Couching

I'm doing some posts to show the process I used to make my "Bird of the Night" art quilt. This is a detail of part of it. If you look closely at this photo you can see that the bird head and major petals have a piece of yarn stitched around them. The process of sewing down this yarn is called "couching". For me couching is basically using a Zig-Zag stitch over the yarn to stitch it down

I do the couching before I machine quilt inside the flower. It is my boundary line for stitching. I use a wide Zig-Zag stitch for the couching to make sure I cover the yarn.

I used blue yarn and orange yarn, depending on the part of the flower. It makes a nice outline, thicker than machine quilting thread. I also did some straight stitching (multiple passes) over the major dividing lines inside the flower head and petals. Here is an action shot of this work!



I defined the leaves on the bottom the same way. In this area I couched green and yellow yarn. I like this technique to make sure the shapes stand out from the background.





I think I will talk about the machine quilting stitches in my next post. Thanks for visiting my blog!