Embroidery Test

I’m about to embark on another short animated embroidery piece, though this time using mixed media rather than being fully embroidered. The reason: the last one I did was ‘just’ a 12 frame walk cycle which I felt I could embroider in full, in a (reasonably) timely fashion. However, this latest piece is 22 frames and is slightly more detailed. I didn’t want to give up on this piece before starting by being put off with the amount of frames and the detail involved, but I knew that embroidering it in full would just be too much. After all, this is meant to be a fun little side project and something which I don’t want to dedicate 100% of my time to at this point. So I was thinking of a few workarounds.

As well as the reasons listed above, I also thought there was little point in using full embroidery again as I had already done that now. I know what it looks like and I know that it works- so why create something similar? What would I learn or gain from that? Very little… And then the idea of mixed media popped into my head- I can’t remember how or why (perhaps from the embroidery sub-Reddit maybe? I love having a nosey on there to get fresh inspiration and to see all the cool projects emerging from this community). Regardless of how the idea got there, I have now decided how I’m going to produce this next piece.

It’s the first time I’m working in mixed media for embroidery (I think, or at least in recent times), so I wanted to test out a few techniques first to see what works (or doesn’t) and how I might go about it. Paint was my initial idea, but then I thought what about pens of some kind? They’re less messy, don’t need much drying time and I already have them readily available- my stationary collection is prettttyyyy big!

So I tested out several different types of pens to see which would look best on the fabric and if any would bleed, dry weirdly or anything else that crops up! In the end, it actually turned out that good old gel pens worked the best. I only tried them on a whim towards the end of my experiments. They drew on the fabric well, they don’t run/ bleed and the fabric retained the colours nicely (looked nice and vibrant).

For this project, I bought a cotton bedsheet to use as my fabric as I need a fair amount. I thought bedding would be a perfect solution to getting a good amount of fabric at a reasonable price. Better so if I had an old one which I could up-cycle, therefore being more environmentally friendly, but unfortunately I didn’t have anything which fitted the bill this time around. The bedding is a lot thinner/ delicate feeling than the fabric I usually use, which is much more robust. The fabric also has a tighter weave, so I wanted to test out how that felt, before I dive straight in. I also wanted to get a feel for stitching next to the inked sections, as I have never tried it before. Another reason for using the bedding was that I actually wanted something with a tighter weave as it’s less ‘gap-py’ and would make for a smoother final result.

I tested out the main three stitches I use: satin stitch (both single and double stranded), back stitch and long/ short stitch. It definitely felt different embroidering on this fabric, though I’m sure I’ll soon get used to it. The main thing I found was that because the bedding material is much more lightweight, using single stranded thread worked a lot better for all the stitches, rather than the double strand which I usually use on my regular fabric. The double strand just felt too ‘heavy’. The single strand took a little longer to sew as it filled up the spaces slower due to less thread, but I felt the overall result was preferable, so that is how I’m going to progress with this… See you in about 8 months for an update!!

Below is the test piece- just a load of circles in different pens and stitches!