A two-stage transfer

Last Monday at our weekly embroidery group a friend brought a kit which she’d been given for Christmas; it was a Quaker Tapestry kit. She’d got everything hooped up and was about to start, and she explained the first thing was to do stem stitch on the back of the work so that there would be backstitch on the front. We were all a bit puzzled about this, and I asked why she didn’t simply work backstitch on the front of the work. She wasn’t absolutely sure herself but said she was just following the Quaker Tapestry Stitch Guide which came with the kit. Several of us had a look at it and after a while we worked out why this was the first step: it was part of the Quaker Tapestry transfer method. I was intrigued and that afternoon bought a copy of the Stitch Guide myself (which fortunately could be obtained without having to buy a kit).

The Quaker Tapestry Stitch Guide

The trouble with the Quaker Tapestry and its kit offspring from a transfer point of view is that pretty much none of the usual methods work on the specially-woven woollen fabric they use. It’s too thick for a lightbox transfer, too textured for prick & pounce (even if the variegated colour didn’t make it difficult to work out what shade of pounce to use in the first place) – tacking the design on through a layer of tissue paper would probably work, but pulling every last bit of tissue paper out from under the tacking without damaging or at least fluffing the fabric would be challenging. So the Quaker Tapestry people came up with a method that as far as I know is unique to them. And it so happens that it looks to me like a jolly good method for transferring designs onto other “difficult” fabrics – dark, thick, textured or a combination of the three. I decided to have a go myself to see whether I liked it.

I didn’t want to use anything too big, so I fell back on my trusted little Quatrefoil. Wouldn’t it look rather rich and luxurious done on burgundy dupion? As this fabric is both dark and textured, it would make the perfect trial piece for this transfer method.

The not-easy-to-transfer-on fabric

The first step is to transfer the design to your backing fabric, which you then hoop up with your main fabric. A few things things to bear in mind: firstly, as you’re working on the back of the fabric the transfer needs to be a mirror image of the design. Not a problem here as the Quatrefoil is pretty much symmetrical, but especially important to remember if there is any lettering in the design! Secondly, when you hoop up do so with the backing fabric facing you, to make sure you get the transferred design centred in the hoop. And thirdly, make sure the backing fabric is relatively densely woven, for example a medium-weight calico. I used a very open Egyptian muslin and regretted it because it makes it difficult to place your stitches accurately. (By the way, I am using these terms in the British sense; British calico is American muslin, and British muslin I think is American mousseline.)

The design transferred to the backing Mounting the two pieces of fabric, centring the back The front of the fabric, without transfer

The Stitch Guide tells you to fasten on with a knot at the front of the work (that is to say, the side you are working on as you transfer the design, which is actually the back), taking the needle down right at the beginning of a design line. You then come up a stitch length further along the line – this in effect makes your first backstitch on the right side of the fabric. You then go down a stitch length further, and come up again where you came up the first time. This makes the second backstitch on the right side of the fabric, but also sets you up for your line of stem stitch on the backing side.

You need to remember this “extra” stitch at the beginning of every new line, but you soon get used to that. I found it helpful to think not of how neat (or not) my stem stitch was looking, but of what the backstitch on the other side of the fabric was doing. Sometimes, especially on corners, the stem stitch will look quite ragged, and the thing is not to get hung up on that as long as the backstitch on the other side is correct. Keeping your mind on the unseen backstitch (quite apart from providing some good mental exercise) helps when you need to move from one design line to another, to make sure the whole line is covered on the right side of the fabric.

Work stem stitch on the back The backstitch outline on the front

As I was going to stitch this little flower in Splendor silks, I used a single strand of the lightest colour for this transfer. The Quaker Tapestry Stitch Guide says you should use whatever colour will be used on the front, so that the transferred design shows the correct colours; mainly, I assume, so that the design lines are more easily hidden in the finished embroidery – if a little does peep through it won’t be so noticeable – but as an added bonus it would help the stitcher pick the right colour for the various parts without having to refer to the instructions every time. Still, I felt that would be overkill in a design as small and simple as this, and anyway as I was just quickly trying out the method I wanted to keep it as simple as possible.

The silks I picked for the design; the lightest colour only would be used for the outline An outline in the correct colours

Looking at the emerging design lines, however, I wondered what would happen on the parts that were going to be outlined in split stitch. It might be rather difficult to work a nice even line of split stitch on top of the backstitch. Ideally what my transfer produced would be as close to paint or ink lines as possible, and as unintrusive to the stitching. An unattainable ideal from the very nature of things – thread is never going to be as flat as paint – but would a finer thread be the answer? I switched to Gütermann sewing thread and it definitely does make a difference: the teal arrow shows the outline done in one strand of silk, the orange arrow points to a part done in sewing thread. (The lilac arrow points to one of a couple of places where there is room for improvement in my stitch placement; a denser backing fabric – see above – would help.)

