Original text by Marina Belova
I decided to embroider a postcard. I somehow don't have the mood for a Christmas postcard — perhaps, the reason is that I haven't found a proper design. But I stumbled upon a design for a Valentine's Day postcard instead. Here's a step-by-step report of me making it.
This is how the drawing looked like after some manipulations over the size (the original image came from an open source):
I settled upon 20.5x20.5 cm.
Here is the design preview:
It has altogether 7 colors: 6 for the hearts and the 7th for the stitch along the perimeter: I need this stitch because I'll trim to it.
I set a low density: 0.7–0.9 mm. I also removed the underlay. All connector stitches between the segments and the outlines were hidden on the edges of the objects and were made with running stitches. The stitch length was no less than 3 mm. I drew the tie-offs manually on hearts and inserted them automatically on letters. You can see the result in the photo below.
Naturally, I embroidered on paper. Read here on how to make a design for the embroidery on paper.
I chose the handmade paper, not a heavyweight variety but with long fibers that can be seen with the naked eye.
I chose the threads of the same thickness (#40) but of different structure: rayon, polyester, metallic.
The first thing I did was to frame a cut-away stabilizer.
Then I sprinkled it with temporary spray adhesive and stuck the paper to it:
I must point out that this adhesive is bad for securing the paper on the paper. They unstuck practically right away. I thought of that in advance, therefore, the first thing in my embroidery sequence was an outline that stitched the base of my postcard to the interfacing material.
Having embroidered the squares, I trimmed the extra paper along the perimeter using scissors:
Now I could embroider safely – nothing would shift.
The design was embroidered rather quickly – hardly surprising as it only had 6105 stitches. The embroidery went well, the thread laid smooth, the paper didn't become perforated.
This is the embroidery still in the hoop but (almost) without the connector stitches:
After that I unhooped my semi-finished product and trimmed it along the outline:
This is how the wrong side looks like:
One should notice the tie-offs. If I wasn't lazy and drew them manually everywhere and not only on the hearts, the wrong side of my embroidery would be clean and I wouldn't need to cover it. But I decided to automatically insert tie-offs; the only thing I did was to increase the stitch length compared to the default one in my editor.
In the photo above you can see the ugly knots almost everywhere in the letters, and these are not easy to get rid of.
So the ready postcard looks like this:
The only thing left is to glue some interesting-looking paper to the inside, write something and give as a present.