i'll admit it...got a tad bit carried away with the title there :] basically, this post is dedicated to the science of paper piercing...
for starters, i'm going to let you in on a little known stitching secret [the secret also applies to just about any creative endeavor as well]...keep this hush-hush though, k?
note: sometimes the 'crooked' can be substituted for the following words as well...unevenly spaced or imperfect. the way i see it though, is that those little 'quirks' make it handstitched. i like that i don't always stay in line with my piercing...it's an indicator to the people who will see my albums for generations to come that i put a ton of love and thought into each page...it's what makes it *mine* and i really dig that about this whole handstitching thing :]
honestly, we are all our own worst critic's when it comes to expression. agreed? i think yes.
so, that being said, let's do a group cleansing. let's just take a moment to gather up all of our self-doubt, criticisms, and whatever else henders us from stitching our hearts out, and stow it away in the nearest trash compactor...
done. done. and. done.
so, there are 4 main methods i use for paper piercing...we're just going to take it one method at a time though...
templates and stencils are awesome stitching tools...the beauty of a template is that there's no need to measure...the best ones are crystal clear, like a transparency. i use a template to do most of my zig zag stitches. it makes it *so* much faster, not having to play around with rulers, pencil lines and trying to get the 'perfect' zag, hahaha.
i designed a little template freebie for you guys...so when you get a chance, get your hands on a printable transparency (8.5 x 11), print the pdf and punch holes using your paper piercer. you'll notice, once you download the file that i left the letters' outline solid...i did this for 2 reasons (1) because i couldn't figure out how to make letters with a dotted line, oh dear. and (2) because even if i had figured out how to do dotted lines, they would be super close together and pointless...so, here's the downloadable pdf...Download STITCHING TEMPLATE
i used the same font for the strand sample in the last post as the font in the template...i've found that when i'm stitching letters or characters, the easiest way for me to get *fairly even* stitches is to start with the points or corners...
i prefer to keep my stitches between 1/8 and 1/4 inch in length...again, it's personal preference...it just looks cleaner to me and more detailed. with that in mind- back to the corners/points...once i've pierced at every intersection, i eyeball the centerpoints on the shorter straight edges...
on the longer straight edges i just space them between 1/8 and 1/4 inch apart...notice in the sorta blurry image above...my stitches are both *crooked* and *unevenly spaced*...i won't say i told you so...but i kinda did :]
on the downloadable template, there are also some nesting circles...the dots are a little close together for my liking but i found that if i skip a dot when i'm piercing, it works like a charm. speaking of circles...let's talk stitched curves for a sec. i've found that if my stitches or rather, my pierced holes, are closer together (smaller, shorter stitches); circles, curves and rounded corners end up much smoother looking than if i use longer stitches or holes spaced further apart...long stitches on curves make a rounded edge look more choppy and angular.
the last item on the stitching template is a dual function deal...it's both a zig zag stitch guide (if you use both lines) or a straight stitch template (if you use one line).
as per usual, questions + comments = yay! see you soon friends!
