A Pad Stitched Strawberry

Well  - I had quite a weekend.

            At Jenny's Biggest Morning Tea I was given a flier for an embroidery workshop sponsored by the local quilting guild. Country Bumpkin, an an Adelaide sewing store, was sending up a teacher for this past Saturday and Sunday.  Saturday was an introductory day for beginners,  but Sunday looked exciting - silk on silk embroidery, in an Elizabethan style of not-quite-stumpwork, that I'd always liked but never been quite willing to try, so - why not?

            Yesterday morning I knocked on the door of the Quilting Guild Hall - and walked into rather... more than I was expecting.

            There is an Australian-published embroidery magazine called Inspirations that's full of extremely elaborate and intimidating projects.  What I hadn't realized was that Country Bumpkin, far from being a cute and cozy craft store - is actually the company that produces Inspirations magazine.  And that Sunday's workshop was a seminar taught by Susan O'Connor - teacher, designer and an astonishing embroiderer.  And she was mine, all mine - well, myself and 9 other ladies from the quilting guild  - for a whole day, at a fraction of the price she customarily charges for her classes.

            Seriously - this woman is amazing.  She's stunningly talented, and is in high demand all over the world for her seminars and master classes. She had brought with her from Adelaide a table's worth of exquisite embroidery pieces for us to sigh over and fondle (here are a few of them- these particular ones were actually in the classroom with us, but the pictures don't come close to showing the exquisite detail and texture of the dense embroidery.) 

            The demand for her time is understandable.  She's a wonderful teacher.  Monique Johnston, who had run Saturday's class, sat at the back of the room doing things with needles and thread that looked as though she was painting on silk, while Susan led us through our paces with silk thread and number 10 sharp needles and handed out the project du jour  - a tiny embroidered bag silk.  We looked at the design - a stylized Elizabethan strawberry plant, no more than two 2 inches across - and all "Oh, yeah!  We'll get this little baby done today - wheee!"

            Susan smiled serenely and began to explain how to pad our strawberries and strawberry flowers with layers of satin stitch - and eight hours later, I had several stem-stitched stems, 3/4 of a split stitch and satin stitch leaf, one of two strawberries, and the padding of a strawberry flower.  You see - this is textured silk embroidery - you work with a single strand of silk, and you pad out the shapes by doing layer on layer of satin stitch - a strawberry the size of my fingernail has nine layers under the final layer - and then you have to criss-cross it in gold and couch it in green, and -well, there is a fair list of things that go into a silk strawberry.
            On a completely unrelated note,  I now have a divot the size of Crater Lake in the top of my middle finger.  I need to invest in a thimble. 

And my word, did I eat well!  I'd packed a sensible lunch of sandwiches and carrot sticks (I was feeling virtuous that morning.  So sue me.) but I'd forgotten something important - the ladies of the quilting guild are elderly country women: there was a morning tea provided with madeira cake and home made biscuits, a lunch of hearty country soups (plural) and long loaves of fresh-made bread, and an afternoon tea of more madeira cake and chocolate cake and more biscuits and home-made cheese straws - I may not have eaten healthy, but I ate solid.

            I also learned just how sharp really high quality European needles can be.  They're so narrow and fine that they just slide straight into your fingers and you don't even notice until they're a quarter of an inch deep.  The afternoon was punctuated by howls of anguish and yells of "SHIT SHI- sugar. sugar.  darn. drat." as delicately spoken country women leaped to their feet and ran for the first aid box before they bled all over the silk. 

            Today I've been all over amazon and found a set of books by Di van Niekerk, a South African woman who combines these techniques with ribbon embroidery, which clears up my last lingering dubiosities of "well,  this is fun, but I really love the freedom and spontaneity and creativity of designing as you go, as you can do with ribbons so,  should I...?"

            Well, I should.  And I'm sold on silk thread.  It's only a dollar more per skein than DMC cotton, and it doesn't fray and it's a billion times as strong and it keeps its luster - and I don't think I can go back!

Fire and Ice: Part 5 - The Dress!!

