Stitching

I just love the look of stipple stitching on quilts. It just gives the finished product that much more dimension. So, I've been playing with trying to reproduce it on a scrapbook background and I've realised a couple things that should be glaringly obvious but I'm just a sucker for torturing myself instead of listening to common sense. I just need to see how something will work out.

Stipple stitching on quilts requires that the presser foot be raised while stitching so that the piece may be moved in any direction freely. When stitching on cardstock, if the presser foot is lifted, for some reason, the needle punches these GIANT holes in the paper and the result is not pretty. Not what I was looking for. I used an 80/11 needle, which was the smallest one I could find, I've ordered some smaller ones but I don't think it will make that much difference.

Polyester thread works better than cotton which works better than handquilting cotton. It could be my machine but I couldn't get handquilting thread to work, just couldn't get the tension right. The metallic threads work really nicely.

It's infinitely easier to work with a small piece of cardstock over the full 12 x 12 piece (DUH!) but I thought "Oh, it won't be that bad". Maybe it's my reliable 10 year old machine.

So I had to keep the presser foot down but because there's no nap to catch on the feeder dogs, the cardstock moved fairly easily but only in a forward direction so it can only be spiraled and the radius can be pretty small and the turns can be spiraled both left and right but for some reason, turning the cardstock counter-clockwise is more natural.

The top image is a finished one. I sprayed and stamped the background first and then ran it through the machine. I chose the yellow because I found I had this spool of metallic yellow thread from some distant project - not gold, metallic yellow.

This is the layout after I scrapped on it. Not bad, the stitching added a bit more dimension but I'm not done playing with the machine yet.