Hand Embroidery Sewing Techniques - Fay Maxwell Stitch Artist

hello everyone today we're going to be looking at Fame ax Welles work she is a fabric artist and a teacher and she runs a number of workshops to teach people exactly how to do her hand stitching which I would consider to be her forte she derives much of her inspiration from history and also from Indian culture in fact when she went to India recently she learned a stitch that she couldn't believe she'd never actually seen before she found very very exciting the two techniques that Faye is most well known for really is her cruel embroidery that spelled CR e WL and also has slashing now cruel embroidery has its historical roots in the Tudor period the slashing also has achieved a technique but she has managed to bring this into a modern-day context and in our demo today they will be teaching us how to create our own new surface through slashing before we begin fake could you tell us who you are and a little bit about your background please well Fay Maxwell I'm a textile artist and I've been sewing really since I was a child we were never allowed as children to sit without a piece of work in our hands I was given trade clothes and ant work asses and arm rests and I favorite stitch at that time was lazy Daisy stitch and everywhere I used to get covered in lazy Daisy stitch my sister used to knit and crochet and I was taught to embroider can you tell us a little bit about your academic background in terms of your stitching it took me to born was art college where I did a diploma in fashion and textiles at least it started off in fashion and textiles I then got really very bored with the fashion and because I've always been interested in history I went into theatrical costume design because it gave me a much broader and time scale to play with and from there I went to work in as well for a short period of time working in the wardrobe department so how did you make the transition from costume design to embroidery I think that was just the timescale really I left the theater and went back into fashion and then of course as you go up and get older you get married and things happen you have your children and so on and so forth I've always been happily stitching but it wasn't until I found the local Adult Education and the City and Guilds course that my son said to me come on mom it's time that you had a go so I took a four year course in City & Guilds specifically what course was it that you did is embroidered textiles and it was just a real wonderful 4-year trip so with your City & Guilds course was that predominately teaching specific skills they taught us every stitch that you could possibly wish to know they taught you how to design how to use it how to place it and of course because I had got the background from bournemouth and I just I lapped it up I was just having a whale of a time and my entire house became covered in samples and pieces of work you're talking about the 16th century especially the Tudor period which was a big influence and a big inspiration for you how did that come about I used to love drawing outfits and costumes from that period of time particularly for the theatre and of course its color and use of its fabrics and its techniques we had wonderful techniques coming through at that time which included of course slashing would you like to expend a little bit more about what exactly is slashing yes slashing originated back in the 1516 hundred and Henry the eighth's of course is known very much for his slashed doublets where he would have a jacket that was made of velvet they would slash it and edge the outside edges of the slashed piece and then pull a beautiful piece of silk through and you see that a lot in wonderful costume dramas of today this is taking it slightly further what I've tried to do is to take 15th and 16th century techniques and makes them into a contemporary use and of course we have so many more fabrics now they only had Velvets Cotton's linens and then eventually silk we've got polyesters we've got all sorts of things things that melt things that don't it's just a huge adventure you've got your slashing technique which is I've never seen anything like you before the other thing that interested me was you're cruel work could you tell us a little bit more about that yes the cruel work again it was probably one of the very first uses of interior decoration they they would have linen with beautiful flower designs worked in sin called cruel wool and the word cruel came from the inferior quality of wool that they used at that time so they used this wool they would lay down a lovely shape and then on to it they would pile every conceivable stitch that they could find all in different colors and they would put them as bed hangings and curtains drapes tablecloths all over their houses which of course we're all made of very heavy wood at that time so this beautiful floral finish and the lovely colors would just look stunning so what I've done is tried to introduce silk which of course came from India much later and of course it was being used in India at that time and they were doing their form of stitches so I've introduced silk and I've used instead of using a cotton background I've used the silk I've got wool applique and then on top of the applique we pile in all these wonderful colors of thread and of course because we've got homes that are