Back Row : Connie, Karla Spinks (Teacher), Lois, JoAnne, Pat
Middle Row : Brenda, Betty, Lynda
Front Row : Michele (me), Theresa
In October, CinC sponsored a 2-day workshop on Thread Painting with Karla Spinks.