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.

(Very) Tiny Purse

I was chatting with our gift coordinator for the crown and she mentioned that they were a bit low on largess, so I decided to make a little something to make her job easier. This little project combines three "to-do" things on my list: eyelet practice, twisted cords, and up-cycled shirts. I've been meaning to practice eyelets and have yet to feel comfortable with them. This little project had 12 of them - and I think I've got the hang of it now. Recently one of the blogs I read posted a tutorial on quick twisted cords and I had been meaning to try it out since I don't seem to have a good track record on finishing long finger loop braids to finish out projects. Finally, I was gifted a box of old silk shirts from my sister a while back and I have been wanting to use them for more projects. Most of the shirts have large chunks of silk that is still nice, so I just have to dissect them and pull out the good bits as I go. The silk for my apron dress is my first shirt project. This is my second. This is a simple little circle purse in silk with twisted cord silk drawstring. I put my favorite teas in it as a little bonus :) When I patterned it, I had intended that it be large enough to have the tea totally inside, but drafting patterns just really isn't my strong suite. Oh well, another skill to work on. The eyelets turned out very nice and surprisingly consistent. They are a little snug for the draw string, but they work. Even as a tiny purse I think it works out well with the tea and the silk is so shiny and soft that it still makes me happy.

And now for something completely different

I've have come to appreciate the beauty of vector graphics for patterning. The ability to scale, manipulate, and print designs easily makes life way easier. As a result, I have a new compiling fidget (as illustrated by the genius of XKCD) My new fidget is making vector graphics patterns for "future projects" and I have decided to share them with the world. Please feel free to use these for your personal projects and enjoy them. If you want to use them commercially, please email me to work something out. If you do something really awesome with them, I would love to see pictures :) Without any further ado, here is the first design from a Bishop's mitre at Uppasala Cathedral and Treasury in Sweden. I've uploaded two different formats to my Google Drive here: PDF and SVG format. If I have done things correctly, you should be able to download them without creating accounts or logging in or any extra trouble. I created the SVG in Inkscape, which is a free program that is similar to Adobe Illustrator. Please let me know if there are any problems with the downloads or files.

Two roses!

I'm in the midst of packing and have taken the opportunity to sort my craft stuff by unfinished projects. If I pack everything else then I can't start a new project, so I *must* finish them! So far, it's working. I had one finished rose and one that just needed a few more minutes of work, so I pulled them out as my first challenge. Now, I've finished my two wool roses! They are a combination of satin stitch, Klosterstich, and stem stitch. They are stitched on linen, using "Designer's Dream" wool from Rainbow Gallery. I posted a picture of the thread palette just for fun. The wool is a very fine wool, which is fairly easy to work with. It's not too fuzzy, but it does tire pretty quickly. The threads are very springy, so you have to be extra careful with stitch tension.

Cheap goldwork?

I've been itching to try some goldwork embroidery for quite some time, but can't bring myself to spend that much money on supplies. I am a huge fan of Good supplies and am happy to spend my money at places like Hedgehog Handworks for quality stuff. However, most of the goldwork embroidery market is ecclesiastical embroidery, where they have a budget to allocate for real gold. I'm more interested in playing around with stuff and will likely making some stuff for SCA that will go camping. In this case, it doesn't *have* to be real gold, just look nice. Thus began my quest to find cheaper alternatives.

Fortunately, I received a lovely goldwork sample set from Hedgehog for my birthday and I have the real deal to compare with. I have picked up a couple of options and going to give them a try. There are three important points to this experiment. First they need to be pretty good approximations for the real deal. I want to re-create a look, so the closer they are to the original, the better. Secondly, they need to play well with fibers. I need to be able to stitch them up without them falling apart, shredding things, or being too finicky to work with. Finally, these substitutions need to wear well. If the metal on them goes a nasty color after a week of use, then it's not good.

I begin my tests with orders from two places:

• French wire from Fire Mountain Gems
• Gold coil cord from Fire Mountain Gems
• Spangles from Crazy Cow Trading Post

Here is the first stitching test result: I used my book "A~Z of Goldwork with Silk Embroidery" for instructions and did three rows of test swatches. Row 1 is from page 102. Row 2 is from page 109. Row 3 is some chip work with two different kinds of gold check. The top border of the chip work is a stretched coil wire with red embroidery thread strung through the core (couched down with red thread) to mimic some of the nicer pearl purl effects.

Overall, I'm happy with the test run. The materials aren't as supple as the nice goldwork supplies, but they weren't difficult to work with (beyond the normal challenges of goldwork). I will have to work on my technique, since you can definitely see some unevenness on the row 2 work. The chip work on row 3 would normally be done over yellow felt padding, which makes for a more even sparkly effect. I definitely like the check on the left better than the check on the right. That's not too surprising since the check on the right is super cheap and even has crossed the line into looking cheap. If you needed lots of sparkle, minimal definition, and to cover a lot of ground cheaply, then the stuff on the right would be ok.

Before you go out and spend any money, keep in mind that I have no idea how this will wear. My plan is to do a couple of test swatches and see how they do. One great suggestion I got at Laurel's Prize was to leave a test swatch outside for a week for weathering and try another swatch just sitting in water. If the first test swatch survives my living room, I think it gets at least a few points for durability. As always, there are more detail photos on my Flickr feed, including pictures of the thread packages used in each sample.

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.