more modern very neutral colors we can change the colors or from 1500 and 1600 to our beautiful colors of today lovely white on white pale apricots lemons blues that sort of thing we can truly bring it all up to date you mentioned to me about the need for family heirlooms the cruel work came from 1500 we have got so many examples of it and very little examples of slashing but the cruel work we have a lot of examples a lot of written history so we're talking 500 600 year old pieces of work and I suddenly thought how lovely it would be for everyone to be able to create a piece for the 21st century that they will be able to hand down and in 500 years time say oh that's granny's own sales cushion and it will still be there not a replica of 1500 but something taken from our homes today we have so many beautiful designs and fabrics that we use in our homes and of course the colors have changed so we've got lovely neutral shades we've got lovely rich silks that we can use so my cruel work is a wool blanket felt appliquéd onto silk because I like the matte of the wool against the richness of the silk and you just pile every stitch that you've ever learned onto it and if you haven't learned a lot of stitches then just use the stitches that you love the most and you create beautiful bed hangings these are little throws that go across the bottom of beds cushions lovely wall hangings that sort of thing it's something that anyone would be proud to have in say 600 years time excellent and also I've noticed that a lot of your things are very useful do you feel the need to not just create beautiful fabric but then to actually put it in a functional role I think it's upbringing really we were brought up to make everything work and recycling of course didn't the word wasn't used then but of course we undid things and we may do and we mended and we made new things and this is where a lot of my work comes from because I never throw anything away and in my bags of bits I've got things that are probably 50 and 60 years old these are probably it gets to the very end of my food chain so to speak these are all the threads that are brushed up from the floor or taken from fabrics that I've used I've torn up bits I've taken beautiful pieces of silk threads away shredded them and I've trapped them between net so very lightly over them and then make them into the most gorgeous handbags and of course because there's so much color in there they go with absolutely everything they could you tell us what you're going to be showing us to do today 1f you've got any specific tips that you can share with us several tips really the first we're going to be doing this slashing and combining the two techniques of slashing one with the straight lines and then leaving areas that we can put a little grid in one of the very first ones I ever did I just used a basic old piece of calico and after I'd laid all the fabrics on slashed it I put a turning and would you believe it the white calico showed through so the biggest tip I would say is never ever use a white background always use the nastiest most horrible color that you've got in your rag bag one of the things that I try to do with the ladies on my web workshops are we throw our rag bags onto the floor and the rule is you close your eyes and you put your hand into that rag bag and whatever you come out with you use now that is not easy rather like my piece of green crimping I kept on throwing it back but I assure you that that very nasty bit that's been in there since 1943 will probably make that piece that you're working on today so you close your eyes you reach into your rag bag you pull out all these little bits and pieces and you can use anything you can use cotton velvet I've even used Hessian you can use silk I wouldn't use too many shares because they are very fine and they disappear and we're just going to have fun layering them all up this is a very different technique to photo kneeling which actually has six wonderful squares laid on top of one another in a regular shape this we're not going to reuse regular shapes at all we're going to just throw everything in that we can find and eventually we'll get to about sort of six ish layers it's very difficult to actually describe we put a lovely piece of fabric on the top and then we start so what I'm going to show you today is how to make a handbag with the slashing technique we begin with a base and the base needs to be colored and particularly when making handbags we don't waste too much time layering up fabric that we're not going to be using so I draw my shape on both the back and the front of this piece of base fabric we're going to layer on all our fabrics put a top layer on and then sew it and eventually it will look like this so here we have our base fabric we have which is this going to be this blue one we have our bits and pieces laid on top of it and then we have the yellow top layer of the fabric so this is the shape of my handbag and it's this is once one side and that's the other it's absolutely identical on both sides and I've drawn it on both the back of the fabric and on the front of the fabric and we're going to infill all of this with layers and layers of fabrics one on top of the other to just go inside and just creep out slightly over the edges now the first thing that we've got to do is dive into your rag bag and take out absolutely everything the