I woke up on Saturday morning, took the bustle skirt off of Sally's shoulders and sighed hugely - the tapes were way too short and the apron attachment to cover the zipper at the central back looked absurd - it was far too small to be rucked up with tapes of its own.
            So I unpicked the tapes in the apron and lengthened everything by 100 percent.  It works.

The Dress looking Splendid:

Straight on:

Lots of sideways yumminess:

The dress has a couple of technical issues - the bodice tends to ride up and wrinkle- I thought about putting some heavy duty press-studs on the waistband but it became very puckery - a better solution would be a piece of fabric to go between my legs-  leotard style, but I didn't have time or appropriate materials, so I sewed myself into the dress and sailed grandly out of the house toward my ball.
            I'd bought face paints and found a lovely design that I planned to base my own on - but had an allergic reaction to the paints.  I began painting on the yellow undercoat and without any fanfare or preliminary itching, my eyes puffed up until I was squinting through bloodshot slits, and they began to weep - it was like Niagara. I jumped back into the shower and washed everything off, then proceeded to redo my face - conventionally.  With as much gold as I could convince to stay there.  It doesn't much show in the photos, but I was most impressively gilded.
            The bustle isn't perfect - the upper apron is too long and the whole bustle tends to slide sideways. I was mystified till I took the dress off after the party and found several pins still tucked into the lowest tier and tugging the whole assemblage off balance.
            On the whole, however, for the amount of fabric I had to play with - I'm very happy with how this gown has come out!
            In fact, my only genuine issues with the over-skirt stem from too much fabric - the little apron attachment needs shortening and the over-skirt is far too wide -it doesn't hold the gold underskirt tight enough and the whole assemblage blooms too wide. I need to unpick a few seams and lap the back apron further over the front so that it sits more neatly.

Here is an example of how the skirt is too wide, in contrast to how it should be:

I found my jewelry in a little store on Bloor street in Toronto a few years ago - the necklace was sold strung on a cord instead of a chain, and the earrings had long chains reaching up from the top of the flower and ending in little hooks that could be strung into your hair. A few days ago I replaced the cord with a chain, removed the chains from the earrings, and attached the tikka to the clasp of the necklace, so that it could dangle down between my shoulder blades. Very elegant!

I love the shoulder ruffle on my bodice - I wired the edges of the upper and lower sticky-out-y bits so that they'd stand up sharply. Unfortunately, this ruffled piece is NOT detachable from the dress - although I wised up when I got to the feathers. And after that, the waist ruffle that disguises where I took in the waistband. THAT little bit of yummy scrap-flower-craziness can be removed if I need to wash the skirt!

Shoulder ruffle:

Frost and fire!

Fire and Ice: Part 4 - Almost Done!

Ahem: The bodice is sewn, the underskirt is sewn, the overskirt is sewn - and only the underskirt still fits on Sally.

Sewing tapes into the skirt:

The finished over-skirt sitting on TOP of Sally:

 All I have left is a few fastenings - press studs and hooks and eyes and buttons.  And possibly something amusing for my hair.  Yesterday I went back to Spotlight for face paint and feathers, but the selection was non-existent - even by Spotlight standards.  A very sweet lady in a store uniform explained that the St Johns Ambulance was  holding a masquerade party that night- which explains why it looked as if the millinery section had been ravaged!  She kindly tracked down a carnival mask with a nice set of red feather biots glued to the top so that I could cannibalize it-

Let's see how it looks in the morning. 

Fire and Ice: Part 3. You learn something everyday…

And what I learned today is that two layers of Spotlight's most delicate white netting under a skirt and a) you get one nasty scratchy rash around your mid-section from the horrible plastic weave and b) you look pouffy enough for an Elizabethan faire. 

            Yikes.
            So - This is a blurry photo of me looking cranky after I discovered exactly how ridiculously large the skirt was. My sister says it looks as if my knees are eight and a half months pregnant.

 

 

 

 

Here's another photograph of the overblown skirt on Sally.

 

 

 

 

Therefore, ergo and quod erat demostratum, the skirt will be worn sans-petticoat.

