Images Magazine Digital Edition May 2018

www.images-magazine.com MAY 2018 images 41 TIPS & TECHNIQUES Erich Campbell is an award-winning digitiser, embroidery columnist and educator, with 18 years’ experience both in production and the management of e-commerce properties. He is the partner relationship manager for DecoNetwork in the USA. www.erichcampbell.com Combining the methods for achieving thickness and texture with mock versions of common stitches is a sure way to capture a folk-embroidery feeling. You can ape even those stitch types impossible for machines to create by copying their most visible traits. Moreover, you can pre-programme these motifs for application to lines and filled shapes. Whether you are producing the varied back-stitch shapes of blackwork, the repeated ‘X’ of cross stitch, or even reproducing the surface of a knit fabric, the aim is the same: identify the critical elements that give the stitch its style; copy the angle, thickness, and placement of the stitches visible in the original and, if possible, create a motif that can be applied to digitised lines or fill an area to produce your folk embroidery style. For instance, to copy a simple split- stitch, look to the most visible parts of the stitch: examining a sample, you’ll see loops that look most like a nested set of ‘V’ shapes – by creating the same kind of ‘V’ and, as previously discussed, stitching multiple passes over each leg and nesting each ‘V’ into the next, you can create an interlocked thick-lined stitch that looks very much like a split stitch, despite the impossibility of manipulating the thread the way a hand-stitcher would. Whether you choose to go for full reproduction style and create classic folk designs with thick, natural fibre threads, apply the thick thread aesthetic to modern designs, or go all-out with machine-friendly threads and special effect fibres on traditional stitch motifs, the cues you take from the hand-embroidered look can help you to create designs that stand apart from the humdrum combination of standard density fills, satins and straight stitches that are the staple of everyday embroidery, elevating your work and pumping up its perceived value. [Below] My split stitch is worked here in standard high- sheen thread to stand apart from the fuzzy texture of the fleece background on these mittens. The split/chain look I designed is reminiscent of classic manual machine and hand embroidery, andwas applied to a simple line drawing after being programmed as a motif in my digitising software [Above] This detail from an art piece shows the juxtaposition of ‘Adam and Eve’ figures copied from an early American sampler with a cross-stitched QR code at top and centre. These figures are executed in standard thread, but the cross-stitch motifs were generated with a cross-stitch plotter built in to a digitising suite – this tool automatically plots the stitches to make sure each pass is even and each row properly placed. Tools like this make it easy to create a hand-worked look; this piece includes normal and double cross motifs, and only required minor manual work for the back-stitch elements outlining features on the people. If this were paired with the right thread, it could create a lovely reproduction of original cross-stitching with ease [Above] In this image, you see, from right to left, a test sample to establish how multi-pass embroidery differs from standard renditions. The far right straight stitch line has a single pass per stitch, the next to the left has three, then five, then seven passes per stitch. The satin stitches start at the right with a fully filled, single pass satin, then a three-pass satin, then five, then seven, with each column of stitches being made of the same number of stitches each time. Thereafter, you see some common motifs, with a single-pass continuous chain stitch followed by my own three-four pass split stitch, and lastly, a row of cross-stitch applied to a path To copy a simple split- stitch, look to the most visible parts of the stitch