Free Motion Script Session 4: Stitching Decorative Capital Letters and Completing the First Pass

So my machine is loaded up with my medium dark gray thread. Matching thread is in the bobbin, so I don't have to worry about my tension being absolutely perfect. I don't have to risk having one color come up through the surface, or be pulled down through the surface. Surprisingly enough, I don't have my feed dogs lowered. I almost never lower my feed dogs when I free motion quilt, so they're not lowered right now, and I'm ready to stitch. So the very first thing I'm gonna do is just do my basic capital letter W. I'm gonna bring up my bobbin thread so that I have an attractive knot. And then I'm going to start stitching. And because I'm going to have a swirl here, I want to get rid of this thread so I don't stitch over it. Okay. So that is a single pass of the capital letter W. Generally speaking for me when I'm doing this, about nine times out of 10, I'm going to do at least two passes, sometimes three, sometimes four passes. Capital letters, or the letters that are at the beginning of a word, I tend to do the four times on, and I may not do that many times on the rest, but you'll see in a few minutes why I do this. Somebody said once, well why don't you just use a thicker thread, so you don't have to go over it so many times? Well, I like it to be different widths. I don't like it all to be the same width, for a couple of reasons. I don't want anybody to look at this and go, oh she must have done that on her embroidery machine. No, I'm doing this free motion, and I'm gonna do it slightly differently than the next time I do a W. I want it to look like it was artistically made by a human, not made by a machine, even though it's machine quilting. So I can go ahead and remove these pins. I've got my basic positioning, and now I'm going to be moving backwards. Now somebody said, "Ah, I don't know "if I can write backwards." Well, you're no longer writing. Right now what you're doing is tracing, so it doesn't matter if the W is moving backwards or not. So I put my needle back at the end of my stitch line, and I'm simply going to double over and stay on that line as much as I possibly can. I'll get rid of this thread here, and normally you wouldn't have that thread, but I pulled the quilt out from underneath the machine to show you the stitching, and so I have some excess thread there. So I'm simply gonna go back over it on or as close to being on the line that I stitched the first time as I can get it, without torturing myself. So now it's thicker, so we can see it more. We can also see areas where I did not stay directly on the line, right here, and right here, and right here. I don't care. And hopefully you won't care either because you'll see later that it adds to the interest of the writing. At this point, I'm gonna go ahead and add my secondary lines anywhere where I plan on thickening up the letter. And so I'm gonna come in here, and thicken at the beginning of this swirl, and you'll see what I mean in just a moment. And then I'm gonna thicken this portion of the swirl. Okay. So I've got a thick area right here. So you see the outline here, and here you see the outline of where I'm going to be filling in basically. And I'm gonna come here, and I'm gonna thicken in, right there at the bottom of the W. And because I did it on the right hand side, I'm gonna do it on the right hand side of this other half of the W also, just kind of being consistent. And I'm gonna come over here and add... Oops, my thread broke. But I'm gonna come over here and add over here again too. You can see here on this right hand side of the W, my line is just a little bit thickened. It's pulled away from the original line by maybe a 16th of an inch, and that's going to add some thickness there, and give some weight or body to that side of the W. The nice thing is, is that if my thread breaks during this process, it doesn't really matter, because I'm going over this so many times. I don't even need to backstitch again. So I'm gonna thicken up my curly Qs. Okay. So that was my third pass, and now I'm going to thicken up the areas, or fill in the areas that I've thickened up, and I'm gonna do that by stitching back and forth rather quickly, and basically scribbling to fill them in. So you can see this back and forth movement. I'm just scribbling to fill it in. And when it's full, then I'm going to be going in and slowly catching those edges on both sides, and making sure that the edges are neat and tidy. And once they're neat and tidy, I can move on to the next portion and make sure that it's neat and tidy. And any place where I've got a line that did not sit on top of the line before, I will thicken up ever so lightly to join together those two lines that aren't sitting right on top of each other. So back and forth to thicken in an area where I did the outline. Just to fill that area in. It's a little bit messy in the beginning, and then I go back in and I tighten up those outlines, and make it neat and tidy. And you can see how I adjust my speed. I actually slow down when I need to be more exact, and I speed up when I'm doing a lot of fill in. Now I'm moving onto the next section. I'm just slowly going back and forth to thicken up that line. And you can see how pretty that's turning out. So slow movements back and forth, thickening up, filling in between outlines, if there's outlines. Otherwise it's just tightening up anything that overlapped. More fill