How to achieve more even stitching in wool appliqué

hello mary mittelstadt here with design and be mary and i'm here for a video that i have often been asked how i get my stitching so even both on the front and the back and i see it quite frequently posted in groups people are unhappy they are struggling to get a nice even stitch doesn't make any difference if you're involved with the more prim and primitive movement because those things the irregularity kind of adds to the charm of the look of the item this is for those of you who would like to improve and get better at your ability to have a nice even row stitching and preferably not only on the front but also on the back of your item so i'm here to share what i know about it and you can certainly try and find out what works for you it works for other stitches as well you can figure out how to get nice even whip stitch with markings you can also uh repeat motives from one to the other that they are all the same and it also works very nicely for a beaded edge which i have another video on the beaded blanket stitch you can also use uh some of the ideas for um the idea of a nice a backstitch or running stitch and i have a lot of fun with uh cork lightly and you can see some of the stitches show up a little bit on here and how i go about doing that a few other examples that i have are things like how do you get how do you get nice even stitches if you want to create a scallop blanket stitch or a scallop with the beads and i even have on one of my patterns that actually that other one is part of the art nouveau pattern on my site and this is another one again that gets you a nice little scallop look on my blooms in blue so and you also see the outside beaded and how how do i get those even all right so the first thing that we need to talk about is the most common uh way to remedy it is to basically use piece of tape and there's two ways to have your stitches even or uneven some people have difficulty getting them to be even this way they they will put you know three stitches will fit in one inch and four in the next so they get a little less space in between each one of these or more um and that's you know typical of of uh just irregularly guessing and you can see how that goes on the edge the other type of of that is the the other type of irregularity is is on the depth of the stitch they go from having maybe in a quarter inch to slightly sagging down and back in and the stitches are not the same depth to solve the depth is very easy basically all you need to do is apply a piece of tape and then when you work you work right up to that depth and this works i've got an edge piece where the both edges are cut but it also works the same you can also put a piece of tape on something like this and just just put your piece of tape along the edge and stitch because you're stitching one piece down to another that will help you and it also helps with you can also do the whip stitch your stitch will not go any dip you can do a you can obviously do a back stitch or running stitch along that edge and that will help now to step that up you can make marks on this tape and you can actually buy tape this is called tiger tape it's available in some quilt stores and various online places it's basically an already marked tape and sometimes you can move the tape along it's sticky enough that you can keep moving along and i believe you can get it with different distances between your stitches it was originally designed to help quilters with their running stitch but obviously it works perfectly for this you get the depth of the stitches correct and then if you make a stitch at each of the lines you will have very even stitching so i it's called tiger tape generally that i have seen it as but you can make your own tape as well if you don't want to go out and buy anything you don't have access there's all kinds of tapes available this is a tape that quilters use this is a quarter inch tape that is used in quilting to mark all quarter inch markings from the edge so you stitch evenly but you can get things like this in your big box department painting area and that will help you uh list your tape this is the blue tape it doesn't stick it's it's slightly tacky so it won't rip up your wool and yet it works and you can probably just make the marks i would use a sharpie pen and a ruler and i will have a little say about rulers i use a flat designer ruler here and i also have a little metal one that i use that has metric measurements on here and while i'm certainly no good at converting over the measurements i just find that occasionally the measurements give me a few more options easily to see as to how far i might want my stitches apart the problem is one of the clues i'm going to give you something that i learned when i was in art school many years ago getting my art degree the quilter's rulers which are so often nice to use they got lots of markings on them but as you can see they have about an eighth of an inch depth and because of that eighth of an inch depth if i put this down i'll do it on this piece of paper if i put this down and i am looking straight on and i mark where that line is i'm probably going to be accurate but if i leave it and the further i go or if it's sitting a little bit to the left of me or to the right of me pretty soon when i'm marking these i am no longer getting accurate measurements because that 1 8 inch plays a difference i learned to prop my ruler upright and then mark it make the marks go in direct contact to the wool don't rely on marking it from this way you know one or two is fine but eventually what happens is you'll add on and you'll get further and further off in your measurements and that that's a good thing to know for almost anything as far as also tapes the other thing you can do is you can get tapes uh this is something i got at uh at one of the big box stores they were clearing out i don't know how easy it is to get but it's called shape tape and it comes i bought it so that i could do my machine quilting and the hand stitching and i cut a piece of it apart basically you're getting a piece that looks like this and what i did is i attached these sticky i attached them to a quilter's template this one has the template showing i would cut that out and this one has the template the plastic on the back so this is very very movable and you can literally place it along the edge and having marked your markings you just simply take a little pen and you mark each one along the way a little simple dot and then you have your distance going and to show you i use um the pens that i use for this for marking i love these pens uh so sew line makes one they're available i think bonen may have one they're just a very fine tip point i have a white one