Stitching at the Speed of Light
On Sunday morning, I finished (finished!!) the skirt trim for the green and peach silk bliaut (which I really ought to rename, having looked at the "peach" silk again. It's more...um...Orange Julius? It ain't peach, that's certain. Then again, the color we call peach isn't really the color of peaches anyway, so potayto potahto).
It feels like both a great accomplishment and nothing at all, looking at how long I've been futzing with this project so far, and how tremendously much I'm hoping to get done still.
And then, since it was only not-quite-noon when I finished, I finally corrected the warping of a band of inkle trim that's been waiting patiently for me to get to it again and zipped through a foot or so of weaving. It's a dead simple, plain weave band, so even though I've warped about five yards, it shouldn't take me more than a few hours to weave it off and clear the loom. This is grand news, as I've been...ah...encouraged...not to skimp on the weaving of the brocaded band that's meant to reinforce and support the skirt of this dress. I need about 100 more cards, I think. And a lot of time.
I don't have a photo of the completed 7.15 yards of trim yet, but I do have a few of how I added the next piece of muslin backing in preparation for the sleeve trim block.
This block, which is the sleeve hems and upper arm bands, is just shy of a yard square. (Wow, when I put it that way, it sounds like a lot. Maybe I'll just keeping thinking in terms of linear inches. That way the numbers are big enough and the units small enough that my brain just throws up its metaphysical hands and shrugs.) I ironed a piece of muslin about four inches bigger in each dimension than I needed, having discovered on the last skirt trim strip that having the hooped area only half-covered by backing is a Bad Plan, and pinned it very carefully and with a lot of smoothing and double-checking to one edge of the new block.
My thread color system is degrading a bit as I make repairs to guidelines with whatever I have handy, but in general yellow is basting stitches to hold backing in place, and not-yellow is guidelines for trim pieces. I'm only basting on two adjacent sides (in this case, the top and the left side of the trim block) to allow for stretching and smoothing as I embroider.
It also occurred to me, as I looked at the trim block butted right against the final skirt trim strip, that I'd be running a risk of embroidering the backing from the skirt strips into the base of the sleeve trim. I do not want to do that. It leads to bad places with tiny scissors and swearing.
So I flipped up the excess backing and used the world's laziest catch stitch to tack it out of the way. I didn't realize until I was almost done that my yellow almost perfectly matched the gold embroidery, and by then I wasn't about to redo it, so I'll just have to be careful as I clip the extra stitching out later.
By the way: After spending five months stitching two-yard lengths of trim? 27 inches at a time feels like flying.
It feels like both a great accomplishment and nothing at all, looking at how long I've been futzing with this project so far, and how tremendously much I'm hoping to get done still.
And then, since it was only not-quite-noon when I finished, I finally corrected the warping of a band of inkle trim that's been waiting patiently for me to get to it again and zipped through a foot or so of weaving. It's a dead simple, plain weave band, so even though I've warped about five yards, it shouldn't take me more than a few hours to weave it off and clear the loom. This is grand news, as I've been...ah...encouraged...not to skimp on the weaving of the brocaded band that's meant to reinforce and support the skirt of this dress. I need about 100 more cards, I think. And a lot of time.
I don't have a photo of the completed 7.15 yards of trim yet, but I do have a few of how I added the next piece of muslin backing in preparation for the sleeve trim block.
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| Technically this is also a photo of the last 16 inches of skirt trim. |
My thread color system is degrading a bit as I make repairs to guidelines with whatever I have handy, but in general yellow is basting stitches to hold backing in place, and not-yellow is guidelines for trim pieces. I'm only basting on two adjacent sides (in this case, the top and the left side of the trim block) to allow for stretching and smoothing as I embroider.
 |
| Should I have used something other than yellow thread? Yes. Yes I should. |
So I flipped up the excess backing and used the world's laziest catch stitch to tack it out of the way. I didn't realize until I was almost done that my yellow almost perfectly matched the gold embroidery, and by then I wasn't about to redo it, so I'll just have to be careful as I clip the extra stitching out later.
 | |
| Really the only difference in these progress photos is going to be the red guidelines instead of blue. |
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