7.2 Introduction to the sewing machine
In this lesson I'm going to show you the basics of using a sewing machine. I'm going to concentrate on how to do the stitching rather than threading up the machine as each machine it slightly different.
You can do stitching on collage using normal machine stitching such as straight stitch and zigzag with a normal sewing foot. This is good if you want straight lines and more rigid stitching.
However, the best type of machine embroidery is free motion embroidery. For this you will need to get a darning foot or embroidery foot for your machine.
Every machine has got its own attachments but I have put some links below to some of the more well known makes. (The price will depend on the machine that you have).
When doing free motion embroidery you need to lower the dog feed on your machine and you need to guide the paper or material yourself, rather than the machine feeding it through for you (when embroidering on fabric it needs to be in a hoop to keep the fabric taught). That's the major difference between the two techniques.
Important - when you are working on paper it's not as robust as fabric and you need to be more careful with the amount of holes you make in it. Doing a lot of stitches in the one area can make the paper disintegrate if you are not careful.
Machine embroidery is a great fun technique and although a lot of people are wary of embracing it, it's great to give it a go because you can get some lovely effects and it's much quicker than hand embroidery. I use it a lot in collage pieces for creating textures and sewing pieces of paper together. So if you are new to this technique I would suggest getting some pieces of paper and just playing about with it until you are comfortable using the machine in this way.