Gütermann sewing thread for thinner lines Thinner and thicker lines, and a few irregularities

I can see myself using this method for goldwork on a silk dupion background, using the sewing threads normally used for couching the metal threads and wires: dark yellow where there is going to be gold, light grey for silver, dark orange for copper. Or perhaps for stitching on velvet or other difficult-to-transfer-onto fabrics. A useful addition to my stitching arsenal!

Transferring again

Before our little family holiday to The Netherlands my evenings (and any other time off-duty) seemed to consist mostly of kits! Workshop kits, kits to be sold through the website or at fairs, the kitchen table was full of bits of kits. By the time we drove off to catch the ferry at Harwich the dining table was piled with 53 complete kits, 12 just waiting for my LNS to get some 2oz wadding in, and 30 ready to be assembled from my collection of parts.

Some of the kits being assembled

One of the things that needed doing for some of the kits – the Wildflower Garden and the two Shisha ones – was transferring designs onto the pieces of light blue or pale yellow cotton, so my trusty lightbox was taken out of the padded envelope in which it resides most of the time.

Getting ready to transfer All done!

As I was transferring the kit designs, I thought I’d try the lightbox on a piece of wine-red dupion fabric bought some time ago for a goldwork design I had in mind. Dark fabrics aren’t ideal for use with a lightbox – much better to use the prick & pounce method, but I’m still feeling a little apprehensive about that. So why not give the lightbox a go, with a white gel pen? I grabbed the Jacobean goldwork design from the pile of projects-in-some-sort-of-progress and set the lightbox to full strength.

Well, it worked. I wouldn’t want to use it for a very detailed design, but for this fairly simple flower, where it didn’t matter too much if a stem or leaf was copied slightly off the original lines it just was fine, and the white showed up better than I had expected, without any bleeding! (The lines don’t show up very well on the thumbnail, but they do on the full-sixed photograph; even then, unfortunately, the picture doesn’t really capture the lovely dark red colour.)

The Jacobean goldwork design in white pen on dark red dupion

But now I’m facing a dilemma: on which fabric am I going to do the Jacobean goldwork flower, my original cream dupion, or this lovely rich burgundy? Red is not such a good background when you’re including copper, and I have rather set my heart on doing the gold/silver/copper shading, so I think I’ll stick with the cream. Anyway, I promised to do a goldwork demonstration at the next Church Craft Fair in November, so perhaps the red dupion will be useful for that. It certainly looks rich and splendid enough to distract people’s attention from any mistakes I may be making in the goldwork smiley.

Getting to grips with cats

Some time ago I set out to transfer Kelly Fletcher’s Cats on a Wall design to my chosen fabric, a piece of 40ct Zweigart Newcastle linen in the colour Flax, a stony sort of shade. Unfortunately this was before I had received or even ordered my lovely iron-on pens, or the promising-looking carbon transfer paper I got from Sublime stitching at the same time. Other, more traditional methods were called for.

Newcastle linen and Splendor silks for the Cats on a Wall

Tracing against a well-lit window (the poor stitcher’s version of a lightbox) turned out to be difficult because of the colour of the fabric – even with the sun right behind it, the lines of the design didn’t show up very clearly. Moreover, both the pencil and the micron pen I tried using sometimes got caught in the holes and skipped. This may be because at 40ct the Newcastle is a relatively low count compared to the Gander and Kingston linens, or possibly because it’s a fabric meant for counted thread work; there are linens specifically intended for freestyle embroidery which have a lower count but plumper fabric threads so that they present a nice full surface instead of visible holes to trap pencils.

Would prick & pounce have worked? It may have been lack of courage that kept me from trying (I have all the wherewithal for it – pricking pen & pad, pounce powder, little round felt pouncy thing – but as yet haven’t used it), but I like to think it was because I could see it wouldn’t work very well on this relatively open weave. I did try covering the back of the printed design with 2B pencil, then placing it over the fabric and tracing along the lines at the front (a sort of make-shift carbon paper which I’m sure most people have used at some time or other to copy things), but it left no clear line. Perhaps it’s simply not the right fabric for these sort of transfer methods!

In a last-ditch attempt I went over the filling stitches on the printed design in black pen to make them thicker, so they would be easier to see through the fabric as I went back to the well-lit window method. It was better, but still not altogether successful. Finally I had to ink in some of the filling stitches “free hand” by looking at the printed design and copying the lines by eye, so they are not quite as regular as intended by the designer. I also managed to get the outline of one of the stones in the wall wrong – I may have to cover that up with a single strand of silk in the colour of the linen! Even so, at least it’s been transferred and is now ready to go.

The Cats transferred to the Newcastle linen

And then I decided that I really want to do the Tree of Life first. Or the Leaves. Or the Toadstools. Or the Daisy-and-Bumblebee…