Couching 101

One of the funnest Craftsy classes I've taken was Stupendous Stitching with Carol Ann Waugh. (Yes, I know 'funnest' isn't a word, but I feel it's appropriate and after all this is my post so I'm using it.) (So there!)

Here is the piece that I made:

This piece is about 12"x18" and I enjoyed every step of making it. I knew I wanted to do another one, but what would I do with it? I know!...I'll put one in my office at work. Currently I have a bulletin board covered with fabric so why not make one big enough to cover it? The size: 16"x50". Wow. That's big.

I bought a batik that fades from medium to light blue. Good. I know I can live with that day in and day out (face it; I spend more waking hours at work than anywhere else so I better like love it). So I cut it to the right height, but find it's not wide enough. In my stash there's another batik I love and add it to the ends. One side is a wider strip than the other because symmetry is not my thing. And very importantly; I back the entire piece with fusible interfacing. That is very important whenever you are couching or using decorative stitches. I chose a medium weight fusible because the finished project is going to cover a bulletin board so it needs good body.

Now for the cords and threads! Here I rub my little hands together because I'm a thread junkie. I love all of the colors and things you can do with them. Proof:

I went with the ball of sari silk first. Believe it or not, I found it at Anthropologie while Christmas shopping. Since the piece is so wide, I laid out the silk in a design that I liked and then used a chalk pencil to outline the flow. I thought this would help me since the piece is so big. It also helped ensure that my rounded sections wouldn't have sharp angles.

 
Next I put on the couching foot. In this case I used a Bernina Foot 21 which is called a Braiding Foot. The cord feeds into the foot and there is a groove underneath so that the foot can flow over the cord.

Now I needed to decide what thread to use. If I used a color, the thread would be visible. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that; it would be a design element. Because the colors in this silk are so gorgeous, I went with monofilament so that the stitches wouldn't be seen.

Next I whipped out a handy dandy quilt sandwich so I could get the width of the zigzag stitch just right before I stitched on my good batik. It needs to zig on the left of the silk and zag on the right i.e., not in the silk. I loosened my tension a bit and was ready to get started.

I rolled up the fabric in my lap and had the ball of silk in my lap as well.

3-2-1 Go! And off I went. Things were going quite well. Just let the feed dogs do their job and pull the fabric along. 

Aaaahhhh! What's this; bunching! That shouldn't happen. I cut the thread and tried it again but to no avail. Yep; that's bunching. What the heck is  wrong I ask myself.  Hmmm I responded. Upon further pondering I discovered the problem. The beautiful silk is so loosely twisted that some of it was going up over where it should be feeding in. As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words so take a look:

See what I mean? Now that I knew what the problem was, I could control the feed into the foot and all was well with the world once again.

After that was all sewn on, I chose a couple other cords and decided to stitch them on with the monofilament as well.  Here's how it looks after all of the couching (the color is hard to photograph, so sorry about that).

That's it for Part I. Next comes the addition of decorative stitches. This is fun because I get to use some more of my thread stash (more rubbing together of my little hands). I'll be sure to share so stay tuned!