Playing with string

Apron dress roundels

I've finished the stitching on my apron dress roundels!  Hooray!  There are two roundels, one on each side gore.  The base black is silk and the stitching is a pearl cotton in a combination of stem stitch and chain stitch.  Here is a picture of them flat for better detail.

The spear mice advance!

The archers are all in place and the spears are advancing towards battle.

Deploy the archers!

The mice have finished their fortifications and are sending out the archers!

Mouse castles!

I've transferred the pattern and made a good start on the stitching. The blue mice have their castle and the red mousies are soon to follow. I'm liking how the design is stitching up. I went with DMC cotton floss for this one, since it's for kids and silk seemed a bit overboard. Ok, silk seemed like a fabulous idea, but one of my friends called "reality check" on me and was correct. The cotton is looking good, so I am happy.

Now that the project planning is done and I've actually started, I wanted to give a shout out to the awesome blog "Got Medieval" which inspired the design for this project. I was looking around for a cute little pastoral scene for a kid's project and remembered the epic mouse versus cat marginalia battle. I've wanted to do something fun with it for a while, so I seized the opportunity. I didn't have enough stitching space to do the poor, defeated kitties artistic justice, but that may just be another chapter in their sad tale. Here is the thread of the tale of the cats versus mice.

• He Hates Meeces to Pieces
• Revenge of the Stripey Kitties
• This Post Doesn’t End Well

Two horses

I've finished the applique and decorative stitching for both of the horses. After that I ironed them out to roundels. Next step is to applique them onto the tunic!

Horse applique number one

My little guy requested decorations for his new tunic. When I asked him what kind he decided that he wanted some horses on his tunic. I needed the tunic finished for the event, but then got to work on his decorations. He has been checking with me every day to see my progress. Last night I finished the first horse and he really likes it. Hooray! The horse is white linen appliqued to a black linen ground fabric, which matches the collar and sleeves on his tunic. I hand appliqued the horse using needle turn and a button hole stitch. After I finished I wanted to add a bit more to the outline, so I just did a quick outline of chain stitch.

Starting an apron dress

I've started work on an viking apron dress! I finished sewing it last week and had some time this weekend to get started on the embellishments. The sewing went well and all more gores are pretty and lay flat, so I was very pleased. It seems that completing a dress is only the first step, since there is lots of decoration to do. I started work on the embroidery, since that should go fairly quickly.

I follow a lot of blogs of people I don't know who do nifty things, and I have been particularly inspired by Ari's embroidery. I have a box of worn out silk shirts that I use for scrap on projects and wanted to use it for applique. I didn't want to use wonder under for the applique though, since it would make the silk too stiff and weird. So I took a leap of faith and tried Ari's techniques. I think most of her stuff is wool, so I may regret using fiddly silk, but hey - it's "free" stash fabric, so I may as well give it a try.

First step is getting the fabrics sewn together and the pattern transferred. I traced the pattern on some tissue paper and then put the dress + silk + tissue paper in an embroidery hoop on the sewing machine. The hoop kept the silk from slinking around and gave me some maneuvering control. Spirals on a completed dress on a straight stitch is probably the path to madness, so I've got an embroidery/quilter's foot on the machine to do the work free hand. Below is a picture of the set up. It worked pretty well and my only complaint was that the hoop should have been a bit bigger for better maneuvering (but there's a trade off for fabric tension with that slinky silk). My 4-year old was fascinated by the process, so I got some "helping", which resulted in some wiggly lines, but that is fixed later. Here is the result off the machine. Silk is sewn down and pattern sewn in. Don't worry, it gets prettier with more stuff on it. Trimmed away the excess fabric and loaded it up into a hoop. Now we are ready for embroidery time! My first concern was anchoring down the edges before the silk totally shredded and getting the edge decoration done. I really liked Ari's anchored chain stitch approach for strength + decoration, so I gave it a shot. It took a few stitches to get the rhythm right, but I like the way it turned out and it seems to be holding up. In my zeal to anchor the silk firmly, I think that I used stitches that were just too small for the anchored stitched. I probably should have made them twice as long, but I was so worried about a strong anchor, shredding silk, and edge coverage that I was perhaps a bit too enthusiastic. There are a few little silk shreds poking through, but not as bad as I had worried. Of course the whole silk background may disintegrate after washing, but I will still have some nice surface embroidery, and that's how experiments go. Next is filling in some of the pattern. I worked the spirals in stem stitch and the inner circle in chain stitch. I'm still working on my stem stitch technique, but it is improving and I think that it will hold up. As I'm stitching, I am also pulling out any stray wiggles from the sewing machine thread. This keeps things looking tidy and keeps too much fuzz. So far, I really like it. The embroidery over silk lends an almost quilted quality that gives it some depth and shine. It's actually nicer than I expected. Next up is the gray fill for the outer and inner circle designs.

