Embroidered Tesselations Part 2

I have been working for months on embroidering a complex image that fits the description of mathematical art.  I knew that it needed to be large to get good detail.  The largest single position hoop for the Husqvarna Epic sewing machine is 260 mm x 360 mm.   I've used this hoop for projects like the stuffed fish and had great success with it.  The next step in scaling up the image was to create the largest embroidery that this hoop could support.  It took about 2 weeks to produce a embroidery design that I thought was good enough for this project.

This design is very dense.  The entire circle is covered with one layer of stitching and sometimes more.  It needs a heavy fabric to support it.  I chose plain cotton duck canvas.

Cotton fabrics do stretch, not a good thing for a project like this, but there are ways to deal with the problem.  I used Floriani Heat n Sta stabilizer.  It is ironed on to the fabric and holds it tight.  I chose to use a second layer of regular tear away stabilizer under that.

To make sure everything stayed in place, some of the lines in the design were sewn before any of the stitches that show.  Here, the machine is just beginning to sew with colored threads.  Just as I was choosing colors, I was struck by inspiration and chose variegated thread rather than a solid thread.  This has the effect of emphasizing the direction of the stitches.  I carefully oriented the stitches in each of the fish to follow the symmetry of the design and this last minute choice makes that more obvious.

With all of the colored threads done, the design looks like this:

Now it's time to add the white and finally the black.

I was very pleased at how this turned out.  I though it was very acceptable, but I was still wanting to use the larger hoop to make the largest possible design.  Come back next week and learn about the tribulations in getting to the final finished design.

Embroidered Tesselations Part 1

It all began with a phone call from my aunt, the very talented quilter.  A mathematical artist was looking for an embroiderer to collaborate on a project.   Was I interested?   Life can take you done some interesting paths when you say yes at the right moment.

This was the image that my collaborator, Doug Dunham of Duluth, MN created.

You might recognize it as very similar to some images by the artist M.C. Escher, famous for images with mathematical foundations.  This is a tessellation, also sometimes called a tiling.  The fish shapes, all identical, completely cover the surface.   Wait...  all identical?  This can't be!  Some are large, many are small and they aren't all the same shape.

In fact, they are all the same shape if you see this not as a regular two dimensional circle, but rather the Poincare disk, a hyperbolic geometry, where the distance between two points depends on how close to the edge they are.  In fact, it's an infinite distance from the center to the edge.

The question asked whether this image could be rendered in embroidery in some pleasing way.  Making this work would require many days with Floriani Total Control, my embroidery design software.  It was also obvious from the beginning that with an image this detailed, the larger the embroidery could be made, the more details could be included.  I knew from the beginning that the Husqvarna Majestic Hoop, at 350mm x360mm was going to produce the best results.

Here's a version of the image in embroidery at 4"x4".  Not much detail is included.  As the fish get small towards the edge, there's no way to render them.  However, as a first crack at the problem, it wasn't bad.

Come back next week and see what can be done with a 260mm x 360 mm hoop.

Warm Coat Part 2

Last week, I was describing the coat I'm making for a winter trip to Baltimore.   Here's the coat, all complete and ready to go.

The coat has a lining of ripstop nylon to help it be windproof.  Fleece may be a very cozy fabric, but a strong wind will go right through it.

The coat is double breasted; there's a lot of overlap between the two front pieces.  There's a hidden button closure on the inside flap of the front.  It's exactly underneath the decorative button on the front.  

This coat also features a notched collar.  These are a bit tricky to get right, but fortunately, fleece is a very forgiving fabric.  If it was made from wool, then a steam iron can be used to make wool do just about anything.

Come back next week and see the project I've been working on for months.  It got invited to a major academic math meeting, which is why I'm headed north in the winter!

Warm Coat

I'm headed to Baltimore in January to show off one of my sewing projects.  You'll get to see that and the process of making it soon.  I know just how nasty Maryland can get in the winter and I need a warmer coat.  I have this lovely purple boiled wool sitting in my closet, earmarked for a warm winter coat.  I thought I even had a a pattern picked out, McCall 6800, the one I used to make this coat.  There's just one snag -- the sleeves.  After careful measurements, it turns out the sleeves aren't big enough.  That's not a problem with the green coat, where the fabric is a stretchy fleece, but with the wool it would be. This green coat looks warm, but it has the problem that neither the outer fabric nor the lining is particularly windproof.  It's great on a still night, but get a breeze and a windchill and it's not so warm.

It's certainly possible to modify a lot in a pattern, but my experience is that making two piece sleeves wider is pretty tricky and I certainly don't want to ruin the the wool.  It was time to start over and get a new plan.

I found this pattern, Vogue 9289.  (Fortunately, Vogue patterns were on sale that day.)  It's got two piece sleeves that are cut quite a bit wider. 

This sort of pattern isn't very efficient on the fabric, so there wasn't enough of the wool to make this work.  My local fabric store had literally no heavy, windproof fabric that I liked.   But, fleece was on sale.  I reasoned that maybe if the lining was windproof, the result would be reasonably warm.  (Yes, I know you loose some of the insulating properties of the fleece by doing it this way.)  

I picked an astronomical print for the coat.  It's got lots of planets and spiral galaxies -- perfect for someone like me!

For the lining, I chose ripstop nylon, a thin but very windproof fabric for the lining.  It's used for back packing tents and sometimes windbreakers, but I've never seen it used as a lining before.


Just cutting out the coat was a challenge.  Because the side front and side and back pieces are so wide, the fabric could not be folded and cut.  It had to be laid out on the floor and each piece individually cut.  I had just enough room in my living room to make this work.

Come back next week and see how it turned out!