Royal Gloves - Finished!

And finally, here are lots of pictures of the finished gloves!
 

Royal gloves - sewing things up

And finally I had this lovely pile of embroidery.  We are going to pretend that both of the hummingbirds are facing the correct direction and proceed accordingly.  Next we are going to sew the embroidery to the pieces of our gloves.  The gloves here are actually mittens, because we are Vikings!

 

I just love my quilter's tools.  Here I am using my block ruler and chalk pencil to get all the lines perfect.



And now I've ironed in my the folds for the embroidery piece.  I used an ultra-lightweigh fusible called Misty Fuse.  The fusible itself is like gossamer and floats on the air.  It's good to tack things down and doesn't add stiffness to the piece.  It's not so great if you have the ceiling fan on.  I wouldn't use it without extra stitching though.  I also have my trusty block ruler to line things up just right.

 

 I pulled enough silk from the ground fabric to use it for stitching down the embroidery. Here are the teeny tiny stitches on the fold.

And here is the embroidery all sewn down to my glove piece.  Can we make it prettier?  Yes!



I used the light yellow silk to lucet up some cording for a matching trim.  Then I used the same silk to stitch down the tiny trim over our seam edge.



And here is one finished cuff ready to be sewn into a finished mitten!

Royal Gloves - Rhino

Sven's heraldry is a rhino, which was an interesting design challenge.  It's difficult to make larger creatures in the Viking aesthetic and have them still look "cool" to the modern eye.  After a large number of drafts I finally was happy with this guy.  The rhino was bigger and had fewer smooth lines than the hummingbird, so I went with a tissue paper template for the stitching pattern.  Here's the template basted onto the gorgeous red silk.


I don't like the tissue paper, so it took enormous self control to leave it on while I stitched.  Here's some stitching progress on my rhino.  The color palette and thread are the same set as the hummingbird.


Finally, I was far enough along to pull off the tissue paper!



Nearly done....


And here is a slightly fuzzy picture of the completed rhino

Royal Gloves - hummingbird

My commission for gloves for the Royals of Ansteorra has been delivered, so now I can post my pretty pictures!  The gloves were for Sven II and Antigone II and were given in court a couple of weeks ago.

I had a lot of fun with these, since I had a lot of latitude for design work.  I decided to go with a Viking theme, since they both have some great Viking kits.  I wanted to use their heraldry in a way that maintains the artistic aesthetic for the Viking age.  I spent quite a bit of time futzing with the designs until I found something that I really liked.  My inspiration was largely woodwork and stonework designs from the Viking era.  Here is the hummingbird for Antigone.

The ground fabric for the embroidery was a nice Dupioni silk.  I drew the hummingbird on the muslin that I was using to reinforce my silk and then basted the design to show on the front.  Below are the front and back showing the tiny basting stitches.  

I wanted a little bit of depth on the hummingbird, so the arc of the wing has a layered stitching underneath the satin stitch.

The stitching is in Rainbow Gallery Splendor silks, which is a spun silk.  Both Antigone and Sven have white charges on their devices.  The Viking aesthetic would have been lots of bright colors.  I decided to take a bit of artistic licence with the colors.  I chose a color palette with lots of colors, but then picked extremely washed out versions of the colors.  My goal was to see lots of colors up close, but for the charges to look white from a distance.  Here's a fuzzy progress  picture of the stitching.



Here's another progress picture for the hummingbird.  The fill stitches are a variety of colors and the outline is all in white.





I pulled some threads from the dupioni and used them for the eye embroidery.  And here is the finished hummingbird!

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

Apron dress progress

I went to fiber arts guild last night and have made some progress on stitching the roundels on my apron dress. A while back I sewed down the second roundel (left) and stitched the edges for it. Last night I worked on the first roundel (right). I've finished the white stitching and am working on the gray fill.

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.