Lisa Charles – 2020 Brinton 101
For the last eleven years, Lisa Charles has used her skills, learned while fashioning wearable art, to create photo-realistic machine-stitched images using her home sewing machine. Her work has been collected in both corporate and private collections. She has been featured in Threads Magazine and The Sheridan Press.
She has received several awards for her wearable art. In 2015 she was awarded Third Place in the 2015 SAGE 5th Annual juried Art Show with her thread painting “Bad Hair Day”. Her latest award, “Best of Show 2019”, was at FACE of Fiber in the Rockies held in Estes Park, CO. It was for her portrait of an alpaca “Anjolie”.
“I am a fiber artist who uses thread to paint pictures. Quilters call the technique “thread painting” when free motion embroidery is used.
I first transfer the image onto cotton fabric or canvas. Then the canvas is backed with a stabilizer to give it stability while sewing. My home sewing machine, not an embroidery machine, is set for free motion embroidery by lowering the feed dogs and setting the stitch length and width to 0 so the needle goes straight up and down. With the feed dogs lowered the “sandwich” can be moved around smoothly while the needle goes straight up and down.” Lisa Charles