City Scape Background Quilting

After I put some stitches through the ties, I needed to do something with the background area. I decided to add some building shapes in the area of the tie buildings. You can see the outline of the buildings below.









For the sky, I just did a horizontal back and forth stitch, suggesting some clouds.






Below the buildings I did some linear stitching at different angles.

My next step is to jazz up the background fabric a bit. I'll show that on my next post. Thanks for visiting my blog!

Embroidered Building Facades

Red and Blue City Scape

This is a city scape made primarily with men's ties.  I have stitched the ties down to the background, and my next step was to add some embroidery stitching to the red building fronts. The red tie fabric looked a little too plain, in my opinion, so I wanted to add something to jazz up the front of these buildings a bit.

I am not a master embroiderer, so I rely on the simple stitches that I know well. I don't even know

their official names, but I use a cross-stitch, a buttonhole stitch and a straight stitch. The stitching was done with embroidery floss.  I've shown a couple of detail photos here, above and below.

The embroidery stitches stand up on the surface of the tie. I have also done some machine quilting stitching on the ties themselves to enhance the appearance of the top. This machine quilting often goes around the areas where I've embroidered and makes that location stand out more. In other instances it secures the ties to the backing fabric and batting so they don't look like they are puffing out too much.  Decorative stitches built in to my machine have also been used on a couple of buildings as well.  It's on to the background next...






Thanks for visiting my blog!

This is a partially finished city scape that uses men's ties for the buildings. I have cut the ties in various sizes to make the buildings. I am using three different ties in this piece. I also am using solid blue and black commercial fabric for the building shadows and the top of one of the buildings.

The tie pieces are placed on a hand dyed men's handkerchief. The dye color is a light blue. I have placed the handkerchief on a commercial striped fabric. There is a piece of batting and backing fabric under the striped fabric.

I cut the tie sections and arrange them in a way that looks interesting. I use a bit of glue to hold them in place, and then begin sewing them down. I sew them with my sewing machine using a buttonhole, zig zag or decorative stitch. The stitching goes around each of the shapes. This stitching is done through the tie, handkerchief, striped fabric, batting and backing fabric. Here is a picture of the back with some of the stitching visible:



It's not particularly neat looking. I intend to use these as pillows, so the back will be inside the pillow and won't be visible. My next step is embroidery work on the buildings. Thanks for visiting my blog!