Patterns: Tuesday Bassen and the Sublime Stitching Transfer Pen

Jenny Hart from Sublime Stitching very kindly sent me the new fine tip iron on transfer pen to try. Now I've always been a tracing my patterns with a light box kind of girl and lately I've been using Sulky Solvy, but I've been falling out of love with that. So I was very keen to try a new (for me) method, specially as the pen seemed to be nowhere near as thick as other iron on transfer pens I've seen (the tracing paper in the photo has been in my stash for a long time, as I've always been put off by the thick pens previously).

Now of course to try a Sublime Stitching pen I thought I might as well try it with a Sublime Stitching pattern, now I've got lots in my stash and I had a look through them and some of them are quite simple, like the Heavy Metal Alphabet and some of them are more complicated, with more fine lines, like the Shy Boy and Girl pattern. So I thought I'd pick something a bit more in between to test the pen, so I plumped for the Tuesday Bassen pattern set, which I thought would be perfect for my pre-teen's bedroom.

I was still quite ambitious though, the Tuesday Bassen pattern set it pretty large and I wanted to stitch it almost like a sampler, stitching lots of the designs together. So I transferred the designs I liked onto two sheets of tracing paper and I was already appreciating how much easier that was compared to juggling the patterns and the fabric on a light box. And of course tracing on fabric is always a bit of a nightmare. Also I found that the pen was really nice to use, it has the sort of thin nib you normally find in artist drawing pens and it felt like in handled similarly too.

When ironing on the pattern I hit the normal problems I usually get with iron on transfers, as I find I can struggle a bit with either not ironing it enough or ironing it too much or the pattern shifting and causing double, blurred lines. I got a bit of all three problems when transferring the pattern and I also got a few small scorch marks, oops! But still, I was fairly pleased with the results and the lines were just as thin as I'd expect with a commercially made iron on pattern.

Then it came to stitching it up, which was great fun, Tuesday's pattern is really lovely and for someone who normally tries to embroider with a restricted palette, I used it as an opportunity to go really mad with colours. I didn't really hit any problems with not being able to cover the transfer lines, it does show a tiny bit in places (I, as the stitcher am probably more aware of it than anyone else looking at it) but that was due to the pattern shifting a bit in places when I ironed.

I used two strands of DMC embroidery floss throughout and although I was mainly using back stitch, there's also some satin stitching and french knots.

I will definitely be using the pen again to transfer more patterns, so thank you again Jenny for letting me have a go with the new pens!