Working with Waffle, Part 3

^{The future final placement for my patch}

Moving on to the embroidery; as I mentioned I decided to do a patch for it. I did a test on the waffle weave, and while it came out pretty nice, I thought a patch might be fun to do. A quick tip: when you embroider on a heavily textured fabric like waffle, one, use a design with heavy stitching. This will “knock down” the fluff and keep your design visible. Also, don’t forget to use a topper! This will help keep any nap or fluff flat so your machine can stitch over it. I used a tear away stabilizer under the fabric, and a heavy water-soluble topper. I don’t think you’d get hoop burn with this fabric as it’s cotton, but you could float the fabric over the stabilizer just in case, as I did here.

I created the patch using my in-machine software on my 10-needle. I selected a design, then crated a circle of single-run stitches around it to size it, then deleted and added back the design (most machines have a first-in, first stitched order to the programming; you don’t have to stitch the circle first, but it’s typical with appliqué. If your machine or software can re-order the design elements, it won’t matter.) Then I added my initials withing the circle, then added the satin stitch outer ring.

You can see by my sample in the lower left, that I forgot to trim my appliqué (which is the badge in this case) before my satin stitch. And, you can also see on the lower right that my trim job was not great, lots of fuzzies sticking out.

Luckily I remembered to save my design – hit that memory button! – and I can easily stitch it out again. I hooped a heavy water-soluble topper (something like Sulky Ultra Solvy or OESD Badgemaster) and a piece of heavy cutaway (2.5 to 3 oz) to have as my badge support; the fabric is a plain weave white cotton. The satin stitch perforates the topper, and it pops right out after it’s finished. Then you just have to rinse or tear away the rest of the topper from the back – easy! And just fun… after I make the next one, I’ll use a small whip stitch to attach it to my robe.

^{The four in the center were used in the design}

The color choice has a short story to it; a few Fashionista meetings ago, Roz gave us the low-down on this season’s colors. She said one trend is pairing unusual colors (that still look good of course.) I decided on these colors by accident; I passed my machine after doing some test stitches after using some random threads for machine maintenance, and saw the pictured angle. Somehow those colors just seemed to go together – I think they came out nicely!