Stitch

I was nervous to begin the stitch technical block. I had hardly ever used a sewing machine before and the whole method was alien to me. Although I was unsure of my skills on the sewing machine I was a lot more confident in hand sewing as I enjoy embroidering as a hobby. After laboriously learning how to thread the machine and the absolute basics, I started to sew. Pressing my foot onto the peddle was nerve wrecking and I’m still not completely confident at it. I had a lot of trouble getting the tension on the machine right. The stitches initially would create large loops on the back of the fabric which would eventually gather and become jammed into the machine. After playing around I confronted the curious problem of the machine stitching back to front; so the thread from the bobbin showed at the top of the fabric rather than the other way around. After many attempts and a lot of trial and error I final sorted out the tension. I was shocked at how suddenly sewing became easy to me.

In class we were taught how to sew with a broken needle, to create a stretch in fabrics using elastic threaded through the bobbin, pleating and wadding. Although I was slightly more confident in sewing, I still found it difficult to convey my ideas through stitch as my abilities were limited.

Stitch was based mainly around the drawings we had done for the box clever project and  drawing workshops. After my drawings being taken from DG15 this was more of a struggle for me. I decided to work only from my swatch book. Although this was a pain, I think it was also a blessing in disguise as this encouraged me to create more original and abstract stitches.

We were sent to go fabric shopping in Shepherds Bush with a price limit of £5. I thought this was impossible and that you couldn’t possibly purchase fabric this cheap, but after looking around for a while I saw how possible this actually was.

We started off the block by testing out our ideas and showing them to Isabelle. We were told to create 10 ideas per day over the weekend, but with a job and already being slow on the machine I found this next to impossible. We showed Isabelle our ideas and she helped us strengthen and expand them, working them up to create our final pieces.