About Becka Rahn

19 February, 2025

Preventing and Untying Knots in your Embroidery

beckarahn2025-02-19T11:37:22-06:00Embroidery, Tutorials|Comments Off on Preventing and Untying Knots in your Embroidery

One of the most frustrating things about hand embroidery is when your thread ties itself in knots while you are stitching. I thought I would write a couple of tips to help prevent knots and how to untie them when they happen.

Preventing Knots

After you have threaded your needle, take a few seconds to “condition the thread”. That means pinching the eye of the needle so that it doesn’t come unthreaded and then running the length of the thread through your fingers a few times while you pull on it gently. What does conditioning do? It helps to push some extra twist out of your thread. Less twist means fewer knots.

As you stitch, some stitch movements can build up extra twist in your thread, especially with stitches that wrap around themselves, like french knots or twisted chain. Keep an eye on the extra thread as you stitch. If you see it start to twist back on itself, that is a knot waiting to happen. You can let go of extra twist by picking up your work and dropping the needle, allowing the extra twist to spin the needle around and fall out of the thread. Then you can go back to stitching.

Untying Knots

The most common kind of knot to get while you are stitching is a slip knot. They happen when the thread starts to twist up and a loop slips through another one. When you see a knot starting, the best thing to do is stop stitching and don’t pull it tighter.

A slip knot looks like a loop with a knot at the base of it and you will see two “legs” coming out of the bottom. If you pull on one side, the knot will tighten up, but if you pull on the other side, the knot will unravel easily. It’s hard to tell which side is which by just looking at it because it’s all based on how your thread twisted, but a gentle tug on each leg will usually show you how to loosen it. If you accidentally pull it too tight and nothing is slipping loose, you can sometimes unravel it by slipping your needle into the knot part and wiggling it around a little to loosen it up and allow the threads to slip.

13 February, 2025

Picot Beaded Edge: A Micro Tutorial

beckarahn2025-02-13T14:41:28-06:00Tutorials|3 Comments

I learned how to stitch this picot beaded edge from a friend a bunch of years ago and one of my students in class reminded me about it today, so I thought I’d make a very quick micro tutorial and show you how it works.

First you need some beads, needle, thread, and something to stitch the edging on. For this example, I made a heart shape from two layers of felt. You can stitch around anything, but a circle is the easiest shape to start with if you’ve never tried this before. I am stitching with #8 perle cotton embroidery thread, a chenille needle (which is my favorite for embroidery) and some size 8 seed beads. This works with almost any kind of beads, but you just have to make sure that they fit over your needle and thread at least twice.

Thread your needle and tie a knot. I start by making a stitch between the two layers of felt so that I can hide the knot inside.

For your very first stitch, you will pick up 3 beads on the needle. Then move over about two-beads-width and make a stitch through the layers of felt from back to front. You want to stitch in about 1/16th of an inch from the cut edge of the felt.
Pass your needle through the last bead again from bottom to top.
For the rest of the picot stitches, you will add 2 beads to the needle. Then stitch through the layers of felt once again about 2 beads width away from your previous stitch.
Continue in the same pattern by bringing your needle up again through the last bead.

Once you’ve worked around the outside of your shape, continue adding picots until you meet up at your starting stitch.

To join the last stitch, add just one bead and then go back through the very first bead of the first stitch from top to bottom.

Make a tiny stitch and tie a knot right at the base of that bead and then you can bring the thread through the felt layers to bury the end and trim it off.

7 February, 2025

Paste Paper is my Nemesis.

beckarahn2025-02-07T18:26:27-06:00An Artist's Life|Comments Off on Paste Paper is my Nemesis.

I use a lot of handpainted paper in my work for making collages and illustrations from cut paper. One of the kinds of paper I fell in love with many years ago is called paste paper. It’s a kind of surface design where you cover the paper with a tinted paste and then draw, scrape and press patterns into it. The thing I love the most about it is that it tends to make richly textured patterns that are close to monochromatic, so you can introduce texture into a design without adding a lot of different colors. There are many theories about how paste paper patterns got started but it’s been a technique practiced since the middle ages.

Because I didn’t know how to make paste paper, years ago, I bought scrap packs from an artist named Cristina Hajosy who lives near Boston. I found her on Etsy and she sold these lovely scrap packs of all kinds of colors and patterns that she made in her studio. Then a couple of years ago I saw a paste paper class offered at the MN Center for Book Arts. I signed up immediately! My chance to learn how to make these cool papers.

