Free Standing Christmas Ornament and Water Soluable Stabilizer

It's the season to work on fun Christmas themed projects!   This week, I decided to make a lovely Christmas ornament for my tree.

This item is free standing embroidery.  Regular embroidery is fancy stitching on fabric.  Free standing embroidery is fancy stitching without the fabric.  The designs have to be specially created to make this work.  I've done some of this before, with butterflies.  This design from Embroidery Library is called the carnival Christmas ornament.  It comes in a small enough size that it can be made with just a 100 mm square hoop.

While making the free standing embroidery, a stabilizer must be used to hold the stitches together during construction.  The idea is to make the stabilizer go away afterwards.  This is done with a water soluble stabilizer.  When you are done, you just was it away.  I've been using Sulky Ultra Solvy, a heavyweight plastic like material.  However, I've been having trouble with this material tearing when dense designs punch too many needle holes in it.  At the Houston International Quilt Festival, I picked up a new kind of water soluble stabilizer that I was hoping would work much better.

 This is Embellish Rise-Away Mesh, brought to you by the fine folks at RNK Distributing.

I tried using just a single layer of the mesh for the ornament.  It didn't work well.  The stabilizer distorts quite a bit when put under too much stress.

However, unlike the needle hole problem, this can be fixed by using two layers of the stabilizer.  I think a single layer would be fine for free standing lace, but the denser free standing embroidery does a lot better with two, and this design stitched out perfectly.

My machines are still busy, so come back next week for more fun with a sewing machine (or two)!