After a whirlwind of sewing and then traveling to something like nine states and visiting almost everyone in the world I could possibly be related to, I bring you the finished flower girl dress:

Silk dupioni flower girl dress, from the Pascal pattern printed in the Issue 114 - September/October 2007 of Sew Beautiful magazine, with hand embroidery and beading, modeled by the lovely Nora.

(more…)

I started with a sample piece of the silk dupioni fabric, backed with Floriani Dream Weave interfacing to keep the silk from shredding, and a variety of threads, beads, and stitches (slightly out of focus, but you get the idea):

and decided that the feathered buttonhole “vine” with french knots and pearl beads was the prettiest for a flower girl. The other bands are just too dense, particularly with the ribbon that will be used as a sash on the dress, though I’ll remember them for other projects.

So here’s just the vine for the neckline, before the knots, done with two strands of DMC floss:

(And yes, that is my lap, on the couch, in front of the TV — the best way to do handwork without noticing quite as much how long it can take!)

And with the french knots, but before the beads, done with a pale green Caron silk:

And here is the bodice almost completely embroidered — it just needs the pearl beads on the bottom line. The sash will go below that, which is a one-sided feathered buttonhole stitch. I’ll use the same pattern on the back, on either side of the button placket.

The sheen of the silk really makes it difficult to photograph. I’ll have to take it outside for a truer representation of the colors.

My hands are hurting this morning, from keeping the stitches so uniform and tying all of those knots. When I was younger, doing cross-stitch kits, I just couldn’t figure out how to do french knots, but now I really like them.

I like the way this is turning out; I think it’s better this way than it would have been smocked.

“Point Sampler” on Guatemalan wool, with pearl cottons, metallic floss, and silk ribbon - from the top left, chain stitch, pekinese stitch, fly stitch with colonial knots, long-tailed lazy daisies with a colonial knots, sheaf stitch, lazy daisy, whipped long-tailed lazy daisies with french knots, seed stitches, berry stitch and long-tailed french knots, chain stitch with more long-tailed french knots, moss stitch, wheat ear, variations on fly stitch with french knots in silk ribbon, and a whipped spider web. Approx 4″X6″.

This was made for week two of the Personal Library of Stitches Class, back in November-December 2007. Weeks one and three samplers can be found here.

The lesson was on the concept of “point” — stitches that can stand by themselves, or be grouped for certain effects. I used a piece of the wool that I purchased for an Advent stole (to be posted later this week), thinking that I would embroider it rather than doing all of the embellishment by machine. I ended up going a much simpler route for the stole, because the relatively loose weave of the fabric made it difficult to needle and keep the stitches uniform.

The picture is not as clear as I would like, due to the need for a flash on the dark color and the sheen of the threads. The Pekinese stitches, top right and laced with gold floss, especially do not stand out as much as they do in person.

Back in September, I taught my daughter’s first grade class how to finger-knit. It was fun and chaotic and exhausting.

After at least five parents asked me to show them how to do it so that they could help their kids, I made a video tutorial with the video function on my still camera, and put it on YouTube:

Today, five months later, almost 35,000 people have watched it. This blows my freaking mind.

Starting in November, I took an embroidery class online at Joggles.com from the amazing Sharon Boggin, who is also the host of the Take it Further Challenge. The class was titled “Personal Library of Stitches,” and the goal was to develop a repertoire of embroidery stitches and design concepts to create freehand works of embroidery. For the first lesson I started with this:

(more…)