Like many techniques, there are many ways of making paste and every artist has a favorite recipe. Unfortunately, the papers I made in that class were terrible. The materials we had to work with left the paper feeling very plasticky and the designs looked muddy. It was nothing like Cristina’s scrap pack papers and the instructor left us all feeling more confused than confident in making more.

I noticed the other day that my paper scrap bins were getting low on paste paper scraps because I am teaching more with them again than I have in several years. So I reached out the Cristina and asked if she could give me a lesson. I knew I loved her papers already so I decided that I should go right to the source. She and I spent a couple of hours talking all things paste this afternoon and then I spent a couple of hours playing in the studio.

Right now, I am cautiously optimistic? Everything is still wet, so I can’t tell yet if I have the texture that I was hoping for, but things look promising. My paste had some issues. We used a plain cornstarch and water paste with acrylic paint as the pigment. I cooked it up this morning but by the time I mixed my pigments in, it had gelled up maybe a little too much and it was sort of crumbly/chunky when I mixed in the paints. I am going to make another batch and try tinting it sooner. It seems I need to do a little tweaking to find just my perfect recipe. It’s always good to go back to being a beginner again at something and remember that it’s part of the process to not be great at something the first time.

30 January, 2025

My favorite scissors for mixed media art

beckarahn2025-01-30T15:57:57-06:00An Artist's Life, Fabric Reviews|Comments Off on My favorite scissors for mixed media art

I shared a photo of my studio table in my newsletter today while I was in the middle of a project and I noticed that all of my favorite cutting tools were on the table, so I thought I would talk about what they are and why I like them.

I work with both fabric and paper often in the same project, so I unlike many fiber artists, I don’t have a dedicated pair of fabric-only scissors. My cutting tools include scissors, thread snips, and a utility knife.

I have two pairs of Fiskars scissors. The large pair has a non-stick coating on the blades. I love this classic bent handle shape; I know you’ve seen ones like that before. The small pair are a style they call Microtips. If I had to have only one pair of scissors in my entire studio, it would be these microtips. I use them for everything and the very fine pointed tips make them especially good for cutting fine details in felt or paper. Both of these are nice and sharp, hold an edge well, and work equally well on fabric, paper, threads, or cardboard. The best part is that they are super affordable and you can find them nearly anywhere. When they get too dull for my art, I retire them to the garage and the kitchen where they still work great for those things.

The utility knife is one I found because I was looking for a sturdy handle that was easier on my hands when I was cutting things like bookboard, which is very dense and hard. This is a handle which holds standard box cutter/utility knife blades. It’s aluminum and folds up with a push button latch. The photo shows it folded closed, which also protects the blade. It is THE BEST. It’s comfortable in my hand and holds the blade really steady unlike some of the xacto handles I’ve used. And it comes in about 10 fun colors.

Finally, there is my favorite pair of thread snips. The thing I like the best about these is that they are so simple. I have several other pairs with fancy molded handles and loops and this pair is the one I love. They came from my local yarn shop but these look nearly identical to the ones I have.

25 January, 2025

Every house should have a Playdough Board

beckarahn2025-01-25T12:26:41-06:00An Artist's Life|1 Comment

I spent the week at my mom and dad’s house last week. I brought a handful of projects with me because the temperatures were forecast to be very chilly and I knew we’d be hanging out inside a lot. When I sat down to work on a book project, the first thing I asked was “Where is the Playdough Board?”

You might not have grown up in a house with a Playdough Board, but it was one of the most essential art making tools I had when I was growing up. It started out as the piece of countertop that was cut out to put in our kitchen sink. My mom and dad built our house. Dad is an architect and all-around pretty skilled crafty guy, so to save money, they did a lot of the work themselves, with 2 year old me toddling along with my tools and a pencil after him. When they cut out the space to put in the kitchen sink, they saved that large rectangle of countertop and it became the Playdough Board.

When I was a little kid, it was the surface you played with Playdough on, as the name suggests. We plopped it in the middle of the dining room table or more often the living room floor and the Playdough had to stay on the board (so it wasn’t getting smooshed into the placemats or the carpet). The board was smooth and indestructible, easy to wash, and just the perfect size for two little girls to build fancy playdough birthday cakes on. As I grew up, it became the everything board. Anytime you had a project that needed to be wet, sticky, taped down, pressed, stamped, or glued, you pulled out the Playdough Board to work on. In my house, there were a lot of these kinds of projects.

