The Steamstress

Steampunk-happy crafter getting in trouble with needle and thread.

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Slightly  blurry pictures (*sob*) of my latest needlepoint portrait - my friend Mare’s handsome tri-color corgi, Ace. I used the red white & blue because as I told Mare - he’s a goddamn American hero.

Lesson learned on this one - when you scatter beads across the surface like this, it makes it very hard to mount the fabric on a board without having any wrinkles.

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Needlepoint portrait of my friend Mary’s pretty little chihuahua, Lily Belle. I fell in love with the gold frame so I had to add beads to match because Lily, she’s a princess.

It’s more textural, not as delicate as I might have wanted since Lily’s so soft in real life. Still, I have to smile when I look at it, even remembering the pain the fluffy fur coat caused me.

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My second needlepoint portrait. I’ll post one with better detail later, but essentially, I used a photo as reference - hence the large-proportioned head. :)

Still learning of course. Like, stripes are hard because they show where your tension’s uneven and make your background look drunk.

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My first attempt at needlework portraiture - my friend’s beautiful corgi, Ruby. I’m pretty happy with this, despite the unevenness. I learned a lot. Here’s hoping my next one doesn’t take 50 hours!  :)

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Again, I shoe-horn something that’s totally not steampunk in here, but hey - I used it to get my hand back in the game. Anyway, what do you do when life hands you too-small, lemon-yellow Polish beer festival t-shirts? Why, make lemon-yellow throw pillows of course.

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I started work on this last Fall, then moving and a 2 week vacation interrupted the process. I wanted to make a neck piece to wrap the neck and drape over the collarbone - kind of a decorative thing that could dress up any existing outfit. Though not entirely successful, this taught me a lot about the process of making an accessory like this:

1. Embroidering without a hoop is rough. With nothing to maintain the tension, it’s all too easy for shapes to get distorted.

2. Freehanding gear shapes might not be the best idea. Like line drawing, these should either be almost machine-perfect, or stylized even more so it looks like they’re meant to be that way. Right now, they’re somewhere in between.

3. I’m still undecided whether it’s a better idea to sew the pieces together and THEN embroider them, or embroider the pieces and sew them together afterwards.

4. There are likely more elegant ways to achieve this look that don’t involve 40 hours of needlework.

Ah well. As ever, this has been a valuable experience in terms of gaining knowledge and confidence. Time to start prototype #2!

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Vacation, work, moving to a new city and other profound family changes have kept the sewing machines quiet, but I did manage to find the time to embarrass my dogs come Thanksgiving time.

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Couldn’t stop myself. Had to make Maisie an Easter fascinator and Milo an Easter tie. 

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More incredible, humbling embroidery work from Michelle Carragher for Game of Thrones.

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OK, these have zero to do with Steampunk, but they were a fun little project for my mom's birthday. I found this adorable "I love dogs" flannel material and made it into two cuddly pillowcases. To personalize them, I drew a portrait of my mom's dog Feo, and used T-shirt transfer paper to transfer the image directly to the fabric.

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These are various experiments I've done in fingerless gloves. They're made of scrap yard fabric, and I embellished them with scrap yard buttons and trim and hand-made ornaments I crafted from small scraps of cloth.

The red gloves I think of as my vampire pair. They're made of soft velour-like material. The beige ones are made of soft knit fabric; I wanted to create a soft scalloped edge over the fingers and see if I could actually do something NOT over the top.

Of course, after that I had to do something wacky, so I made the pink ones - they're my circus performer/Can-Can girl/Moulin Rouge gloves.

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These were part of my Steampunk Hansom Cab Driver outfit from Dickens Fair 2012.

I made them from a thrift store jacket and some buttons I ordered online. They're pull-on and have elastic around the top to keep them up. The buttons are non-functional, but I love them. Little bees!

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Another first year of Dickens Fair costuming. I made these pleather spats for my husband in about two hours. I used a pattern I bought on Etsy (and I won't use it again - I'm not crazy about the seam on the front) and some buttons and buckles I had from a scrap yard.

These aren't spectacular, but they succeeded in adding some interest to the lower half of my husband's costume.

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This was my Hansom Cab Driver coat for Dickens Fair 2012.

I'd only started sewing classes two months before then, and it shows in oh so many ways. I started with a plain brown coat I found at a thrift store for $15, then added pieces of suede from an old skirt to the bottom for length. (I really should have ironed this before I took a picture of it. Ah well.)

I cut the sleeves off, and replaced them with the sleeves from another thrift store find: a velvet blazer I bought for $8. I used the leftovers of the velvet blazer as the vest that went with this outfit. (Since I didn't really do anything to make the vest but clean up the arm holes, I'm not gonna post it.)

For embellishment, I bought new satin ribbon and velvet trim, and found the star buttons on Ebay dirt cheap (I can't remember how much I paid, but less than $10 for about 30 of them. Anyone who's ever bought buttons knows what a deal that is.)

The overall concept for this coat is simple - one might even say timid in terms of Steampunk's general over-the-topness, but my objective here was to accentuate the structure of the coat and add a bit more of a faux-uniform feel to it.

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This was the hat I used for my very first Dickens Fair.

I went as a Steampunk Hansom Cab Driver, so I bought a new coachman's hat and a pretty feather, then sewed the pleather hat band. I wanted to have electric lights on the hat, so I found some cheapie battery-powered Halloween lights and sewed little holders into the hatband to hold them.

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These are the spats I made for my husband's Steampunk Engineer costume and my Steampunk Undertaker costume.

My husband's are kinda sloppy, but it was my first experiment re-using sleeves as spats. The pinstripe material on these started as sleeves on a thrift store sport coat. I sewed velvet trim onto the top, a row of buttons I had from a scrap yard onto the side, and made button loops out of thin black elastic.

My spats began life as part of someone else's aborted sewing project - an art deco-looking satin blouse I found at Savers. I loved all the detail in it and thought about the time someone spent creating those careful rows of fabric and wanted to save them.

I used the front for one spat and the back for the other, and simply sewed a row of buttons and loops onto them. I love thinking that I and some unknown seamstress collaborated on these.

The last are some quick-and-dirty fingerless gloves I threw together out of scrap fabric for my Steampunk Undertaker costume. They were made of stretch black velvet with satin detailing and were really pretty and comfortable.

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This is a combo of the dickie I wore with my Steampunk Undertaker costume, and the vest from the Steampunk Engineer outfit my husband wore.

The dickie I realized I needed once I put on my coat and saw that the neckline was ahem...a bit TOO low. I threw it together with scrap trim and material and a little bit of velcro.

The vest started as a thrift store find - an old men's sport coat we bought for $10. I ordered the vent buttons from Ebay. I chopped off the sleeves and the bottom of the coat, moved the left button flap to above the right one, then added black velvet trim (bought new) to the arms and bottom.

I really like the angular shape I cut into the front - I'd like to do that again in a more pronounced way next time. I felt overall, this was pretty successful. If I could do anything better, I'd say I would rather the velvet trim look cleaner on the sleeves.