Ribbon Embroidered Reticule

A few weeks ago I had a rummage in my fabric stash, and I found a piece of soft peach silk dupioni. Unfolding it, I saw that at some point I'd begun embroidering wild roses. It took a bit of remembering, but eventually I worked out I'd started this piece back in High School.  That's quite a while ago now.  Why on earth had I abandoned it?

I decided I'd finish it.  Going back to the stash, I pulled out a frame, my silk ribbons, a box of silk threads -

Oh boy.  It was pretty quickly VERY clear why I'd abandoned the project the first time round. I use dupioni often for ribbon embroidery as I find that silk ribbons pass very cleanly through the fabric - far more easily than they do through a silk taffeta.
  But this particular  soft-and-supple-seeming dupioni was so tightly woven and so tough that I could hardly get a needle through it.  To drag a ribbon through it, I had to pull the needle through the fabric with a pair of pliers.

 

The mystery now wasn't why I'd abandoned the project the first time round - it was why I hadn't burned it in a fire and salted the earth afterwards.

Presumably I was as much a stubborn idiot then as I am now.  The roses were pretty. I would not waste them.I abandoned my first plan -  to unpick the rather-badly-laid-out stems and start the composition over, and instead stuck to a few simple rose leaves. 

Leaf by leaf, I dragged the thin ribbon through the blasted silk.  The resulting tension issues mean that my little rose bush is not the healthiest-looking rose bush in embroidered history - in fact I'm pretty sure some of the leaves have sawfly.
But I pressed on, swearing ineffectually, until there was a nasty snap, and only the front half of the needle came through.  Yep.  My, soft and supple silk had actually broken a tapestry needle in half.  

 

Dropping plans for any  further leaves, I tied off and threaded up the smallest needle I could get away with and started embroidering rose thorns instead.  Lots of rose thorns. This was NOT a FRIENDLY rose bush.

Once I'd wrestled the embroidery into submission, turning it into something I could show off was practically a walk in the park. I needed a regency reticule, so I made that.  

I figured out some dimensions, cut out a template, marked it up, cut it out, and stitched it up.

 

A hand-stitched drawstring channel was next.

 

Then a pair of ribbon drawstrings to match the roses, and lastly, I used up a hank of green silk thread making a set of little silk tassels for the corners.

And voila - a reticule!

 

 
The embroidery might not be perfectly accurate to the period, but it is very pretty and photogenic, and I never need to sew this AWFUL silk again.

So there.

 

 

A Breezy Summer Hat

Summer

Wheat: Gold on Gold

Thought I'd try monochromatic for a change.
Put the last tack stitch in the last leaf this morning!

I really REALLY like the golden wheat ears.  They came out beautifully!

Random ribbon embroidery

Nasturtium

This is my current favorite color of silk ribbon:  Nasturtium, by Color Streams.  It's not a color I usually use - I tend to go for purples and blues.  I bought a hank of it on a whim at a craft show, reckoning to use it as an accent in larger compositions  - naturally, I use it constantly and have to restock regularly.  It's bright, it's sunny and cheerful and not QUITE orange - and it has the same quality of subliminal iridescence that, like real life flowers, lets it coordinate with everything.

Pig Iron

This is Porcus Minoris Mark 0.5- the original test run to see if I could machine stitch the little squeakers.
Mr Tabubil has claimed him as an office mascot.  His name is "Furnace Pig" - and I have stuffed his belly with pot pouri, so that he can climb all over the job site and get black and dirty and still come out smelling of roses.

Oinkers, Doink & Sidney

This triple bill of Porcine Perfection is known as Oinkers, Doink and Sidney (or Sydney. He can't spell.)
Porcus Majoris is reasonably tractable, but the two porcus minorus are liable to cut up something awful if you leave them unchaperoned.

All three have been sent to keep company with the new baby of a very good friend. They used to be my very favorite purple sweater.
            Then the sweater got felted. I didn't know much about felting before it happened, but I've done some research since: one takes wool rovings, or knitted wool fabric, and through the application of detergent suds and agitation and hot water, one turns them into felt.
It's a highly specific process, prone to balling and piling, but the best results are achieved through the use of a centrifuge in conjunction with very high heat.  (You want shrinkage to squash the knitted fabric into felt.)
About a year ago, I accidentally ran this sweater through a hot wash layered between two sheets. The washer and dryer in our old house in Adelaide uses water at about six billion degrees centigrade and spins the water out of the clothes with a small medical-grade centrifuge...
The sweater came out sixteen sizes too small, fully hypo-allergenic, and perfectly felted.
            It was a freak of perfect circumstance, and I have not been able to duplicate it since.  And I have ruined a few thrift shop sweaters trying! 
           So I made pigs instead* and embroidered all over them with silk ribbons.  But for the love of heaven, if you use this pattern, chop the noses off. Poor Porcus Majoris looked like an anteater. Even after some serious lopping he looks less than porcine. With the three porcus minoris, I cut the snout back almost to their front legs- now they look like pigs.

Originally the two porcus minorus had major embroidery on both sides, but I sort of forgot to leave room for an ear and eye on the really busy side and had to unpick everything but the french knots.  Le sigh.