Here is a really horrible blurry-mirror photo of the late 1930s look I'm going for.  My camera really doesn't like low-light situations, does it?  And it seems to be incredibly liberal about how it interprets low-light… sigh.

 

 

 

 

Fortunately, the lining of the skirt gives it enough body to hold up to the apron front.  The lame is too flimsy to stand up on its own, so I went to Spotlight and found some ice-white polyester duponi, which, while being a fabric of spectacularly nasty hand and shininess, looks positively classy in comparison to gold foil lame.  While the counter-lady was cutting my yardage she gave me a series of squinty looks and muttered dubiously about what an awful fabric it was.
Hharrumph.  Don't look at ME, lady.  This is the best your lovely shop had to offer.

Yesterday Mr Tabubil pinned the darts on the bodice while I was wearing it, and contrary to his worst expectations, he did NOT stab me and I did not bleed out through the fabric!  He doesn't believe it, but he's actually very good at this sort of thing.

The bodice is now finished, but because Incontinent Sally (my mannequin) is still a work in progress and does not yet match the measurements of my upper torso, you won't see any more photos of the bodice until I'm wearing it at the party.

Fire and Ice: Part 2

Yesterday's work, starting small:  here is the finished apron for the front - you can see how prettily the back apron will cover it at the sides.  (needs red velvet ribbon down that side seam.... Maybe after the party!)

Also the back "hide the center zipper" piece is done and trial -pinned.

I really love this purple sash -particularly the way the tasseled drapes hang down the back of the dress!  Pity about the color.  If only it were red.  Perhaps I can find some scarlet satin at some point.   I love the way the back of the skirt looks with the sash twisted like that!

Fire And Ice - Part I

Yesterday evening I was handed an invitation to a birthday party with a theme: Fire and Ice.

There's not much that's gold or white in my red-desert wardrobe, and I'm not one to dance all night dressed up in a pasteboard sun or a ski suit, and I'm up to my ears sewing presents for new babies of good friends, so I reckoned that I'd go to spotlight, pick up some shimmery white bits of fabric and a white wig and tart up a pair of jeans and a shirt to look like I was covered in frost.

            But THEN - I remembered the BALLGOWN.

            About a year ago, I ducked into the local thrift store looking for brass buttons and had an unexpected WOW moment - a very tall and very plump person had made herself an A-line ballgown skirt and scoop-necked blouse out of scarlet silk duponi - and donated it to the thrift store, who had priced it $5.

            I love this shop. I have an unexpected WOW moment there at least once a month.

So I pulled it out of the stash and cut it up and started draping it on Sally and - I think that this is it.

It's very Schiaparelli, isn't it? With the bustle and the pouter-pigeon front?

The flowery bits are the leftover scraps of silk roughly ruffled into flowers - I'll interleave them with gold scraps - all shreddy on the edges. 

            There's only one little hitch - the party is on SATURDAY.

            But I think I can pull it off.

It took half an hour to cut up the skirt and an hour to drape the dress. And it's DOABLE, If I don't care too much about the inside finishes, which I don't.

 

Schedule:

 

Tuesday - finish the damn elephants and sew up the red apron front.

Wednesday -  have Mr Tabubil help me pin up the bodice - and then sew it.

Thursday - Sew the bustle skirt back, and sew the apron front and the bustle back to the waistband of the original skirt.

Friday - Make the underskirt - which involves all of  one french seam to turn the gold into a cylinder, a rough hem (I wonder if I can leave a train at the back - or will I just rip it to shreds?) and three or four layers of stiff cream-colored net (a la Spotlight!) attached to an elastic waist band.

And maybe a bustle pad - we'll see. I rather like it the way it is, all flat and Schiaparelli 1939.

Then, lastly - use all the silk scraps to make ruffle-roses (predominantly red, with only touches of fraying gold poking out) to hide where I've had to shorten the waistband, and to tart up the rather dull neckline.

Currently the bodice is pinned so that the excess fabric flares out as panels on the outside. Should I seam them out or should I leave them like they are - to add a bit of fun?

