New Year – New Machine

First of all although a little belatedly, Happy New Year! I hope you are all rested and refreshed and raring to go in 2022! I don’t want to sound like a complete misery but I’m always pleased to get back to a normal life as soon as the decorations are down. This year particularly so because, as a Brand Ambassador for Husqvarna Viking I’ve been loaned a top of the range Epic 2 embroidery machine. It arrived 3 days ago and has hardly been idle since then. It’s so exciting getting to know what this beast is capable of and I am really impressed with what I’ve discovered so far. It’s early days and I’ve only tried the tip of the iceberg but I hoped you’d be interested to see my first forays.

One of the first designs I chose to try out was the lovely big fern ‘line drawing’ you can see details of above. It’s already built into the design library of the machine. I’ve worked it onto a digitally printed pastel drawing of mine which I had partially free motion quilted. I chose the outline fern because it gave me potential to add paint in the leaf shapes – you know how much I like to add a bit of paint! I’ve used Jacquard Lumiere paint in metallic olive gold for this.

The daffodil and tulip piece above and to the right is another of the built in designs which looked very sketchy and hand drawn – just like a pen drawing I might have made in my sketchbook. I stitched this onto a scrap of a quilt Laura had chopped up to make purses. It already had quite a lot of linear quilting and digital embroidery but I chose a dark thread that would show over the top of the initial layers of pattern. The design was worked in a single colour of Madeira rayon thread but once the embroidery was finished I added colour to the blooms with Inktense pencils and water.

The leafy embroidered branch on the right is looking very plain right now but my plan is to add painted lemons – I’ll let you see if that turns out as I imagine it. It’s looking great in my head but I just have to make it happen on the fabric now!

Thanks for reading this today – hope you’ve enjoyed seeing how I’m keeping busy in a cold and dark January.

Bye for now,
Linda x