rule is close your eyes and whatever you bring out you use because it will all look super you take your base piece of fabric and lay it out I've got loads and loads of bits pieces that I've got here ready but one thing I will say to you don't use a lightweight fabric as your base you're going to slash these and the scissors will go so quickly through so always use something that's actually of a tougher nature now we're going to take all our bits and pieces and I really don't even own them I just um tear them into strips and lumps and bumps and bits and pieces we're going to be doing a grid and so any fabric that is one-sided you've got fabrics that's got printed on one side and white on the other put it in upside down because we want to fold them back later so that the color is on the top lay it all up and it's amazing how many layers will go into this it's difficult to say how many layers like six or five or whatever but eventually you get to the point where you pass it and you know you're poor machine is not likely to be able to take anything else so we're throwing all of these bits and pieces in make sure that they go out over the edges but not too far out over the edges and put for instance if I've got a bright pink I'll put bright pink at one end of the bag and bright pink at the other end of the bag just to give it a bit of continuity and we just throw in all these wonderful bits and pieces one on top of the other do make sure that there is absolutely no bald bit because if there's a bald bit it really does look skimped so I've layered them all up and as you can see they're all willy-nilly they're all sort of just thrown in one on top of the other I haven't taken too much time and effort and now I'm going to take in this case a very pretty piece of pink silk silk is very good for the top of a bag it it's it's just so delicate and fine and it's when you when you slash it and it goes all sort of curly it's absolutely delicious I would say under no circumstances tack this because the tacking in itself takes time but when you're sewing it the tacking thread gets caught in your foot and it's so irritating so I overly pin it I just pin it to bits all over the place so that all the pieces are absolutely fine underneath and kept still you've got a lot of layers in here so just pour in all the pins that you can all over the place until you can't do do them anymore and if you've got bits that are hanging out of the edge that you you think are just too far over just fold them back in again throw them all back in again don't don't let them be any waste it's rather like a sort of huge pudding of bits underneath so I think I've pinned that enough now and that then is sort of pinned like that so we've still got this design across the back and the first thing that I would do now is I would sew a line of stitching all the way around the shape of the bag then I would turn it over and start my design we've laid all our fabrics up and this is exactly how it should look before you begin to sew and you begin in the very center of your piece so you're going to start sewing at the top in the very center of your piece of work now you could if you wanted to you could just go in a straight line so you've got six lines in a straight line or better still in a just a lovely wavy shape that takes you down from the top center to the bottom okay so the first thing that we're going to do Jamie is we're going to go around the outside of the handbag to give us our shape and then we can work all our patterns inside there so if you work on your piece of blue and I will work on my piece of pink it really doesn't matter it's the fabric wrapped up the more the racking the more fabric that you have in your cutting it just there is no mistake it's only ever different springboards as this near three wards I'm going to go from top to bottom you're going from side to side it needs to go the width of your foot and I tend to sit back on it I sit right back on it and just let the fabric well in its own right also some machines of course are very useful and swatches that they have the reverse reverse stitching and that's lovely because you don't have to move the fabrics too much you just leave it as it is and just go back with the boards you can hear when you'll go your machine's going over a thick lump of fabric it really does struggle it this will take us about two hours to complete and I'll come down through the center of this grid as much as close to the center as I can all the way down through the center if you aren't fortunate enough to have the reverse stitch on it turn it always turn it round and work in different directions because if you work in the same direction all the time the fabric gets pushed and pushed and pushed and you end up with a large Ward fabric at the very bottom of the fabric so I have now got a quarter of an inch between my foot and the previous line which is a good half inch and I'm going down to do that and as you can see I'm not cutting off any ends or taking any anytime to to finish off things properly or anything I'm just going out over the edge that's what our forwards backwards and forwards when you meet one of the previous lines you just take no notice of it you just you don't want to go over it at the end of the lines you want to in fill with your grid so I'm going to come down to there and now I'm going to go move up to here and go