So when I wanted to work on glueing the covers on a new book project, the Playdough Board was the thing I needed and I put it right in the middle of the living room floor. It’s had an upgrade since I was little, so it now has a cutout to be a lapdesk since my parents aren’t so much into sitting on the living room carpet anymore. I’m starting to think that I might need to have one of my very own. Maybe I’ll keep an eye out at the architectural salvage places around and see if I can’t snag my own piece of counter top for future art adventures (and maybe a little Playdough.)

8 January, 2025

Sheep Blossoms: Designing fabrics for Darn Knit Anyway

beckarahn2025-01-08T10:46:46-06:00An Artist's Life, Spoonflower & Fabric Design|Comments Off on Sheep Blossoms: Designing fabrics for Darn Knit Anyway

One of my favorite projects from 2024 was designing a set of fabrics for my local yarn shop friends Aimee & Carly at Darn Knit Anyway. The shop celebrated its 15th birthday last year and I’ve known them since before the shop was even a twinkle in their eyes. I thought it would be fun to talk a little bit about the process that goes on behind the scenes to make these fabrics come to life.

We started by talking about what the fabric should be. I gave them a list of adjectives so that we could kind of choose the style they were going for and they came back with “branded, playful and maximalism”. Since they are primarily a yarn shop, they really wanted to incorporate sheep into the design somehow and I really wanted to do it in a way that it wasn’t just a design that screamed “we’re a yarn shop”. We also talked about what they wanted to do with the fabric after it was printed so I could get an idea of the scale. Designing for something that’s going to be curtains vs small project bags are two very different fabrics.

Branded to me meant that we needed to use their brand colors, which happens to be a palette that I LOVE. The challenging thing about this palette is that they are all a very similar value so there’s not a really strong variation in light and dark. But fortunately, sheep are really classic to make in black and white so I decided to try and balance the black and white with the colors.

You’ll notice my photo up above is paper, pen and pencil. I do not draw my designs on an iPad or use Procreate. I like to make paper art as the starting point. So these started as many sketches on paper. I don’t use a lot of special art tools. I drew these on copy paper and inked them with my favorite Uniball pen and a plain old sharpie. Why do I work this way? I really like the quality of the lines and the art better. As I watch videos of other artists drawing with tools like Procreate that “correct” your lines and “perfect” your circles as you go, I just looks boring to me. No shade to those of you that love drawing with those tools! It’s just not my style.

I decided that one way to make the design a little playful was to try to “hide” the sheep in the design. I didn’t literally hide them as they are a pretty prominent element, but I treated them like they were flowers in a lush floral design instead of making sheep in a field or something more realistic like that. I rarely design florals, but I liked the humor of the sheep as flowers and sitting on and swinging off of the vines. I added a few other little knitting bits into the florals: the flower buds look like yarn balls, the vines all have a knob at the end so they look a little like straight knitting needles.

Once I had the initial design done, I scanned the art and brought it into Photoshop. There was a lot of boring little clean up zoomed way in on the design: cleaning up stray marks, making sure the repeat matched, adjusting lines that were too thick or thin.

I spent a lot of time coloring and experimenting with placing the colors. I used a Photoshop brush with an impressionist painting effect so that it added some variation to the color as I painted, so nothing was just big blocks of color. I really love to add a lot of rich texture to my designs, so this has two layers of texture over top as well. The pale yellow grid broke up the white blobs of the fluffy sheep and added a linen-like texture to the background. And then there’s a very subtle spatter paint texture over top of the black outlines in the same color as the background. This softens up the lines and gives it a kind of weathered look. Both of those textures were also things I drew or painted and scanned; I have created a library of subtle textures like crinkles, spatters, and linen that that I use often in my work. I ended up using all of the colors from the brand palette because they just worked so well together and because the values were so similar, it makes a kind of unified background that was a great contrast for the sheep. As a last detail I added the words “Darn Knit Anyway” along the edges of the vines in three different places. I love this fun little message hidden in the leaves.

Because they wanted to make some little drawstring project bags with these prints, I also created a coordinating print for the lining. I wanted to do something reminiscent of a ticking stripe and pulled the little twinkle star shape from the main print. I drew more fluffy sheep but instead of swinging from things, I wanted these to look like they were napping and their feet were all tucked under their fluff. My husband said they looked like popcorn, which made me laugh and I think also adds to the playfulness and the whole theme-in-my-head of sheep pretending to be other things. I couldn’t decide which color I liked better so I designed two.

It was great fun to work on this collection and I hope it brings lots of smiles to the community at DKA.

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