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An appreciable part of our designs are in the photo stitch
technique, and our customers often ask us about it. We prepared several
lessons and invite you to browse through them.
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| The photo-stitch technique is more reminiscent of pencil or crayon
sketches, rather than embroidery. Multi-colored photo-stitch designs give
an almost Impressionist effect, which is why this technique is often used
when digitizing works of art. It uses very densely placed stitches, often
overlaping each other. In this lesson we're going to try one- to three-color
designs. |
| The simplest designs are one-color designs. |
| Step One: Download the design of a Girl. |
For small hoop:
Size: 81.2 x 99.1 mm (3.22" x 3.89")
Stitches: 16130
For large hoop:
Size: 108.2 x 123.9 mm (4.25" x 4.9")
Stitches: 24222
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| Step Two: Put the design onto a card or floppy for your machine. |
Step Three: Photo stitch is usually dense. That is why it's
very important to choose the fabric and stabilizer correctly. For our lesson
we've chosen linen-like synthetic fabric, it's medium-weight, evenly-woven
fabric, and medium-weight iron-on tear-away stabilizer.
Iron the stabilizer onto the fabric. |
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| Step Four: Hoop the fabric with the stabilizer, stretching them
across the hoop tightly. There should not be any folds or areas where the
fabric has puckered. |
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Step Five: We used #75/11 needles, 40-weight rayon threads for
the needle and the 60-weight thread for the bobbin. For heavier fabrics
it's recommended to use # 80/12 - #90/14 needles.
Choose the thread for your work, according to the style that you want
for the end result. It might be black, to immitate a charcoal sketch, or
any hue of brown to immitate sepia, or blue to immitate ink, or any other
color that you like. |
| Step Six: Embroider the design. You should get the following
result: The first photo below shows the design with the jump stitches and
the second one shows the design after the jump stitches were removed. |
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| We have a variety of one color designs on our site, such as Angel
Set I, Angels
Curtain Set, Notes
and Instruments Sets, Chinese
Dragons, and others. All these designs are simple and perfect
for a beginner. More experienced embroiderers also like these one-color
designs because they give a lot of creative possibilities. You can see
works of some of our customers in Works
of Our Customers Gallery.
Designs that have up to three colors are all considered to be suitable
for embroiderers just starting in the photo-stitch tennique. Such designs
include Red
Hat Set, Red
Hat, Girl,
and Black-and-White famous people portraits, for example, Ludwig
van Beethoven, William
Shakespeare, Chief
Sitting Bull, and many others, which you can find in the Famous
People section. |
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| For Homework, we offer you to embroider a portrait of Pope John Paul
II, which has 3 colors. The colors that we suggest in the color card are
black, gray and white, which gives the effect of a black and white photo.
If you like to experiment, you can try dark brown, light brown and beige
instead. We recommend to use white or cream fabric. |
For small hoop:
Size: 70 x 99 mm (3.2" x 3.9")
Stitches: 6793
Colors: 3
For large hoop:
Size 115.5 x 175 mm (5" x 6")
Stitches: 33091
Colors: 3
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| After embroidering the design, you should get a result similar to the
one below or better. |
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Most 3-color portraits in our gallery of famous
people are done in the same way. Please also check out the Works
of our Customers section, where you will find interesting ideas and
photos which our customers have kindly sent us.
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| To help us to improve this tutorial please don't hesitate to ask questions. |
| Our next lesson will involve
more complicated multi colored designs. |
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Other Lessons: Lesson
II, Lesson III, Lesson
IV
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