As promised, here is the peacock feather I was working on in my last post. During the process of rendering my design into fabric, I found that my stabilizer didn’t work as well as I had hoped.

What’s interesting is that there are so many variations to creating thread sketched pieces. I have options to finding something that works better. I don’t usually put backing fabrics on my pieces when I thread-sketch/paint. Sometimes the backside of my art quilts look messy, so adding the backing after the fact hides some of the ugly. I do use some sort of stabilizer which helps keep the fabric from shrinking up too much when you add the layers of stitches.

On this particular piece I used fusible fleece batting as the stabilizer. I don’t think I ever tried using fusible fleece before. What I realized is that this brand of fusible fleece is acrylic and the more I stitched the more grip (resistance) it created on the sewing machine bed. It was almost like the acrylic fibers were melting a bit from the friction. When you free-motion stitch, your fabrics need to move smoothly under the needle. If they don’t, you’re stitch lines won’t look as fluid. I’m happy with the final piece and I’m ready to ship it off to its new owner. This is, however, a reminder that there’s always lessons to learn and I should continue to experiment.