and i have a dark one i have tried the colored leads i don't find them terribly useful usually white or or regular pencil lead works it probably a regular pencil lead drafting i don't know if it would wash out but in most cases you're not washing this in in most cases you're kind of covering it up with your stitch and obviously if you're working on white you wouldn't want to make a real black mark but by putting this down i'll show you the kind of mark it makes just going like this and you can see you can get a nice dark mark where your stitch should go and anyways but there are other fun shapes uh in this available and if you noticed on my pieces that have the scallop this is how i did the scalloped i cut this out and i would lay this template down and mark my dots and go on to the next one this also allows you to figure out if you're doing say 12 inches and you want it to come out kind of even at the end by starting in the middle you can end up with a similar end and figure out how that works but anyways uh that's so much for the tape um other ways to do this is some people mark the end of their thumb i don't do this so much because for some strange reason i do my blanket stitch going forward so i could do it if i kept my thumb way out there that's just not real closer to me what i suggest you do is figure out how you hold your fabric and then see where your thumb is and how it lies along where the stitches go and make your marks there and you know some people really love this it doesn't involve any other paper or marking and they can go anyplace they can go around a curve whatever they want to do and so that works for them i'm not overly fond of it um but that doesn't mean it won't work for you i want you to just know it exists one of the other things i saw that's kind of a take off on this that made a little bit more sense for me was this little template this is i call it kind of the c template and somebody created this because they didn't want the marks i don't know apparently on their fingers so it's a c-shape i made mine out of pelin 72 the real extra heavyweight weight interfacing which i had on hand and you basically a letter c you cut a little inlet out and then you cut something about the shape of your thumb slide your thumb in and you can then it stays on your thumb and you can then place it where you want it let's see get my thread here and just stitch along to meet the markings and for some people this is this works really quite well and you can you know it helps you get that start and it stays on your thumb so you don't have to go too many places with that anyway so this is something you can make yourself you could make different ones that have different amounts of distance in their quilting i don't know if it would work to make one out of plastic i thought this was kind of good because it actually it kind of grabs the wool so it stays in place but again something to try and work with um what do you do when you get to things like circles and irregular shapes let's face it you're not always sewing sewing on a straight edge and how do you get even stitches on say a circle uh one of the ways that you can kind of do this is uh to if you're cutting your piece either on an outside edge or on the inside cut a piece of freezer paper draw a draw your circle slightly smaller than the edge that you want to work around and then fold that circle in half and keep folding it in half and draw your lines around it and just keep drawing lines i've drawn some lines that are closer together here and i just didn't fill in in the rest of these so when you start your stitching you're going to go towards you're going to lay your needle where that line comes out and have it like that it'll it'll guide you you don't even have to go all the way here you can certainly make that now i could go to the next one that's a pretty big gap for me i could have drawn another line or i can just visualize it i know that my second one is going to be here so i'm going to go halfway come back here and do that make sure when you stitch in a circle that your needle is always perpendicular to this point in other words it's not like this and it's not like this make sure it's laying up against it and you will be able to do that if you have this little template because you can lay your needle down on the line you've drawn and slide it in and you will be able to come out with the exact thing and if you've drawn this um i'm not going all the way to the end i could make a example as i could go all the way here and come out and make a very deep stitch and continue doing that around and it's something you can press that uh you can press that i've got it pinned here uh but you could simply press that freezer paper on there another thing you could use is actually something like contact paper sticky paper or if you could get a really wide depending upon how big you could use a really wide piece of masking tape the trouble is tape it's a little harder to draw your lines the freezer paper is very easy to draw your lines but you can see how that will keep you if you it helps guide your needle to the right angle and it helps you get your your pieces all the way around so that's a good thing to do with circles and for the most part uh this is not unlike you can cut an irregular shape if you have a flower shape and you're doing a number of them just cut the inside of the template just slightly smaller the depth of your stitch and it will guide you within reason to have a fairly nice stitch as you go around that item such as in this case i would cut a piece that would be smaller in here and then i would be able to stitch exactly you know right to that piece so that the the tracing paper would cover this all right so you've got that um the other hint a couple other hints in keeping your stitching even especially on outside edges again is when you are putting a piece like this again i recommend fusible fusible keeps the edge firm now that works for placemats or table mats it works for mug rugs uh ornaments uh it doesn't work if something's going to be laundered frequently and some people just simply like things very soft put fusible on the back of your top applique and either in some cases you'll be putting it against the background but if you're going to have an outside edge put it in so that the outside edge is bigger and then trim the outside edge so that this edge is even and that will help keep your stitches evenly done because when you go down you want to pull and have this edge nicely along the middle of your two pieces of wool felt and that may make a difference with how heavy your felt is to show you how the difference this is two pieces of melt and wood you can see that this is this is this is well over an eighth of an inch on its way