Free Machine Embroidery Technique

I really love using Free Machine Embroidery and have used it and developed my techniques a lot over the years of studying Art and Design and Textiles at school and doing my Art Foundation at Central Saint Martins. I am going to use this technique in my SDP as it is a really fluid, quick and easy way to create really intricate designs which appear to have taken a lot longer than they really have. I really want the cloak to feature a lot of details and layers as I stated in previous posts.

The images below are of a witch costume/ instillation I made for my Final Major Project at Central Saint Martins. It was inspired by Shakespeare's witches in Macbeth and by the history of medicine women and men. I sewed onto a basic cloak all of the witches 'spell' ingredience and collected objects. I was given a big box of my Grandpa's fishing tackle collection when he died, which was a random collection of lots of feathers, (real) furs including squirrel, fox, goat and badger, bird capes, squirrel tails and sheeps wool. I combined these with other feathers I bought and collected and natural materials which I sewed onto using the free machine embroidery technique. In some of these images you can see the use of this technique. For some of the patches I tore hand dyed natural fabrics into strips and sewwed them together in this way which was really effective. I even used it to sew real leaves onto squares of fabric.

The image below is a detail of a small area of a skirt I made for A Level Art and Design project called 'Transitions' and is made entirelly from collected and recycled pacaking and old fabrics and items of clothing. This also shows the type of embroidery I am intending to use on the cloak I will be creating for my current project. For this I used a combination of purple and gold threads given to me by friends, family and other donators.

Other Free Machine Embroidery inspiration I have found is a blog by a nice Welsh lady named Karen: http://artistsgardenstudio.wordpress.com/2007/10/

I absolutely LOVE the different colours and materials she has used and the intricate designs she has created using the Free Machine Embroidery technique; like I did for my A Level Art and Design 'Transitions' project, she has used a gold thread on a few of her samples. I will attempt to create some samples like these to test out the different effects I could acheive.