Camberwell Beauty

Had a very exciting friday, I made a pretendy neckpiece base for practice. I used plain cotton for the top and layered chiffon over plain cotton for the collar. That bit didn't work quite as well as I'd hoped, mainly cos I'd been ignoring the fact that chiffon was quite so see-through so its ended up with a big hem so I'm gonna try overlocking and, fingers crossed, that'll work better.

Then I sewed and sewed and sewed and made some beautiful Camberwell Beauty Butterflies...

This one is is organza with free motion machine embroidery

This is a photocopy on acetate that I machine embroidered the detail on.

 

I loooove the organza one, I was so excited I didn't wnt to look at it while I was sewing the bottom wings on which I think is why it went a bit wonkey lol. The thing is though, because the fabric is so light and the embroidery is so heavy, the wings just fall. I think that when I've gont a lot together I'll be able to put a little stitch between the wings and that'll sort it.

The acetate one actually worked a lot better than I thought it would which was quite a nice suprise. I might put the occasional acetate butterfly on to keep the wings upright.

Hi Ho, Hi Ho...

It's off to sew we go...
Spent yesterday dyeing and today sewing, what fun. I've been playing with Organza, Chiffon and Crepe de Chine and these are some of the beautiful colours I've come up with...

Except I found out after I'd spent all day sewing these wings that chiffon sort of shrinks and wont stretch back into the proper shape no matter how hard you try.

Hopefully the organza will work better.

Dun dun duuuuuunnnn.....

Final collections are all complete! WOOH! I've spent most of the day in the print room, freezing, gluing stuff to foil so I can finish them...

Anyways, here are my Embroidery ones:

These were done on cotton sateen (apart from the first one, that was some kind of wool that wasn't very nice to use) and have been done using various hand and machine stitches as well as some applique and dyeing.

And my printed ones:

These were done on habotai silk and cotton sateen using various procion and acid pastes, discharge pastes, pigments and some foiling. (The first 4 are silk and just look so nice, I think I have a slight obsession with silk - I did loads of work in AS Level with it too)

 

 I know they're a bit small but I think if you click them they get bigger and you can have a proper look. If they dont and you really want to see some more detail then just say and I can put them up big!

Final Piece Numero Deux

Finally finished my second final piece for my embroidery collection! Tra laa!

And, since I actually quite like this one, I've got some close ups of my fave bits for you...

Hope you like it too :)

Machine Stitches

We started our Embellished Surfaces project today and I got to play with free motion stitches on the machines, I was quite excited!

This is just a free motion stitch on Calico using an embriodery hoop. I quite like how sketchy it looks as I was copying from a drawing.

This one is machine couching - you use embroidery thread at the bottom so you have to mess with the tension - and it makes this lovely raised, wrapped effect.

Finally, we have normal free motion stitches but this time in colour. This has been sewn with Stitch and Tear behind it so the Calico doesn't pucker. I decided to leave some areas just with the veins sewn in so the detail wasn't lost and I think this is my fave piece from today :)