Tambour Flower Clutch Bag Finish

Finally there are some photos of this piece of tambour embroidery, transformed into a clutch purse.  Here is the front of the bag.  I chose a beautiful periwinkle dupioni silk for the base fabric and loved it so much, I split the tambour worked silk organza into a seam at the bottom to show off how pretty is the fabric underneath, on the back (below).

The inside is a very slippery lavender silk- very soft and feminine, with a small pocket for a credit card, business card or lipstick.  After the initial intimidation dissolved into determination, the most difficult part of creating the purse was getting the glue into the recesses of the purse frame, without getting the glue on my hands or on the silk on either side.  And then making sure the glue was holding all the way around both sides of the frame.  Most difficult!  :-/

Closeups of the stitching, using a number of thread types and brands...  This purse is now stuffed with paper to keep its shape, and put into a bag of presentation pieces.  Time to frame up another piece of silk and get back to work!

As usual, Mango is in the middle of everything! 

Tambour Embroidery Progress

 Projects, projects.  I have too many of them in the works....  Here is a tambour embroidered piece I just finished.  It is going to be sewn up into an evening bag later today.  This is the pattern I got out of an old art deco book of designs.  You can see it was intended to be very monochromatic.  I intended to follow the colors as exactly as possible.  But as it turned out I could not find a yellow I liked for the bottom curved part and it did not translate so well with so much pink all over.

Here is the piece, all laced up on the frame.  I work on a frame and not a hoop to maintain good strong tension on the silk organza fabric base.  Here you see the pattern all drawn out onto the fabric.  I used a soft white chalk dressmakers pencil that rubs off with a bit of water.  As the piece progressed, I had to go back over it with the pattern underneath and pencil on top to retrace parts of the design because my arm rubs the lightweight chalk off.  You can see the flower on the bottom right is buggered right now due to this and has not been blotted and retraced yet.  I used a basketweave stitch technique (with the tambour hook) that I just learned last month for the inside of the curve.  I love this stitch- it gives such dimension!

 Just for show and tell, I ordered a bunch of skeins of silk from Japan to use in tambour embroidery.  It is rather a crapshoot when receiving these orders-- some of the silk is too thick for using the hook but most of this was very fine and very usable.  Isn't it gorgeous?  They stitch up so beautifully and the sheen is amazing.

Another photo just for show and tell-- this is my wee work station.  My husband built this folding frame stand for me and it works perfectly in this little bedroom corner where I keep all my supplies.  The light is a clip-on Ott lamp and works extremely well in this dark corner.  You can see I keep alot of things right on my frame!  This is how I like to work.  The only thing I try to keep off the frame is my scissors although sometimes I forget.  Oops-- there they are on the fabric.  :-/  So far-- no accidents!  I worry more about my fabrics than myself, though!  Looking at this photo-- I have an array of threads that I used for this project.  On the upper left of the frame is a box of Sulky rayon threads and Sulky metallic threads.  On the right are bags of very fine art silks- really a fake silk as they are Rayon but they look like silk and it is almost impossible to tell the difference on the finished piece.  Some of the bags hold real silk, too.  I use several tambour hooks but mostly I prefered to use a size 70 on this piece.  And my pencils and pattern are there.  I have a habit of having to have a pencil clamped in my mouth while I am working on something.  Nerves, I guess!  If I don't have one to chomp on, I end up biting the inside of my cheek.  Weird, I know!

Ok, I am getting somewhere with this.  The original pattern called for small stem petals and I drew them on but frogged them out after I finished one.  It just looked weird, so they got rubbed out and just the larger stems remain.  The green is Sulky 40 rayon thread.  The pink is silk from Japan.  The periwinkle blue in the basketweave is Sajou embroidery thread from France- one strand.  And the bugle beads are a gorgeous blue/grey color I bought in Paris last year.

Basketweave in metallic thread on one flower.  :-)

Heading down the home stretch, putting different colors of silk dupioni fabric underneath to see how the colors look against it.  So much planning and pondering goes into every piece I make.  

Taking a break with my sweetheart in Williamsburg!  We enjoyed a rare day out without throngs of tourists last week.

Our dog Buddy was captivated by the horses & carriage!

