Creative articles about sewing

Decorate a cushion with a children’s drawing – use hopper foot #9

I wanted to decorate a cushion with a children’s drawing with the use of Hopper foot #9! In this blogpost I tell you how I started it and how I made it.

Decorate a cushion with hopper foot #9

Hopper foot #9 has so many ways of using it. What I want to do is called threadsketching or free motion embroidery (FME).

This technique is is the art of drawing with a sewing machine, whether you sew over a line, or you do it all free hand. It is really meant to have a unstable line. To accentuate your line more or less, you can choose how many times you sew along that line. It gives your work a nice structure to sew with different colors over the same line as well.

All you need is the ability to be able to lower your machine’s feed dogs and attach a darning foot to the machine and you can start to try.

Watch this tutorial to find out about the hopper foot #9

I asked some children to draw my portrait. It was so much fun to see the different faces and I knew I could use these drawings for decoration.

 For my cushion I chose Maxime’s drawing, the upper left one.

The pencil drawn lines were not very clear, so I copied the drawing in Corel Draw. It is the drawing software, included when purchasing embroidery software BERNINA Designer Plus. It’s very interesting to have it.

This is the new drawing with a clear contrast:

Then I copied it to water soluble fabric. It’s easy to trace it when attaching the sheet to the window. The pen I used was a blue roller pen. Be sure to take a water soluble marking pen.

What else was needed?

  • Prewashed fabric for a cushion
  • A scrap of fabric for the face bigger than the size of the embroidery hoop
  • Mettler Seralon sewing thread in the colors you wish to sew.
  • An embroidery hoop (a standard one that you would use for hand embroidery, or one from your embroidery machine) with at least an inch extra space around the drawing.
  • Water soluble stabilizer (size a bit bigger than the drawing).
  • Decovil stabilizer bigger than the embroidery hoop. It is quite firm, when you’re more experienced with this technique, you can use other material or fabric to stabilize.
  • Think of bobbin thread in the same color of you sewing thread.

Think of disengaging the feed dogs for this technique. For your first try, it is useful to sew at a lower speed.

 

And I start to decorate a cushion with a children’s drawing:

I overlock the fabric for the cushion with the BERNINA overlocker L 460.

I pin the fabric for the face on top of the fabric for the cushion. On the back side I iron the Decovil stabilizer on the place where I will sew the face. On top of the fabric for the face, I pin the water soluble stabilizer with the drawing. The 4 layers must be hooped in the embroidery hoop.

Check if you switched off the feed dogs?

The hopper foot #9 is attached on the BERNINA 710 (a very comfortable machine in the 7-serie) and I start sewing. I move the hoop up and down, left and right to follow the lines of the drawing. Sometimes, it is easy to turn your drawing upside down.

I can cut away the water soluble stabilizer after finishing all lines.

Decorate a cushion with a children's drawing

Check all sewn lines. Is your result satisfying? I found a partially forgotten line on the forehead.

Decorate a cushion with a children's drawing

Is your drawing ready? Wash away the remaining stabilizer. If you took a lightweight kind of water soluble stabilizer, you will be able to remove the rest with steam.

Now the children’s drawing is ready. You could fill some areas with textile pens, if you’d wish to.

Decorate a cushion with a children's drawing

The only thing left is to finish the cushion with the children’s drawing.

Don’t you think it is funny? I like the way it turned out. What a nice memory of a lovely children’s drawing. I’m especially glad with the huge smile Maxime gave me.

Decorate a cushion with a children's drawingA cushion decorated with a children’s drawing.

Free sewing tutorial: Decorate a cushion with a children’s drawing

This blogpost ‘Decorate a cushion with a children’s drawing – use hopper foot #9’ was probably helpful for a nice decoration in your home.

Related content you may be interested in

Comments of this post

0 Responses

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.

Required fields are marked *

Dear BERNINA Blog readers,

if you want to publish pictures via the comment function, please log in to the blog first. Click here to sign in.

You haven't registered for the BERNINA blog yet? Click here to create your free account.

Thank you very much

Your BERNINA Blog Team