Behind the Seams | Speeding Up Alabama Chanin Fur

This article is a copy from my old post: 

Basically it’s backstitch in repeated spirals. Google Alabama Chanin fur for beautiful photos.

Anything that speeds this up is welcome. These are techniques that I’ve found to help because they decrease effort and time I would rather use elsewhere.

What I noticed slows fur down & the remedy:

• Very small stitch length – make each stitch as long as acceptably possible. Alabama Chanin goes with 1/4 inch at most (6mm)

• Spirals that are too dense – spread them as much as acceptably possible while maintaining beauty.

• Knotting off….yikes. Double knotting off every single spiral while avoiding all the tails – double stitch the last stitch instead (run it over twice)

• Needing to thread your needle too frequently with new thread – instead use double length thread and double it through needle, where one end of the thread is loose, ie your needle could technically fall off (***). Backstitch is very thread consuming and fast to use up.

• Stitches where individual strands of embroidery floss are at different tension when stitched – use technique *** instead. Reason this works better is that when the thread is “enclosed” (needle can’t fall off thread) then the strands just don’t get sewn on in equal distance while going around in spirals. Something has to give therefore you get uneven tension of strands within individual stitches. Alabama Chanin uses four strands for backstitch usually which is a lot of potential unevenness. Using the *** technique solves this a lot. No need to fix tensions nearly every other stitch!

• Cutting every single thread after finishing spiral – instead use *** technique and then you will usually just pull the needle off instead.

• Tails tails tails everywhere you stitch getting in the way – can’t be avoided but the better way is to stitch randomly all over the panel rather than expanding from the same spot. Because if you expand from the same area it will always be densely full of tails. Ensure of course that the fabric layers sit evenly (eliminating any ripple effect by good positioning beforehand. More about this below).

• Thinking too hard about where the next spiral will go, how big etc – don’t think too hard. Experiment and a good way to do this is to do it all over your different panels. My techniques changed over many months/hours of this so it is better to spread out the differences over all the panels rather than have eg very dense spirals in one patch.

No Knots

Haven’t used a single knot in this ac fur/spirals technique but found that most often the back stitch will anchor the thread at start & finish. There is a way to kind of “entangle” the start & finish stitch among itself that makes it very difficult to pull out. This is best done with some trial and error but it is so simple to achieve. I actually began the no-knots technique by doing the first and last stitch over the same stitch twice, which was especially secure – but then eventually found that it wasn’t even necessary. As described previously it’s possible to entangle the first and last stitch among the thread using the regular backstitch so that there’s no need for knots at all. This seems to work for me roughly 75% of the time: even though you can entangle it, it’s sometimes not as secure as I would like it, so if it’s not secure enough I will do the second backstitch over the same stitch, or even just half of the final stitch. The concept is still the same; just to entangle the threads enough to stop it from coming out on it’s own. I usually just check the finish stitch using the blunt of my needle.

The first stitch is never an issue much to deliberately secure because it gets so entangled within the spiral. You will understand this especially when look at the wrong side of the embroidery.
Nevertheless this strategy saves heaps of time not knotting among all the tails. Plus I actually like the look better.

No Pins - Use Scattering of Initial Embroidery So You Don't Get Pricked.  (Obviously Start with a Few Pins).

A scattering of spirals on the panel. I did this by starting in the middle of the panel (I did initially use the ac method of “scattering pins” but it’s definitely more comfortable/versatile to work without pins. I would initially scatter the pins according to the ac method and then take them out when I added in the a spiral close enough to the pin). I added spirals beginning from the centre outwards in an approximate grid manner – being careful to straighten/smooth the two layers of fabric out when adding each new spiral. I pulled/smoothed outwards towards the seam any of the excess fabric. The result is that at the edge/seams the fabric doesn’t totally match (because they weren’t cut absolutely identically) but I have essentially eliminated any “rippling” effect of the layers that would have been caused by excess fabric unaligned. They will be trimmed off later during construction.

In my experience it is easier to work with infilling random spirals evenly all over the panel rather than creating an ongoing dense patch of fur/spirals. This is because a dense patch will always have more tails to flick out of the way.

This is a pencil skirt in the making with hand dyed floss. I love this shade on Asian/middle eastern skin tones especially.