29 FACES DAY 7

'Manfred the Machine Man' - Jez
Machine stitching on white card

My personal challenge today for 29 FACES was to create a recognisable face using my brand new baby sewing machine.  I wanted to try to 'draw' a stitched face with no pre-drawing, and with a single sewing line from start to finish.

Hopefully you should be able to see that there are no pre-drawn lines.  I used green thread because that's what was threaded into the machine, and since it is an absolute pain to thread-up I wasn't going to change it.  At this point you can see the thread of my starting and finishing points, the eye and the moustache.

Here's the completed Manfred, with the loose threads showing the starting position at the hair-line, going round the face, down and up the neck, up the jaw, round the hair and back to the ear.  Phew!!  At that point I tied them and cut them off.

I used yellow thread in the bobbin which means the image on the reverse side is 'drawn' in yellow.  Inspired by Morag's use of wax crayons in her September 2nd painting, I dug out some old jumbo crayons and scribbled colour in.  Handsome fellow, isn't he!  So, two for the price of one today.

Here's my little baby Janome machine.  I had only used it a couple of times before trying this face.  You can see how small it is from the mug of pencils - about 9 inches by 11 inches.  It does five sizes of straight stitch and five sizes of zig-zag, and cost the princely sum of £58.  Apart from the terrible problem of threading the needle, I have no complaints about it.  I have an all-singing,  all-dancing reliable old Pfaff machine, but sadly it is too heavy for either Dev or me to lift out of the cupboard onto a table.

So I love my new baby, it means I can sew again, even though it's at a basic level.  I've never been without a sewing machine since my mum taught me to use her treadle machine to make postage stamps with paper and no thread in the needle so that we could play post offices with metal buttons for sixpences when I was about 5 or 6.