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.

More rose progress

I've finished most of the stitching for the rose! Hooray! I'm very pleased with how it's turning out :)

My current obstacle is that I forgot to buy yellow wool for the center. I didn't even realize it until I finished the outline and was at the "what next"thought. Oh well, I will have to make a trip to the thread store. It's not really a problem if it gives me an excuse to go to the thread store.

One medieval aesthetic that has been a bit hard for me to embrace is outlining in festive colors. My natural instinct is to just always outline in black. I have seen so much beautiful embroidery work with contrasting and festively colored outlines, that I decided to grow as a person - I used white for the outline. I really like the results, it adds to the harmony of the piece. For perspective here is the rose stitched, just before the outline is added. You can see a little bit of the black drawing through, which gives you and idea of how a black outline would have looked - I like the white much better.

Wool roses!

I've had this project sketched out for a while and have finally gotten started on it - wool roses! Racaire has been posting beautiful wool work on her blog for a while and it has inspired me to give it a try. It's a definite shift from all that silk that I like to play with.

I used the pattern from Mary Corbet's blog for her silk Tudor rose project. One day I will try the actual goldwork rose from her blog, but for now I'm just using the drawing.

So, this is my progress thus far. I've finished the fill stitches on the rose. I have just started the outline stitches, but didn't get enough work done on that to make an interesting progress picture. I am slowly getting a feel for the wool and am getting to really like it. I don't know why, but I had a mental image of wool as unruly and messy, but it is starting to look really nice. It even has a soft, fuzzy shine to it that is very nice.

Floche doodles

I bought some DMC cotton floche on a trip to the embroidery store and have been meaning to give it a test drive for a while. It is so smooth and soft, and such a nice fiber that I couldn't wait any longer. I pulled a motif from a handy Dover book, "Early Medieval Designs from Britain for Artists and Craftspeople" and started doodling with split stitch. It took me a few rounds to get a good feel for working the fiber, but I really love it. The stitches really work themselves nicely together for a pretty flow with stitch direction. The floche is a small thread though, so I need good lighting to do the split stitch. It's fairly tedious, but it's the kind of tedious that I frequently find relaxing. I took a quick picture of stitch progress on the frame along with the floche skeins.

Largesse for Pennsic Finished!

Ta-da! Finished! There are more progress pics on my Flickr stream, but since I was too lazy to blog them in progress - I will spare you. I put the penny on top for scale, since it's a fairly large pouch. Final materials list:

• wool - gray pouch, blue roundel
• white linen - white crescents and pouch lining
• Kreinik Jap 5 silver thread for couching and tassel tops
• Gutterman silk white sewing thread
• a lace weight white wool yarn for drawstring and tassels

Largesse for Penssic

I thought I'd post some of the progress pics on the little project I'm doing for our gift basket at Pennsic. I've been meaning to try some needle-turn applique, so this is my test project. The background is some blue wool I picked up at Gulf Wars and the crescents are a nice dense weave linen. I used the linen both as the applique and the foundation, since I didn't have any thin white wool. Below is a progress pic of the applique. The linen foundation gave more loft than I thought it would, so the crescents have a nice depth. After the applique was finished, I started with the outlining. The outlining is done in Kreinik Jap 5, couched with silk thread. I like the way they are turning out, though the applique acquired some skew. I starched the foundation linen, but alas, it was a crescent with lots of bias edges, so skew was probably inevitable no matter how well I tacked it down before the applique - lesson learned. The outlining smooths things out quite a bit and adds some forgiveness to the process. The camera doesn't really capture the wool / linen / silver contrast very well, but I am pleased with the look. More progress soon, since I'm on a deadline.

Dark blue pouch for raffle

Bryn Gwlad is doing a raffle next week to help raise funds for the Ansteorra Gulf Wars site. I finally finished the little pouch that I was making to raffle off. The outside is dark blue linen and the lining is a light blue linen. The stitching, tassels, and drawstring are done in white cotton floche (DMC). Here you can see a better look at the seam treatments. I used a technique that shows the lining as decoration.