Sabriel Surcoat, Part 2

This is kind of a look, actually.

I made it to pinning the neckline at work, but decided to delay cutting it until I had a chance to try the surcoat on again and confirm my size and depth guesses. Although the pinned version was meant to give me a general outline to follow for a rounded neckline, I ended up really liking the notched shape of the front neck. Is it surcoaty? Who knows! It is a fantasy garment made of The Worst Cloth For Cold And Damp so I can do as I please.

Not bad for pinning into my own armpit.

When I got home, I tried it on, confirmed the neckline, and pinned out the front half of one arm opening. I smoothed out the line a little bit after taking this photo, but that's about the shape I cut out.

Second verse, same...enough...as the first...

And then I flipped the scrap to the other side and pinned around its edge, and cut just inside the pinned line to produce a second arm opening hopefully very close to the same size and shape as the first. Sewing is only sometimes a precision sport for me.

I wonder if this binding will make the fabric look bluer?

Having cut the arm openings, I needed to get some binding made and stitched on, because now I have wriggly semicircular cuts that're just waiting for a chance to stretch out of shape. I ordered a suede lambskin from Etsy, which is just luscious to touch, and rigged up a long "ruler" from a spare folder when I realized I'd forgotten to bring my yardstick to mark the binding strips. Fine leather binding was common on stays in the 18th century, both for comfort and durability, and I think it makes sense for a garment that isn't precisely a work item, but might still see quite a bit of wear. I also priced out  an equivalent quantity of ribbon (I don't want bias tape because the fabric is already so bulky and stiff) and came to the same cost, if not more, than using leather.

I traced and cut one strip at a time, aligning my little ruler with the new cut edge every time to minimize weirdness from the leather shifting and relaxing as I worked with it. 

Maybe this fabric really is blue?

After a false start wherein I forgot that if you're gonna fold one edge of the binding to make it very neat and hide/protect the attaching thread, you have to stitch on the outside of the garment first, I discovered that stitching very fine leather onto very heavy cotton is no big deal. With a thimble. I have very quickly lost all my phalangeal fortitude since figuring out how to operate with a thimble, and I would probably work much more slowly if I had to push the needle with a bare finger.

One approximately-two-foot-long strip made it around one arm opening with a little bit to spare, and took maybe half an hour to stitch. Good, as I've decided I need to whip down all eleventy-million seam allowances preferably before I wear this more than once.

Also featuring some of the damage from a cable on my garage door failing.

I flipped the binding over the edge after I attached it on the outside with a fairly big running stitch, and tacked it down with a small sort of whipstitch. I overlapped the ends wherever I needed to connect strips by about an inch, which seems to be enough to keep them from working loose.

Some messiness where I had to figure out how catchstitching works.

I decided to go ahead and stitch down seam allowances as the mood struck me. It's a job that needs to be done eventually, and when my hands protest pushing the needle through leather, I can whip down a seam or two easily.

Not sure why I thought 5 square feet of leather would fit in an Altoids tin.

I realized that I'd end up with a tremendously pieced section of binding if I only cut strips as I went, so I went ahead and cut the remainder of my first skin so that I could intersperse the shorter strips from the edges with the longest ones from the center, and hopefully avoid having too many overlaps on top of construction seams in the surcoat.

Still have no idea what I'm doing.

I also put a little pleat in across the point where the main panels separate as they move toward the hem, to give enough slack for turning and stitching down the binding without too much distortion.

This is simpler than the skeleton key I was going to use.

I'd been hoping to find a way to practice mukaish (or badla, or kamdani—if there are finer nuances in the terms, I'm not picking them up from the materials I've found on the technique) embroidery before starting some bigger projects I have planned. The surcoat I'm interpreting is "dusted with embroidered silver keys that reflect the light in all directions." Silver and light-reflective sounds like some manner of metal embroidery to me! While "dusted" implies that the keys are quite small, I'm going to be working fewer, larger keys, both for my own sanity and because this is a medieval-inspired garment. Silver keys on black or blue is a heraldic move, so it makes sense to work them large enough to be identified from some distance. Valerie also has a lovely skeleton key I'll be using for my model.

There are two big stumbling blocks to working the keys this way: I only speak English, and heavy brushed cotton twill is emphatically not the right fabric to do this type of embroidery on. I tried a few ways of defining a shape at first, and was struggling to get the metal to lie smoothly against the fabric. After wrestling my way through about half of a key, I had the bright idea to look for instructions online.

I found a few videos showing different mukaish techniques, and they're pretty self-explanatory, but I remain curious about whatever the embroiderers are saying that I can't understand. Are there more tips? Reasons for working a certain way? I don't know. At the very least, I realized part of my trouble lay in how I was using the metal thread. Flat metal strips seem to be worked either as many (many, many, MANY) tiny dots, where the needle goes over a single spot in a few directions before the strip is clipped and the end anchored, or couched onto the surface in long, smooth zigzags across the area to fill. I was trying to use the strips like embroidery floss, which wasn't fun for me or gentle on the metal (or the fabric, honestly).

I also had to decide whether to continue attempting to embroider directly on the surcoat, or to wait until I could retrieve some sheer fabric from my stash to make embroidered appliques instead. Stitching small dots went more smoothly for me, so I'll be marking keys with basting thread to fend off the issues with chalk rubbing off under duress, and working many, many dots to make the motifs.

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