Happily, the red silk over-skirt is exactly the same as the one I'd planned for my very-on-hold steampunk outfit, so on THAT, I'm getting back in the game. I started making the steampunk outfit 13 months ago, but tried to fake the 1880s with an A-line Vogue skirt pattern - and screwed up the corded petticoat and blue pinstripe underskirt so thoroughly that Mr Tabubil had a major giggle fit and sent me out to buy an actual pattern, which i did, but I'd sort of used up all my motivation, and the fabric migrated to the bottom of the stash, where it could live forever, I thought.

I may be wrong!

Not a Sewing Post

Jenny, a friend of mine who runs the quilting store Rose Hall Quilts, is hosting a Biggest Morning Tea to benefit the Australian Cancer Council.
            Jenny has spent a whole year planning this event, and it is going to be one heck of a shindig. Originally it was intended simply as a get-together-with-a-cause for the quilters of the gulf region, with a silent auction of pretty cups and saucers and old fashioned silverware (culled from estate sales and thrift stores by her quilting minions over the past months) to raise money for the council.
            And then, eight weeks ago, the morning tea exploded.

Arriving at her house for a sewing session one Wednesday morning, I found her feverishly labeling books of raffle tickets, and looking seriously harassed.
            "Tabubilgirl!"  She bellowed. "It's metastasized!  It's gone CRITICAL!  The Biggest Morning Tea is now frigging ENORMOUS!"
            I took the flyer that she thrust at me.
            "It started when Lucy told me I had to have a plant stall.  'A PLANT stall?' I said.  'This is a morning TEA!' Then she told me how much money you can make from a plant stall in this town, and then she told me she'd run it, so all right, we have a plant stall.
            Then Chrissy asked if she could be in charge of the catering.  I said 'Great!'  and asked her if I could still contribute a few boxes of Pink Ribbon Tim Tams - I LOVE Tim Tams dunked in coffee - and she got really SHIRTY and said 'NO!  I'm talking about the baked goods stall!'
           'The Baked GOODS stall?' I said.  And she said 'YES!' And she told me how much money you make from a baked good stall in Australia, so fine, she can collect people to bake for her - no worries! She can run the baked good stall. I'll do the coffee. 
            I asked her how much coffee and biscuits I should provide - I was thinking about enough for 50 people - and she told me to cater for TWO HUNDRED!! THREE HUNDRED even!!!  And now we've got trading tables, with CWA ladies sewing purses and knitting baby clothes like they're on fire, and we're having a quilt exhibition, which means I now have this huge pile of quilts insured for ten thousand dollars EACH sitting in my spare room, which makes me very uncomfortable, and now there's a raffle for another quilt (NOT a ten thousand dollar one) and travel vouchers to Adelaide and I don't even know what else, with an ARMY of ticket sellers fanning out across the entire peninsula and my wholesale suppliers have been sending me the most amazing quilting supplies as donations to the cause and the whole thing is getting out of hand and I'm starting to panic. 
            I mean, it's only being held in my back yard!! Do you reckon we can get the pool hall and the BBQ shed and the shop shed and the granny flat cleared out in time? (editors note: in the Gulf region, people LOVE their sheds. You need at least three in your backyard to be taken seriously by anyone.) There's 150 folding chairs and six portable gazebos on order, but maybe we need more space? D'you think we can move the quilting exhibition out of the house and onto the verandah? What if it rains?!?!  Where will we plug in the pie-warmer?"

In summation, I will be baking.  Lots of 'American style cookies, please!" for the baked goods stall.
            It's really quite something. Cancer is the one really democratic charity.  There's nothing political or geopolitical about it.  It's as inoffensive and feel-good as the Make a Wish Foundation.
            Everyone can get behind Cancer, and my god, they certainly have.  Jenny's suppliers are sending her hundreds of dollars worth of fabrics and threads and quilting templates as raffle prizes and local retailers and travel agencies have been getting into the act -

Saturday, May 7, 11 am, at 5 Woods Terrace, Whyalla.
It's going to be quite the shindig.
If you're in town, please do drop by.