back so that none of the lines encroach over the top of any of the other lines so now I finished all the vertical lines and they're half inch apart as opposed to the quarter of an inch of the little wavy lines we come back into the center and we're going to do the right angle lines now then that begins again in the center and you work up and down a quarter of an inch and then the width of your foot so that's finished so Jamie you've started off with your lovely wavy lines really really beautifully apart from this one which is too wide apart that's half an inch and it's not a quarter of an inch so that final one you could run another line down through there to make that narrower if you have them too wide in this lovely wavy line when you cut them they just sit there and they don't do anything the quarter of an inch is a good width because it just puffs up the little slashed area now your grid which needs to be a good half-inch you've run across these lines and that's you don't need to do that you don't need to take it out because you can cut through it in a minute but don't put it across because you want these lovely wavy lines in their own shape to stand firm and then this little grid here which you can continue up from there will work properly but the grid must be half an inch and the little wavy lines must be a quarter of an inch okay and the quarter of an inch mustn't be any larger and the half inch grid mustn't be any smaller thank you do mm-hmm okay in some areas my squares have actually not square they're more rectangular presumably when the air is a rectangle we can just leave that I unn slashed or if we slash it it's a little bit on the wonk and actually it doesn't matter because it doesn't just fun and it's creative and and it'll look good and it'll be fun and we'll just make it slightly different yeah which is fine so I'm here I've got a a very nice grid going on here and I've got some parallel lines lovely as well there's one other line that you can do and that's for people who like to do free machining and it's quite good fun you take off your standard foot and you put on your darning foot you drop the feed dogs and you can do wonderful curly lines so pull the needle up with the thread and you begin these lie at these lovely circles in the center and work out I'll just cut that off because it gets in the way you keep these lines as close to a quarter of an inch as you can and it's bound to be a bit wonky because you hit lumps of fabric underneath and you can drift off and do all sorts of lovely curly patterns and then that's the basic shape and then you just fill in the rest around with lovely quarter of an inch lines so that really is as much of the sewing that you need to do to cover the lot and you really must cover the whole lot and once you finish that you're ready to slash so this is what it's all going to look like when it's finished everywhere has been sewn within the shape of your parallel lines you've got the greenery and we've got the reveal lines yeah okay you've got them all over the place and you quite simply now need quite a sharp pair of scissors the pointiest ones if you can get them they're few and far between but a nice sharp pair of scissors we finished almost all stitching and I must admit I just get very excited about this and want to know what's going on because you just want to know what's going on underneath so let's even though we haven't finished this piece you put your slashing your slashed your scissors into there and you put your fingers underneath here you will go through the bottom you were bound to go through the bottom fortunately you know that you've gone through the bottom because it hurts okay but just go right as close down to that base as you possibly can and your digging in and you're pushing your scissors all the way along all the time it's very difficult to use the cutting tool there is a cutting tool that you can run through slashing like this but the problem is we've used a variety of fabrics we've used very heavy velvet some of them Cotton's and when the tool hits on a corner sometimes this form of slashing it snaps I like the control of the scissors and you're just going to go through all of those lie in order to achieve this great finish going back taught you're talking about earlier about the Tudors this is what Henry the eight pads on his sleeves isn't it on the past lots and lots of the puff sleeves they slashed through and the fabrics come through he would have had just a little slash like that with the fabric coming through one silk but we have got 810 sometimes if it's been folded over twelve colors coming through and they pick up this is some velvet in here and if you remember rightly we put the velvet in upside down okay so that the that we've got the lovely velvet pile on the top and you just go on and on and on and on this piece here has been cut along all the parallel lines and this is how it looks and if you look back to that pink can you see how sharp it is these sharp advantages the cut edges are sharp and they're sitting there and not really doing anything you want to rough them up a bit gotta wrestle up a bit now we could if we wanted to we could just rust them like that and they come out slightly better but this is the difference between a piece that has just been cut and this piece here you take the whole thing and you put it into a bowl of hand hot water