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!

Desert Sunset II - Couching, Image Stitching, Machine Quilting

In my last post I talked about transferring the design to the black background fabric. The photo above shows the image drawn on the background. I wanted to make sure the moon and tree stood out more than the other features, so I couched around each of these with yarn.

Before stitching I pinned a piece of light weight interfacing behind the black fabric to add some body to the fabric as it is being stitched. The interfacing acts as a stabilizer. I cut it out after the couching of the yarn is done to make sure I didn't have anything too stiff to machine quilt through.

By couching I mean that I stitched yarn down to the drawn line using a zig-zag stitch. I did this on my Pfaff 1475 CD machine. I used this presser foot for this process:

This foot allows me to have the yarn slide under the bump in the center of the foot. I have had good luck using this foot for couching. I hold the yarn to the left and let it feed in as I go. I can see the stitching on the drawn line in the slot in the foot. Here is a photo of me stitching down the yarn around the moon shape.

Here is the top with the yarn couched.

My next step is to sandwich the top with batting, and backing. I use black batting when I have a dark top. If any of the batt comes through the top (bearding) you can’t see any of the light colored whiskers from it.

Once the quilt sandwich is made, its time to do all the machine quilting for this piece. For the design lines I stitched using bright colors of threads. My thread colors included pinks, fuchsias, golds, and tans. I also machine stitched inside the design elements. The stitching inside the features is a large part of the design of a quilt like this, so I tried to use interesting stitches. You can see some examples here of the stitching patterns I used. These photos show the area after the oil paint stick has been applied, but you can still see the stitches.

After the design elements were quilted I stitched the background using a navy thread. I thought the navy color would add a little more visibility to the stitching if you are close up to the quilt. I tried to cover the top so that the stitching occurred at least every ½ to ¾ inch on the top. Here you can see the stitching in the black background area.

After all the machine quilting is done its time to apply the oil paint stick. That will be the next post. Stay tuned!

Thanks for visiting my blog!

Hibiscus - Postcard Quilt



Hisbiscus

 This is my postcard quilt for my Serendipity Exchange. The theme this time is "Flower". I painted a hibiscus from a photo I took while on a cruise in the South Pacific a few years ago. I used Tsukineko ink paints. I practiced some new leaf machine quilting patterns I recently learned from Cynthia Catlin in the background. For the border I couched some yarn around the edge. This is being sent to Linda Friedman as we speak. I hope she likes it.