Couching, No Potatoes

It was a productive weekend! I had several projects keyed up for a finish this weekend. A few were gifts, but one was selfishly a project I had been planning to try (just for me) for a while. I tried my hand at couching last year with some limited success with my mini Xmas trees. Couching is a technique where you incorporate decorative threads, cord, or yarn on the surface of a fabric. You stitch it in place with other finer threads. In my case, I feed my yarns in with my longarm when stitching a design. The first time I tried this, I used a crushed velvet yarn. I found it was a little finicky due to the nature of the yarn I selected. The velvety fiber slides right off of the middle strand, and would occasionally not get caught by my upper thread. While it worked, I did find I had to go back and manually stitch a few areas down. I don’t recommend using crushed velvet.

This weekend, I tried again with a different kind of yarn, Bernat Blanket. It still has a soft, fuzzy texture, but is more stable than the crushed velvet. For my spider web pillow project, I opted for a variegated. Using a the Spider Web E2E Simple, I fed the variegated yarn into my longarm. I tried two methods for feeding it. First, I looped the yarn over a hook behind the needle. This method was forgiving about where I had the yarn lying. However, it tended to let the yarn twist and resulted in a bumpier finish. The method that worked better was to just let the yarn feed dragging over the quilt. I am using pro stitch. The machine is moving by computer in the video, but you could also use this method with free motion quilting. The foot on my machine is one of the specialized Handi Quilter couching feet and is selected so that the hole in the foot is similar to the thickness of the thread. This keeps the yarn feeding directly under the needle.

Handi Quilter Amara – Couching with Bernat Blanket Yarn

I was very happy with the final product and made a few 18″ throw pillow shams and a mini quilt. The mini needed some additional detail. Normally, I would embroidery designs on my mini, but I didn’t think that the chunky yarn would work well for that, so I designed some new spooky buttons. I laser cut a limited run and have shared a handful in my shop in case you want to give this couching project a spin.
Boo! Spider Button Set – Custom Halloween Buttons