ImagesMagUK_October_2020

www.images-magazine.com OCTOBER 2020 images 29 KB TIPS & TECHNIQUES Embroidery and embellishment designer Liss Cooke was inspired by Japanese flower arranging and kanzashi head pieces worn by Japanese geisha when creating this heavily embroidered jacket for her MA degree Anatomyof an embroidery www.lisscooketextiledesign.com The digitising of this design took approximately a week as the piece features over 45 individual elements, and includes multiple stitch techniques and around 20 different colours. The process of actually illustrating and scanning in all the different elements before the digitising could even begin took about a week or more. I used a variety of Wilcom filled stitches, but I mostly focused on satin stitch embroidery. In a few of the flowers, such as the dark electric blue flower and the mixed blue lotus-style flower with the orange sequin centre, I purposely used very long satin stitches, all travelling in one direction. This helped the piece to have a little more texture as well as a hand-embroidered look. I used Wilcom EmbroideryStudio to digitise the jacket design. Having tried different embroidery software in the past, I knew that Wilcom was the only software that would be able to handle the size of this design in relation to the scale and number of components I was working with. I played with each individual component to change the stitch direction to how I wanted it, the density of stitches to make some elements feel more padded/dense, and the length of stitches to make some elements appear to have more of a hand-embroidered look. Being able to make these changes meant the design became more unique and personal to me, and had more depth of interest and design variety. The design was embroidered with a Barudan 12-needle machine and, because the design is quite large, I used a pantograph frame. The piece contains 171,180 stitches and took around nine hours to fully stitch out. L iss Cooke is an embroiderer to watch, having already worked on outfits for celebs such as musician Beyoncé and actor Cate Blanchett while working with fashion designer Mary Katrantzou, as well as producing gorgeous designs for her own business. Her work focuses on combining digital and hand embroidery so they work in tandem. “I love to use digital to create a beautiful base design and then add additional embellishment details for texture and 3D relief.” For this particular design, she used complex 3D sequin techniques including stacking, clustering and folded sequin, as well as more subtle details such as micro-beading and the appliqué of tulle and metallic leathers. “I love the sophisticated and controlled look of Japanese floral arrangements, but I also love the freedom of nature, as falling flower petals float in the wind and are pulled to the earth by gravity,” explains Liss. “I wanted my design to have a controlled barrier, represented by the circular frame, and the flowers to begin spilling out over the edges.” The highly detailed design was finished with a final addition of hand embroidery, creating a painterly blue line that runs from the top of the jacket through the central embroidery, before falling off the edge of the jacket, leaving trailing blue thread behind. I used a beautiful palette of classic and frosted matte Madeira rayon threads in a contemporary bright colour palette, featuring blush, neon pink and electric blue shades.