I See Purple Elephants....

His name is Roger.
Roger Featherstone Umbrage the Fourth. 

Finger Puppets

My stuffed elephants are on hold until the other half of the baby gift arrives, so yesterday afternoon, during an impromptu sewing bee with Sarah, I whipped up a few of Soto Softie's finger puppets for the big (slightly bigger) sister of the baby.
            I made them about half the size that they're shown on the Soto Softies webpage  - I wanted to make them the right size for a set of two-year-old fingers.  So no big bobble eyes.  Just embroidery floss and a bit of attitude.
            They're rather creepy.  They look as if they're planning something.

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!