Planning and Design
My mum asked me if I could repair some holes in a shawl that I’d forgotten we (me, my husband and siblings) had bought for her probably around 15 years ago (it was a souvenir from Japan, maybe from Muji?) and the timing was such that I was planning on trying out free-motion embroidery with the Octi-hoops I had purchased earlier this year. With the understanding that I only had 4 colours, the only suitable one being white, I decided to use this as a practice project.
Materials
- Thread
- Hemingworth col. 1001 (Pure White)
- Stabiliser
- Sulky Stick’n Stitch
Sustainability Check
👍 Sulky Fabri-Solvy (Sulky Stick’n stitch is Sticky Fabri-Solvy) is 100% PVA – PolyVinyl Alcohol which is biodegradable (and obviously water soluble)
👎 The embroidery thread is polyester
Construction
I had an idea of where all the holes were, but double-checked by placing the shawl over my lightbox. Then I cut out squares of the Stick’n Stitch that were large enough to cover the holes plus some. I was originally planning on placing the shawl in the medium Octi-hoop and securing with the small Octi-hoop, but the shawl itself didn’t really have enough bulk, so the small hoop was quite free to move around which didn’t make it very good for guiding the shawl around. So instead I backed the small Octi-hoop with the Stick’n Stitch and placed the shawl on top. Since it was sticky side up it secured the shawl quite well. The only issue with this was I couldn’t really use the handles that much since the shawl covered some of the holes. But I made do with what I had access to. I did straight stitches to ‘colour’ in the flowers I had hand drawn and then tried to free-motion zig-zag stitch the borders. I think it the borders turned out terribly haha. But I did realise that I didn’t need to free-motion it since the shawl is small enough for me to manoeuvre around (unlike my Niece’s Bunny Quilt).
Then I was kinda wondering how to deal with all the wastage I was generating thanks to chopping out a chunk of the Stick’n Stitch that was attached to the hoop. And I remembered from the Octi-hoop videos I watched while researching the product that I could just patch it up with more Stick’n Stitch 😁 So I did this and for the remaining flowers.
Then it was just a matter of dissolving the Stick’n Stitch and letting the shawl dry 😊
Reflections
Since this was a mending job favour for a family member, it really is the ideal first free-motion embroidery project. But in other ways, it wasn’t ideal, for example, embroidering a knit for a first project is like going straight into hard mode LOL. It was a bit tricky. Also, using white on navy meant that the gaps between my ‘colouring in’ is very obvious. I think it’s ok for this purpose, but it made me realise that the patch method I had in mind wasn’t going to work (I was going to embroidery onto Fabri-Solvy only, but I realise that my stitches aren’t dense enough and everything will just unravel once I dissolve the stabiliser). So it was a good reality check for me.
Things I learnt:
- How to free-motion embroider for mending purposes
- How to patch up stabiliser gaps when using the Octi-hoop
Categories: Sewing
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