Recently, we asked our Facebook friends to send us stories of how they started working in the embroidery space, searching for interesting people and importantly, interesting works of art. We were not disappointed!
Sabine Schulz sent us her short story, which we hope you enjoy.
My name is Sabine and come from the North German Plain, or otherwise known as the Northern Lowland (Norddeutsches Tiefland).
Life often has a way of giving you just what you need. Years ago, I was going through a particularly difficult stage in my life. Homebound and dealing with rehabilitation, I was gifted the time to draw again. It had been 20 years since I picked up a pencil, but it all came rushing back. It was therapeutic for me to be creative again after all this time.
At first, I started working with acrylic paints, uploading pictures of my work to my website, which I call Cyncopia. The name was derived from two words; cyan (the color blue), and copy (because I painted from templates).
In the long run, this was not going to work for me. As a wife and mom to two wonderful daughters as well as two lively beagles, I was rather busy and also wasn’t able to get out the house to buy the colors of paint whenever I needed, so I found myself tinkering around on the computer with Adobe Illustrator. This was great! With the stop-start lifestyle, I could save my work as I progressed, which was far more practical than dealing with paint that was not going to wait for me before becoming dry.
My real background was that of a trained clothing engineer, and a few years later found myself venturing with a friend into a sewing machine shop where I noticed them running an embroidery machine. WOW! That was exciting. Throughout all my time in clothing education, I had never experienced anything like this, and then I discovered digitizing.
Destiny came knocking, and I was ready. Armed with a new drawing tablet and my first version of Wilcom’s software, I was able to use their Freehand tool and create the same beautiful artwork for embroidery. It was an incredible learning curve and one which I really enjoyed. Understanding how to work with limited colors, minimizing color changes was key as well as the need to reduce any jumps in designs. It added a new dimension to the word of design.
I’ve developed a style which I call my
“Scribble Series”.It is similar to pencil drawing, but of course, it is created using stitches. These running stitches merge seamlessly to minimize the number of jumps. It creates a more classic drawing look, just without a pencil.
Scribble Series
Zendoodle
There is also my “Zendoodle”. This is where I have used individual running stitches and connected them with the branching tool. I use just a few different color thread tones to add flow and interest.
Please visit my website where you can see all my designs created in Wilcom’s EmbroideryStudio e4 – www.cyncopia.com
