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.