in. Now we're getting to this final portion where we're doing more fill in again. So we're gonna be doing the back and forth. And then tidying up the edges. And we're done. And we have this wonderful, wonderful, monogrammed basically, machine quilted, capital letter W. Now I like to add flourishes along with this, and so I can come in here and really doll this up some more if I want to, and I'll show you how to do that, but why I want you to understand is that as we stitch this, we're building in some poof. So we've got some poof here, and we've got some poof in here, poof in here, and in poof in here. If we add so much quilting in here that is close to this W, it'll start pulling the quilt in, and pulling the quilt in, and pulling it in, and then we'll end up with kind of a ruffly area out here, and that will require us to do heavily quilted negative space, so don't overdo it. Don't start to buckle up the rest of your quilt, and if you notice it buckling up, then maybe that's time to stop. But I'm gonna show you what I mean by little flourishes, and I'm gonna come here to the top of the swirl of this side of the W. And I'm going to add a little loop de loop swirly that moves in the opposite direction. Like so. So we've added that little bit of whimsy to it. And then I'm going to come over here to the other side, and because it's the beginning of the letter, I'm gonna add two over here. Just the one over there, but I'll do two over here. A small one here. And then I'll do a larger one over here. And now we have an extremely fancy capital letter W. And there we go, look how gorgeous. So a really cool way to add some artistry, some flourish, some whimsy to a piece by making up your own little calligraphy type, or fancy stitched alphabet or lettering. So now we're gonna move on to our sentiment. We're gonna do some actual writing. And we've marked our piece, and we have our piece written out here if we need some guidance, and we're going to go ahead and jump in and start stitching. We're going to do what's called traveling between words, which means we're going to knot off, and then move the machine to where we want the next word to start, and then we'll knot off again, and start the next word. So our W is quite large. We just practiced that W, so we should have no problem with it at all. And I would practice writing this probably two or three times at least, until you felt really, really comfortable with it. Okay, so I've just knotted off, which means that I simply backstitched a little bit, just like you would backstitch if you were sewing a garment or something like that, and I'm going to lift up and I'm going to travel. So I'm going to, this is the line I'm stitching on up here, and I want to make sure that the letters here look like they belong to this word, so I'm going to kind of crouch it in there with that W. Backstitch a little bit so that I can knot off, lift up so that I can go to where I need to go. Knot off again. Try not to hook on my threads. Now you can instantly see that I have not left myself room for my you, and I'm not gonna panic, because I know that I've got plenty of room here. I'm simply going to make some adjustments. So my next line that I'm writing on is right here. So now I know I'm gonna have to fit you, stand, and be on this line. Not a big deal. Knotting off, lifting up, and moving to where I want to start. Crossing my T while I'm there at it. Knotting off and traveling again. Again with my T, making sure that I cross it as I'm making the T. I'm gonna go ahead and clip that thread, so it's not in my way. Backstitching, traveling. Backstitching and traveling. Now I know I've got a lot of room here, and I didn't do any flourishing in there, but I am gonna add a little flourish to the end of this. I'm ending with the letter E which can be mistaken as part of a flourish if I don't move that flourish away enough, so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna move my flourish up and away before I start doing any type of swirling about. So I'm gonna move away first, and then I'm gonna put a large swirl, and a smaller swirl, and a small swirl. So I've added this little flourish here. And then I'm gonna come right over here, and put the author of the quote, which is Rumi, and I'm gonna do it smaller than the rest of my writing. And add a flourish as I dot the I. So now I've got a flourish moving this direction and a flourish moving in that direction. So let's see what we've done here. We'll give it a little bit of a critique, and decide what we're gonna do to emphasize what's already taking place. We'll clip our threads, because we get caught up on them, and that's no fun. Okay. Remove our pins, we don't need them. At this point I check to make sure that I spelled things correctly, because believe it or not, I have misspelled things, and you don't want to go in there and add all the flourishes and thicken up, and go over again, and then find out later that you've made mistakes that you don't really, or aren't really capable of pulling out at this point. Okay. So we say wherever you stand, be the soul of that place. It looks good, the Rumi is smaller, I like the way that looks. I like the way the W is taking up the space here, and the Rumi is sort of balancing it out over here. I like this little swirl, and I like those too. So all in all, I think it's looking really good. So now we're ready to make any additional passes. We'll start thickening up lines, and adding any flourishes that we need to do.