These embroidery designs are my interpretations in digitized embroidery of ancient family crests from Japan. I have used only one color of thread for these designs to maximize the bold graphic effect that these traditional Japanese Family Crests have. These single color machine embroideries look fabulous on small scale printed fabrics. I especially like them on cotton batiks with small scale printed designs. The embroideries shown in the quilt above were all stitched on a blue batik using a Cottage Beige rayon thread. This color thread does not lend itself to photography. I stitched all of the embroideries shown individually below using a light tan rayon thread on a cotton batik to better show the designs in detail.
All of these crests have been evaluated and perfected by stitching them onto quilt weight cotton batik as shown in the pictures below. Most of the designs have no jump stitches; some designs have one jump stitch that allow the stitching to go from one major part of the design to the other. I like to use rayon thread for these designs because it has the best light reflection. Light playing on the directional stitching of these embroideries give the designs interesting variations of color and shading. Polyester embroidery thread works great for kids' clothes, but it simply does not have good light reflection.
There are a total of 25 machine embroideries in this collection currently.
Each digitized embroidery design download comes with
printable templates, stitch and thread color information, plus links to the recommended instructions
for working with templates. Each design download includes three sizes of the design: 4.9"X4.9", 4"X4", 3"X3".
All of these designs include a basting rectangle (5"X5"). This size basting rectangle makes accurate placement easy. You can also use the more traditional method of
marking the center of the design for placements if you prefer to work with the
other method. The first and last digitized stitches are in the center of each
design.
This quilt top was made using 19 of the Japanese Family Crests Embroideries available here.
The
files available here have been
compressed into .ZIP format. You can UnZIP them using WinZip or WinRAR, or WinXP's 'Extract To' feature.
