Scandinavian Technique

Today I was procrastinating in the web when I discovered some very interesting Swedish sites. One of them showed an intarsian technique I decided to try in my sampler for one of the motifs. You can follow the link to see the original site of historicaltextiles.org

The other two sites I discovered are www.kurbits.nu and 2stickare.blogspot.com

My try is the following one:

 I draw the contours of "an animal" with my Frixion pen from PILOT. This is a tip from mine: they are the most marvelous thing to work on textiles because you can draw what you want, correct it with another line on top, whatever, because if you iron it afterwords it will completely disappear!! as you can see on the next two photos!!

Before you begin with the couching you should sew the fabric to the felt with very small stitches, you don't have to turn back the border.

before ironing

after ironing

You can use it to draw you own drawings and stitch on top of the lines, for transferring pictures, etc. 

Here you see how I began working with the thread I'm going to couch. I use a thinner one to do the couching on top of this one. I threaded a needle and stitched through the felt so that the knot stays on the back.

Here I began with the couching following the line along the border of the appliqué and putting the thicker thread on top of the fabric close to the border while stitching.

 Here I finished the stitching and on the top left you see how I pull the thicker thread to the back with a needle to have a neat finish.

Here is the finished little guy. Guess what animal it is and then tell me because I have no clue... :-)

I noticed that this technique es very good for having a good contrast between the figures and the background in some cases. If you look at the kind of owl I did on another rectangle, you will see that the owl doesn't rag out of the felt like this one does.