quilting Archives - Page 5 of 12

Embroidermation du jour: twirling dancer

Today’s embroidermation features a rotoscoped dance outtake performed by Reena Shah about 7 years ago for Sita Sings the Blues. Theo coded the stitches and the animated sin wave loop background. This is designed for larger quilts, but this version is tiny as it was stitched on our embroidery machine.

I sewed the 16 panels together like so:

The cycle is actually 13 frames long – an annoying number for animation. The final 3 frames are repeats so it could be a 4 x 4 square. Finished size is 16″ x 16″.

Crazy Sewing Machine Lady

I guess it’s happened – I’ve turned into a sewing machine collector. No one needs more than one sewing machine, but I just obtained my fifth. I’ve wanted a treadle machine since I started quilting a few years ago, and when I came across this beauty on Chicago’s Craigslist, I couldn’t resist.

She stitches! Came with one bobbin wound with ancient thread. No belt yet (I ordered one this morning) so I used the hand wheel. I’ve also ordered 2 additional bobbins, and some 100-year-old unused needles on eBay. I threaded the shuttle myself after reading up on it online. It’s a Davis, Long.

There were lots of dropped stitches and thread nests in the back, but as I adjusted the tension disc and whatever the screwpost thing on top is (foot pressure?) it got better. The machine was very well oiled before it was stored however many years ago. It moves pretty smoothly.

Officially this is a Channukah present from Theo. I’m a lucky gal.

PaleGray Labs

That’s what Theo Gray and I are calling our quilting/embroidery/stitchcoding/animation collaboration. PaleGrayLabs.com currently redirects to the “quilting” category of this blog, but hopefully it’ll get its own web site eventually. Mostly so we can use this logo I designed:

and that Theo stitchcoded:

Ziz Quilt finished

It took me a while, but I finally got around to stitching the Ziz quiltimation into a single wallhanging. To recap, here’s how these frames look in a movie:

Quilt Plotter

Last weekend Theo and I visited Central Missouri to look at a quilt plotter. We brought our own design to test. Here’s a video:

And here’s our finished test quilt:

Theo did all the stitchcoding, and made the graduated spirals in Mathematica.

This certainly gives us a lot to think about.

Embroidermation: Tree of Life

The source animation (a vector file sequence) was adapted from my short segment for the upcoming feature film “The Prophet.” That will definitely not be rendered in Embroidermation, but the Tree of Life is such a classic, traditional embroidery motif it was just crying out to be used in this test.

In addition to stitchcoding, Theo hooped and ran the machine on all 96 frames, and then he made them into a flipbook.

Theo makes flipbook — Theo hand-stitching 96 embroidered frames into a flipbook

Because he’s crazy, that’s why. He even crafted a copper rig to cut out the frames precisely, and register them for photography (he photographed them too).