Here's... Jackie Cardy!

These are wonderful machine embroidered brooches I purchased on Etsy earlier this year and thus began my acquaintance with Jackie Cardy, a marvelously talented embroiderer from Lancashire, England, UK. Her blog, DogDaisyChains, is a charming combination of things textile, gardening, pets, life in the country, and the things that only happen to Jackie (or so she thinks!). She writes articles on machine embroidery for the likes of Workshop on the Web (aka WOW) and Fibre & Stitch, so you know she is good at what she does. Also, she has done City & Guilds in embroidery, achieving a Highly Commended in the Awards for Excellence, and exhibits all over Britain. If you haven't come across her before, I suggest that you visit her blog, her Flickr, and her Etsy. Click on the photo above to see a much nicer photo on Jackie's Flickr of the brooch on the right.

Jackie finds it flattering and creepy at the same time to be spotlighted in someone's blog, so I'll send her an email and let her know before I publish this. I just wanted to make sure that anyone who reads my blog has a chance to become acquainted with her work. Buying those two lovely brooches from her inspired me to finally try my wings at some machine embroidery of my own.

I signed up for a fabric ATC swap on one of my groups, TreasureArtTrends. Here's an in-progress photo. I had to make 6 ATCs and send in 5 to get 5 back. The theme was summer. So I grabbed a piece of white cotton fabric from my stash and decided to try several new things at once. I watered down some acrylic paints to paint my motifs. These are Adirondack Daubers with colors watered-down but otherwise straight from the bottle.

I smooshed the lemonade yellow and citrus green onto the fabric to make the flowers and used a darker green (lettuce, I think) to make the leaves, then filled in the rest with a purply pink on a brush to make the background.

Here's a not very good photo of the result. As you can see, I used a purple (#40 weight) thread on top and in the bobbin to do some free-motion embroidery on it to define petals for the flowers and then centered each of them by spiraling out from where they met in the middle to make a center. I changed to a dark pink on top and fuchsia in the bobbin to free-motion in between the flowers. Not very expertly, I'm afraid, as I think that the height of my machine is not right for me to do this comfortably, which seems to be the key to doing free-motion quilting and embroidery properly.

I used a thin layer of quilt batting and a piece of tear away stabilizer on the back. I wanted the piece to be puffy and define the flowers better so I dug until I found a piece of thin batting that had been used as padding for a book that had been sent to me. (I couldn't find it when it was time to send the altered book on to the next person, but it turned up later, as you can see. Anyway, that's why I can't say what batting it is.) I cut a piece of stabilizer and put it through my inkjet printer to add the word 'Summer' to the front and stitched it on with a wheelbarrow charm. I printed out my contact info on another piece of stabilizer and stitched it to the back, then stitched between them and cut them apart to send along.

This was a way fun project and Jackie is the one who gave me the confidence to try it! Thanks, Jackie!