Home and back to work.  The flowers are completed and I am using a point terre, or pulled stitch, to set the bugle beads in a 90 degree angle from the flower tops.  Also added another top curved line of bugle beads underneath, above the pink silks.

Finito!  Ta-da! Today I have my outer fabric, interfacings and silk lining all cut out and ready to sew up into a bag.  Stay tuned for the finished bag! For all you Valentines out there, have a happy day of love! <3

or nue project

Not that I need another project or anything, but....  I am intrigued to death with a goldwork technique called or nue.  It is pronounced 'ornway', not phonetically 'or nu' with a long "u", as I have been doing for a while (doh!). I found the correct pronunciation in a book- A~Z of Goldwork.  So, what is it?  Or nue is a technique where an area of fabric is covered with (usually) a pair of fine metal threads, laid in close rows.  The metal threads are couched in place using fine colored silk or cotton single strand thread to achieve a colored or shaded pattern.  The background, where no color is needed is couched in self-colored thread.  The couching stitches are worked closely together where intense color is needed and further apart for softer shading.  This is all taken verbatim from the A~Z of Goldwork book section on or nue, because it's too hard to explain in my own words.  Anyway, I want to frame up a piece of silk and use a colored pencil to shade in the areas of where I want color and outline the rest.  I ordered a piece of silk from Berlin Embroidery Designs www.berlinembroidery.com.

What else I needed was some recommended silk threads.  These are soie d'alger threads in colors I am considering for my project.

Here is my choice for couching down the silver metal threads where color is not needed.  I'm not sure if to go with the grey on the right in soie d'alger or the blanc on the left.

And because money does not grow on trees in my life, and I cannot afford real silver or gold threads (which are available, believe it or not), I ordered the much less expensive Kreinik Japan Thread #5 in silver from the same website listed above, plus one in gunmetal just because I love gunmetal, and one in gold (imitation!) that I will use for the base metal.  I will only use the silver for the project piece.

After intense searching and thinking about it and looking through art books, photographs, ready-made project kits and other sources, this is what I ordered to work my first project.  I love whales and this one has such pretty intense blues that would look really lovely on silver.  This image came from a tattoo art download site.  I paid $1.99 for the image.  Isn't it beautiful?  It will have to be shrunk down to size so I hope it doesn't become too compact because this project is intended to be rather small.  If it is too large, I will use all my silver threads (and lose my sanity with all the couching) in one go.  Time to soak and dry the silk, lace up my slate frame and get started.  I'm a little afraid of it, so we'll see how it goes.  Apparently quite a few needles are used for this at the same time, so the threads don't constantly cross on the back.  Woo, hoo!! Wish me luck!

first blog post!

Welcome to my new blog!  I read a long list of needlework blogs every day and have been wanting to start my own for some time.  Well, there is no time like the present!

Just as a place to begin, I want to point out that the big photograph in my blog header is of a tambour (or luneville) embroidery I did last year, from a master class I take every year in Kentucky.  It is the principle form of embroidery that holds my interest and hopefully, my future profession, as I aspire to teach these techniques someday.  I also am going to Paris (yes!) in February 2012 to take class at Lesage, a couture embroidery school owned by Chanel.  More on that in a future post.  :-)

But for now I am starting with Anna Hrachovec's new book- Teeny-Tiny MOCHIMOCHI.  I cannot get the book cover loaded on here for some reason, but please go to Amazon or Anna's blog http://mochimochiland.com/blog/ and check out these incredibly cuuuute little knitted miniatures!  My mom collects bride & groom sets and this wee one, pattern found in the book, was a must to knit up!  The photo above is the almost completed wee couple, although the groom needs hair and the bride is waiting for her veil.

Male pattern baldness, perhaps?

Blocking the wee veil.

Ta-da!  Veil stitched in place.  The groom has hair, albeit Eddie Munster hair (I had a problem with his hair.)   But check out the wee bow tie!

For anyone attempting these patterns, they are easy-peasy if they don't require color change in one round.  If they dooooo require color change, as the groom's white shirt/black tux did, and you forget to twist your color change, it can be an expletive spewing experience challenge.  Ha ha.  I don't swear.  Nooooooo......

But I am extremely pleased with the final results and can't wait to present the happy wee couple to my mom to add to her collection.  And of course, sometimes prop-ups are needed, both in real life....

and wee knits.....

Thanks for looking at my blog and welcome!