with some washing-up liquid in it and you give it a jolly good scrubbing okay and once you've got that scrubbing done you take it out of the garden and you bash it against a wall and it does you the world of good you know the affero be really take that so you and this this bashing it against a wall is faulting it okay and so all these silks are being felted into the walls and matted and they're all matted into the velvet and the sparkles just pouring out if you were quite simply to just do this with a little scissors it's not as lovely as washing out their phone so you can see the difference it's opened it up it's worn it we've rubbed it and we've almost felted it's like but you will see that actually I have done the straight lines washed it before I've cut the grid now this is personal to me I know that perhaps there are lots of people who would like to wash the whole thing when it's finished but I like the softness of these lovely lines down through here against the sharpness of the the lovely grids okay when I first started cutting with with it with these lovely straight lines it makes the most soft gentle velvety type fabric and the photo kneeling looks almost like camp coral you know rippling coral and it was just that I seen some grids that I rather liked the look of this is a cutback technique and when you're wanting to do a grid there are all sorts of different ways and means of doing it the simplest is just slash down to sides of your square top right sort of top right and top right and you can do the whole of it the whole lot if you wanted to top right top right and you're just cutting down and it's a little bit more difficult cutting down to the very base fabric and you've got this little flap sticking up you take your needle and you can put a knot on the end which is lovely you come up on the bottom corner so you've got your top two slashed and you come up on the bottom corner now this is where you have to lose control again you dig your needle in and whatever that needle comes back with you just pull it back and take it through and you've opened up your little square so you come up at the bottom so there's no preparation there is no preparation you have got hundreds of little colors underneath there and if you were to try and sit here and try and get a pattern of some sort it just simply wouldn't work look at that is that so then I've done that square so where I do the same why not try a different one okay you've done outside edge there why not cut outside edge on that side so that went that way so down and then across done then across okay oops okay you're thinly so if you do down there outside edge again we've got four four little cuts this is my favorite little shape it's a shape of four square so you have to sort of count a bit to get them all together poor for white feel if I don't want that one bit I can I have to get the doubt wait wait because you don't know yet what the needles going to do okay so come up in the center of that for ya yes come from behind come up and Center and I would always use a double thread on this because you've got such a weight of little little pieces of thread thread that you're catching it and then just dig in your needle and whatever that needle picks up you pull it back and catch it down into the center and because it's not quite a square smallville rectangle it's out of I'll just put it into the middle bit there you go now pull in the sense so I come back up into the single catch the corner of that one like that yeah whoops gone too far okay and then pull it back and pull it back into the center and go down okay lovely little gold it's all like little it's like a little advent calendar really isn't it oops cannula needle through guys are quite thick actually it's like that yeah there we go they go and so I'm going to pick up the top I spot one again okay I think I nearly finished a lovely so I fast enough now up now you just simply go from there to your next one so in fact if you were going to do a whole line of fours you would just come up in the center here and go and go in again but obviously where that's a bit of a rectangle I could just leave that these are slash slash that that yeah square there those four squares yes and carry on yes excellent or you could if you wanted to just slash them all in the same direction I mean there are patterns with his hat in kind of what you want to do by the time that you finish this technique you have a unique piece of fabric you'll never be able to make it again yourself even but no one else will have it it will be absolutely yours and everyone who sees it will say oh gosh where did you get that how is it done because it's such an intricate looking thing it's fabulous and it's great fun to do

Channel: Jamie Mason

Views: 263,192

Rating: 4.8066015 out of 5

Keywords: textiles project, how to hand stitch, hand embroidery, textile arts, colouricious, hand embroidery techniques, how to do hand embroidery, hand stitch, embroidery techniques, textile design, sewing projects, needlecraft, fay maxwell, textile technique, jamie malden, textile artist, textile project, creative stitchery, sewing, needlework, creative embroidery, hand embroidery for beginners, hand stitching techniques, embroidery stitches, stitch artist, hand embroidery designs

Id: xiL19t56Xgk

Length: 33min 17sec (1997 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 23 2011