Behind the seams | sewing tartan embroidery from the ugly side
As previously stated somewhere, sewing straight lines is one of the fastest ways to sew. Turning your panel around and around slows you down.
I'm on the last panel for the tartan car coat now and I am so bored of the embroidery. So of course I want to speed up everything. My technique to create the same embroidery pattern as AC just uses the straight lines as much as freaking possible. It does not try to even worry about maintaining stretch in the jersey fabric for this hugely oversized garment, which I don't think you would ever want it to stretch any more anyway. Just get the runners going on the straight stitch as much as possible. So I go like by line methodically in all directions - vertical, horizontal, diagonal one way, diagonal the other way. It works extremely well where you get very long lines to sew. Which happens enough to make this technique worth my time.
Where I now see a problem (which is not really) is the diagonals. The long lines are frequently, not always, broken up those large un-painted squares. Which means you need to flip the panel and knot off and start again = time consuming.
Ok it's not a problem actually. Because of the many many knots that are created in the process, it creates stability in the garment. Which I believe is really good for the next phase - beading the heck out of those large un-painted squares.
But the way to speed up stitching the diagonals, or any direction really, is by mostly working from the reverse (behind/messy/ugly/inside/wrong side) side of the panel. You need the front side to know where the stitches go, but you fix it all up from the behind. You don't worry about the taut of the thread while stitching; you just get the positions correct, then you pull it taut from behind. This works real good because you hold both start/finish of the thread with both hands to really, really quickly create a perfect tension of the thread and it's very easy to see what the thread is doing if it's not behaving as required. (Knots start from and finish on the behind side).
Tartan and straight stitches are not rocket science. You just need to get the stitches on and finished with a good tension...one that looks good, lies flat. That's the key to embroidering this. It's just straight lines, lots of them. It gets boring because you have to lay those straight stitches on a very grid/straight line layout. It's not like free hand straight stitching on appliqué with organic shapes. It's just like after line of bla bla. Worth it for the effect tho.
Which reminds me...I was reminded of how long a company such as AC takes to come up with a texture they will present as part of their collection. Heaps and heaps of swatches get made, and heaps and heaps of them don't make it onto their collection. This is why there is art on their garments. The experimenting and refining is a real labour. This is why home doers frequently don't match up or come anywhere near close to the beauty and finesse that ac present when it comes to design choices. And that is why I frequently go straight to re making things they've already presented, or modify only slightly.
Strangely modern people who are apparently enlightened more than ever before accept widely this universe is accidental and then somehow marvel at the intricacies of art in nature as though no one put any thought to it, then themselves are intrinsically driven by beauty..............
