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Book review: Freestyle Machine Embroidery

September 7, 2009 by Denise Felton

freeYou’ve probably heard of Carol Shinn and seen her work around the Internet. You may even have been lucky enough to learn from Carol through one of her many workshops. If not, here’s your chance to be tutored by her.

Carol is an American fiber artist who is known for her realistic images produced with machine stitching.  Her book Freestyle Machine Embroidery: Techniques and Inspiration for Fiber Art shares amazing examples of her work and explains her techniques in detail. It is not a book for the casual crafter or dabbler, really. It’s more about producing fine art in an unusual medium.

If you paint but you’ve never before touched a sewing machine, and you’d like to experiment with painting with thread, this is the ideal book for you. Carol prepares you by explaining in simple terms the mechanics of the sewing machine so you can understand what’s happening between fabric and thread and you can manipulate that interaction. She steps through each critical element down to thread, needles, and hoops, pointing out pitfalls along the way. She even details how to set up your workspace and guide the fabric so that your body can tolerate long hours of stitching. There’s also plenty of information about canvas prep, color blending, and stitch variations.

But can a crafter with a limited background in studio art benefit from and enjoy this book? Well…yes. That’s just who I am, and I enjoyed it a lot. I’m probably never going to attempt photo-realistic fine art with my sewing machine. But there’s a very good chance, indeed, that some new machine-stitching experimentation will be going on my studio, thanks to this lovely book.

Freestyle Machine Embroidery was produced by Interweave and is available from Amazon.com and many other outlets. ISBN 978-1-59668-042-5

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Super Fun Colorwork Socks to Knit

When I knit socks (which sadly I have not done in a while; need to get a new pair on the needles soon!) I generally stick to pretty simple designs and colorwork that isn’t all that detailed. 

Don’t get me wrong, I love a fancy sock, I’m also just pretty lazy and I figure a project worked on size 0 or 1 US needles is going to take a long time even without the added work of intricate colorwork, so why make it more complicated?

But there are definitely socks out there I’d be willing to make an exception for, and I think Tangled Bliss by Annette Schleicher may just be one of them. 

If you can’t tell from looking, this is decidedly an advanced knitting pattern. There’s brioche for the cuffs, complex looking colorwork done with the ladderback jacquard technique, multiple charts, and colors changing everywhere. 

There are links to tutorials for all the special skills in the pattern, but still it would help to have a handle on these concepts before you get started. 

The pattern uses three colors of light fingering weight yarn at a whopping 31 stitches per 4 inches/10 cm (that’s 7.75 stitches per inch/2.5 cm). 

Would you believe me if I told you that this pattern was designed for a speed knitting contest? Speed would be the last thing on my mind. 

But again, I think all the work for these fancy socks would be worth it. I love hoe the colorwork looks like an old tile floor, and think of the bragging rights when you tell people you made them yourself. (Though of course you did; have you ever seen store-bought socks that look anything like this?)

Best of all, this pattern is available for free on Ravelry, so there’s no reason not to give it a try if you’ve got the skills. If you do, I’d love to hear about it!

[Photo: Annette Schleicher]

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