Sadia’s Blog

One of the latest fashion craze is fringe. You will see it on literally everything, from scarves to clothes to purses, you name it. The concept of making fringe on the embroidery machine is not new, rather it has been around for a long while. I was first led to the ingenuity of the idea at one of the Embroidery shows looking at the Dalco booth offerings. One of their designs had fringe on the flowers which was so very clever and neat that I decided to try my hand at it.

The concept of digitizing fringe is quite simple. A plain column with absolutely no underlay but created at the maximum allowed width is the main design for creating fringe. For stabilizing it at one end, one simply needs to digitize some sort of tacking stitches. The idea is that once the design is stitched out, one only needs to trim away the bobbin threads from the wrong side of where the fringe design is. This lets the top threads become loose and therefore a fringe is formed. A free sample of this can be downloaded from my Heirloom Crystals I collection.

This works great if one wants to create fringe that is no more than half an  inch wide. But what if one wants to create fringe that is perhaps longer than an inch…or how about six inches. This is where I was led to while creating the Floral Paisley collection. I was creating a simple shawl with the Floral Paisley designs and the shawl desperately needed some sort of fringe. Trims and fringe at any JoAnn’s or any online store cost quite a bit especially if you want it to match the color of your fabric. This led me to start thinking of a fringe which would hold up wash time after time and yet be able to be as long as I wanted it to be.

Simple logic tells us that when stitches left loose in the design and stitched out on water soluble stabilizer will simply be threads when the wss is washed out. With that in mind I created my first attempt at a fringe that was at least six inches long. The whole concept worked great until I went to wash out the design. I don’t know what to call it but if I ever need color coordinated hair for dolls etc….I think I may have the trick for making them. The threads when washed were loose indeed but they were a dreaded mess. I tried steaming the fringe thinking that might help make them more smoother and flat. It did help but that is not what I wanted to have to tell my customers when stitching out the fringe. I would rather that the threads laid straight and flat and not much work have to be done to them. So back I went to my software to figure out how to make the threads a bit  heavy so they would not curl up so much.

The curling of the threads led me to think that if each of the fringe strand was heavy enough, it would not give in to curling rather it would lay flat and straight or as straight as one can have the fringe. Thread is not a very tricky phenomenon. It can bend and shape to anyway you want. But the way you want must be defined. This definition is where I had to think and plan. Surprisingly the whole idea was in front of me all the time. When I was making the Tambour Lace (crochet) series, I had devised a stitch which when stitched out would mimic the hand done crochet stitch, whether double or triple crochet. Applying the same principle here, I was able to creat a fringe design which can be any lenght one wants to be and yet had stability.

My first attempt at stitching out the design with rayon threads was excellent. Not only did the threads not curl like crazy but they held their own through repeated pullings and washings. Ofcourse they can be a jumbled mess if one does not lay them flat to dry. Remember thread will shape to what you want it to be. My other desire was to be able to have each of the fringe or tassle threads be thin enough to pull up seed beads to create personalized fringe. Using a simple double georgette fabric and attaching Tambour Lace III (crochet lace) edging, I attached the fringe to the edge. The simple shawl took on an heirloom yet modernistic look immediately. This ofcourse has given me tons more ideas, including making my own tassles using specialty threads.