Oak Leaf Handkerchief

This was my contribution for Ansteorr'a Pennsic largess (for Queen Dagmaer of An Tir). The design is loosely taken from her heraldry - green oak leaf and blue border. This was a chance to practice my teeny tiny hem, which I think is getting smaller and more precise. It was my first try at a handkerchief and I'm pleased at how it turned out. The handkerchief is a really light weight linen from fabrics-store.com, which is really light and soft.

I did the hem in Gutternman silk sewing thread and the embroidery was done in a single thread of the Rainbow Gallery Splendor (which is a 12-ply). The tiny chain stitch was kind of a pain, but the end result was really nice. A single thread of the Splendor is a little fuzzier than I probably would have preferred originally (it was on hand) but the end result was a chain stitch that kind of melts into itself smoothly, so I think it turned out to be a good choice. I declare this a handkerchief success and move boldly forward with more handkerchief plans.

Below is a zoom of my teeny tiny hem with coins for scale. There is a US penny, a Euro one cent, and just for fun a Nederlandish guidler. That should cover most of my readership I think :) I was so happy with my earlier tiny hem that I really finally felt like I might be able to make some nicer things out of delicate linen. With a little practice, I think that the stitch turns out really nicely. I am perhaps a little smug to officially add a new skill to my arsenal.

Finished Tunics

For those of you following the saga of Rachel's lily tunic - it is finally finished! Hooray! She came over and re-drew some of the detailing on the sleeve joins and the curly-q's at the end of the bottom panels better to her liking, and I finished it a couple of nights ago. I really like her improvements - I had her re-draw them because I didn't like my free hand work (its really not my strong suite). You can still see some of the extra markings since I haven't washed it yet.

Today I also have a Bonus Tunic! That's right - two tunics for the price of one post! My 2 1/2 year old son came with me to Kingdom Arts and Sciences and so I made him his own little tunic. Its about a size 4T, so its pretty small. My verdict on children's clothes is that they usually go faster and are a bit easier to sew, until you get to the neck and arms, which are tiny! I had to poke the eyelets in with an awl while I was in a hurry for the lacing to work, so I will try to stitch those up nicely before he wears it again. I meant to get a picture of him in it in action, but I totally forgot! Perhaps next time :)

Progress on Rachel's lily tunic

I've made some good progress on Rachel's lily tunic. I'm hoping to finish it by Yule so that she can wear it to the event. All I have left is the border stitching, so I think I'll make the deadline :)

Tunic trim progress

tunic-progress
Originally uploaded by helene83

I've finished a little less that a skein of thread and the back panel is almost done. After I finish this part, I need to trace the design on the rest of the tunic trim. Hooray for progress!

Stitching trim

trim-stitch
Originally uploaded by helene83

Here's the first little bit of stitching finished last night. Its in DMC Cotton Perl #5 Ecru. The tunic is linen.

Tunic trim

tunic-tracing
Originally uploaded by helene83

Rachel and I sewed like crazy to get enough garb to stay clothed for all of Gulf Wars, but we planned to decorate stuff later. Now that I've got some time, I'm going to embroider the trim. This is my first victim - one of Rachel's tunics. I've picked a lily design off of a 13th century German painting.

Here is the first batch of tracing. I used a washable crayola marker to trace the design. My test swatches with the crayola markers washed clean, so hopefully it will work out ok.