Does Mood Affect Speed ? 29 Faces continued

As most of my blog readers know, I am completing the #29 Faces Challenge - this challenge is to create a face a day for the month of February - any art medium.

I chose to stitch faces, using free motion machine stitching - basically it means sketching with a sewing machine by moving the material around while the machine stitches. ( different from the computerised machine embroidery where a design is pre-determined and completed automatically)

This week I have been monitoring the speed I use my sewing machine as my sketching tool during the creation of the stitched faces, experimenting and using different ratios of speed - hand:foot - some of the results have been good and others not so fantastic.... my aim is to get better control, so it seems to be a matter of coordination, too - a bit like rubbing your tummy and patting your head at the same time.

I referred to another stitching blog ...

Expert advice from Tigley Textiles, UK :

You may well be an experienced stitcher, in which case your brain is used to seeing the fabric move quickly the harder you press the foot pedal. With free motion machine embroidery, you have to forget that relationship. My motto is – Fast foot, Slow hands. It seems so strange at first, but after a while you’ll see that you don’t have to move the fabric quickly- but it helps if you keep the revs up. You are aiming for a smooth drawn line of stitching. If you move the fabric too quickly, the stitches will be too long, equally if you leave your fabric in the same place and continue to stitch, the stitches will build up to create a raised blob of stitches. The success of your stitching totally depends on the synchronisation of the speed at which you move the fabric, with the speed at which you press your foot down. This does take practise, but do persevere. Don’t feel like it’s running away with you, you are in control. Once you have “clicked”, you will always pick up that speed next time you set up the machine, it is just like riding a bike.

Remember that free machine embroidery is supposed to be quirky and whimsical and free looking. If it’s a bit wobbly and jagged, just go over the shape a second time, make it look like it was meant to be. Quirky is good and gives your work character. The main thing is that you need to play! Just go for it and see what happens- yes you will make mistakes but that’s the only way to learn isn’t it?

The comparison of machine speed to the speed and fluidity of the manual handling of the fabric obviously affects the stitching, but I suspect there may be another factor... mood. I have also been registering my mood as I work the machine faster or slower and the way I move the fabric around.... One of the days this week I felt very stressed and I seemed to work a lot faster and ironically, the sewn "sketch" was in fact a lot better, I thought - as per the advice above , " Fast foot, slow hands"! While the speed ratio is important, I am beginning to think coordination and being in the right mood or frame of mind seems to be pre-requisites for free motion machine embroidery.

I wonder if you can tell from the different faces which might have been stitched when I was sad, mad, happy or relaxed?

Fish and Sticks : Art Dolls

This week I've been working on fish and sticks .... The sticks are the message stick art dolls which were very popular, attracting some attention and a few orders at the Wise Women exhibition. Each of the message stick dolls are from the Wise Women series, each with her own personality and message of wisdom, handwritten on a handmade timber tag. I gather the sticks during my walks around my neighbourhood and the tags are made from special bits of timber, some collected by me or my husband or from off cuts gifted to us from another doll making friend whose husband makes bagpipes. These dolls start off very simply with a wrap around a stick, in the general shape of a body. 'Naked" message stick dolls - strips of wadding wrapped around found sticks. Then I usually wrap other layers of fabric, wool, and/or fibres, over which I do some simple embroidery. I sculpt or mould small face masks for these dolls. I really like using "sari ribbon" as w...

Textile Art Tips

Background : Today is Tuesday - Tag day. I belong to a very talented group of artists who weekly produce a small work of art as a tag. We post photos of our tags on the Tag Tuesday blog . Currently our theme is alphabet, and we each could decide on our own sub-theme. I chose Australian plants and each of my tags is an experiment with a textile art technique. Here are February's tags and a brief descriptions of the techniques used. Technique 1 : Heliographic Art (Sun Painting) as in the photo above - close up of Tag E . When special sun/light sensitive paints are applied to wet fabric where objects have been placed on top, the outlines and shapes of the objects are transferred to the fabric. In this example I placed dried Eucalypt (gum tree) leaves on top a piece of originally white cotton painted with yellow and orange" Setacolor" transparent paints and left it in the sun for about an hour. I then cut one of the leaves out and ...

Winter Beach : Tag Tuesday

"Beach" tags for Tag Tuesday Last weekend, I was very privileged to do a workshop with Belgium based artist, Jette Clover. One of Jette's series of small works features postage stamps of famous people, so after the workshop I rediscovered my stash of stamps ( most of them still attached to envelopes). Fortunately for me, this fortnight's Tag Tuesday theme is " The Beach" which seems to be recurring theme for Australian stamps. These collage tags have been assembled from torn bits of painted paper, magazine pages and stamps. I have called these tags "Winter Beach" as the beach still looks as bright and the water as blue even in winter here in Newcastle. Today's winter maximum temperature was 16 degrees C with a clear blue sky and warm sunshine. ...with Jette Clover in fromt of her art work " Lives of Girls and Women" in the STITCHED UP exhibition.

Empress Wu Designs with Wilma

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