I was so utterly disillusioned by the French knots that I decided to take a bit of a sidestep and do the machine embroidery exercise before I attempted any more of the little buggers.
I hadn't ever done any machine embroidery on water soluble fabric, and I didn't really know what to expect. I thought I would start small, just working with two colours and trying to blend them together. I decided to stick with red and blue to see if I could create a purple effect.
The water soluble 'fabric' that I was using was like a thick sandwich bag in texture, perhaps they're all like that, but I was surprised that it wasn't actually fabric-y. Sewing on it felt very odd, I started without any real plan or pattern in mind, I'd read somewhere that it was a good idea to have some sort of grid to hold it all together, so what emerged was a kind of cobwebby thing. I was using red metallic in the bobbin and blue metallic on top and then half way through the bobbin ran out so I swapped the colours over. The 'spokes' of the web were made out of lots of layers of zigzag stitch and then running stitch on top because I was quite concerned about the whole lot disintegrating when I dissolved the fabric. Another thing that was surprising to me was how much effort I had to put in to get the fabric to dissolve, I thought it'd just melt away, but I really had to scrub quite hard at it before it went jelly like and eventually washed down the plughole.
As far as colour is concerned, which was after all the whole point, I think this is a really effective and interesting way to blend colours together, and it creates a fascinating surface. I can see that machine embroidery will be an endlessly useful technique for making decorative details. The finished product feels really robust and almost wire-like, although perhaps that is due to the metallic threads that I used.
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