to almost being a fourth of an inch and if you look at this i have this and this is barely an eighth of an inch both are 100 wool so your edges will sit a little bit different but for a beginner the fusible will help keep that edge a little bit stiffer and allow you to have a little more strength and that also plays a role in what i can tell you next and another thing that i do is i don't stitch conventionally i tend to stitch um with a lap deck desk and it doesn't have to be fancy you could use a book for that matter and a folded box anything what that allows me to do it allows me to sit my piece i hang onto my piece my one hand is on it and again this doesn't work for everything so these are all methods you can try for different things and by going down by going straight down holding my needle i get nice even stitches on both the back and the front what happens when you're holding and this is especially true on this kind of edge if you if you're just holding this in your hand and you're going in like this which is commonly how we're taught to sew the problem is is i get a nice quarter inch sit stitch on the edge but on the back edge if you notice the needle comes out here get the needle sticking out more so you can see it you get almost like an eighth of an inch now if you're consistent you could you could hold your needle consistently that way all the way you would at least have two sides that look consistent and that may be just fine but if you want both sides to have a nice edge now that does not work as well i'll move that table guard that probably doesn't work as well when you are sewing a wool applique just down on top of a background in that case you're probably not going to be there's no need to go all the way through you just simply don't have to go through you may go through if your wool is thin that's certainly up to you in this case um this is melt and wool and there's no way that i would go all the way through the wall you can see that one little stitch you can see just a little bit um and that's fine it still grabs it it's going through it's not going to come apart and it just doesn't show up on the back so you have to take that in consider into consideration but on an edge if you force your needle to go down and think about it being perpendicular to the fabric you'll get a nice even edge the same edge on the back as on the front and i have found in the past that that everybody has a different idea about what makes it nice or not nice i think i mentioned oh and then we've got the idea of how do you transfer multis and this is something i developed for myself if you want to have let's see if i find my sample here that showed what happens when let's see when you have a motif like this and you want to reproduce it obviously you can spend a lot of time tracing it but for most people it's just a matter of figuring out the beginning and the end the length if you want it consistent so what i do is i draw a my stitches i draw the stitches out excuse me and i take a bigger needle a darning needle and i punch a little hole i don't know if you can see it you punch a little hole in the end of the lines and then by placing this down on my wool i can use either a dark or a light marker i put the ink in there and i simply twirl it around and you'll be surprised at the nice dark marks that you get and if my mark is here i then know my stitch will go from here to there from here to there and so on i don't have to draw the whole thing i just have a little tiny mark to work like that i have used this technique for so many things i have even marked lines of quilting where i've just put periodic darts and then i you kind of play connect the dots and it gives you a way to guide for a line for say a stem stitch or outline stitch that you have um hi there excuse the break had a little technical breakdown but anyways a few more ideas and what i was going to leave you with was a few ideas hopefully something here that i've told you will help some of you improve your stitching or at least give you some things to try one of the things that i did encourage and something i learned in art school is instead of thinking of this as a stitch sometimes we get so caught up with thinking of this as a stitch we forget to look at the shape that you're creating and what you really need to do is think i in this case i am creating kind of a rectangle and you will probably be better able to have an even stitch if you think of it in other words where is the thread going to lay and what shape will it make rather than thinking of it purely as a stitch and that will sometimes help you we were taught in or to not think of everything as an object but to think of the other shapes so it's something it's something to try and again it may work for some of you better than for others a few other things is if you're still struggling with evenness and it frustrates you don't forget to choose your thread colors accordingly if you choose a thread that is low contrast or similar people will not see your stitches and that can allow you give you time and over time you will get better if you keep trying and working with it uh and the other thing is that you know it's no fun if you're if you're not having fun doing this and worried about expectations i guess sometimes we have to back off i i know of so few people who are happy with their work initially and they usually come back in a few days and they don't notice the small errors or you know differences that they have made so be kind to yourself and look at your creativity and um you know i think the best of us uh sometimes we're our own worst enemies but hopefully i've given you a few uh hints and clues as to how to get more even stitches and i hope you'll try it um again and one more thing i was going to say if you're a beginner don't be afraid to try wool felt and you can read my i go to my video on working with well felt blends they have very nice firm edges to work with and that may be helpful anyways i hope i hope you will give some of these things a try and possibly find something that makes your stitching remember practice eventually will result in more even stitching meanwhile if you're wondering to see my work or any of my other items i am a pattern designer and you can contact me at www design and be married.com i'll be happy to have you visit my site and until next time keep stitching have a great day

Channel: DesignAndBeMary

Views: 12,405

Rating: 4.9436622 out of 5

Keywords: wool applique, wool work, stitching, even stitches, wool embroidery, marking wool, 'tiger' tape, marking wool applique, blanket stitch, whip stitch, back stitch, running stitch, evenly spaced stitchies

Id: IM41HicxHGs

Length: 21min 48sec (1308 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 17 2020