Embroidery

Sideblog for needleworks

[headspace-hotel]

Y'all ever open a book on a new subject, read a little bit, and have to put it back so you can process the way in which your mind was just expanded?

[headspace-hotel]

The textile book: okay here is some of the ways that textiles are important to human life

me: Okay!

The textile book: Clothes separate the vulnerable human body from the conditions of the outside world, and in doing so absorb the sweat and debris of human existence, accumulating wear and tear according to the lives we live. In this way, various lifestyles and professions are represented by clothing, and the clothing of a loved one retains the imprint of their physical body and their life being lived, as though the clothes absorb part of the wearer's soul

Me: ...oh

The textile book: The process of weaving a garment and the process of a child being formed in its mother's womb are often referred to using the same language. Likewise, when a baby is born, a blanket or other textile material is the first material object it encounters and protects it. Textiles can create the idea of two things being inextricable, as with being "woven together," or can create the sense of separateness, as with a curtain or veil that separates two rooms or spaces, even separating the living from the dead, or separating two realities, such as a performance ending when the curtain falls

Me: ...oh God

The textile book: Odysseus's wife Penelope undid her weaving in secret every night to delay the advances of her suitors. In this way she was able to turn back the passage of time to allow her husband to come home. Likewise the Lakota tell a story of an old woman embroidering time by embroidering a robe with porcupine quills. If she finishes the embroidery, the world will come to an end, but her faithful dog pulls out the quills whenever her back is turned, turning back the clock and allowing existence to continue.

me: ...is...is...is that why we refer to the fabric of space and time?

The textile book: The technological revolution of textile making is sadly underappreciated. The textile arts are possibly the most fundamental human technology, as once people created string and rope, they could create nets for catching fish and small animals, and bags and baskets for carrying food. In the earliest prehistoric times, the first string or cord perhaps came from sinew, found in the body of an animal. Because of this perhaps the body of a living being could be understood as made of a textile material. Indeed textiles have the function of preserving life, as with a surgeon stitching back together the human body or bandages being placed on a wound. Textile technologies are being used to create life-changing implants to restore function to injured parts of the body, as though a muscle or tendon can be woven and made in this way. Cloth can be used to create a parachute that will save a human's life as they plummet out of the sky. Ultimately, the textile technologies are used to enter new parts of the universe. [Photo of an astronaut and details explaining the astronaut's suit]

Me: STOP!! MY MIND IS NOT STRONG ENOUGH FOR THIS

[headspace-hotel]

The book is "Textiles: The Whole Story" by Beverly Gordon

[unlettered-heathen]

:D this is it! The post that got me to borrow this book from my library! This book is constantly rewiring my brain and parts of it constantly slap me in the face when I am going thru daily life and notice textiles.

Like, fiberglass ANYTHING can be considered a textile! Paper? Textile! Chain link fence? Textile!

And more than ever now when I see something like fabric on a couch or mosquito netting I wonder just how much work it would have taken if it was non-factory made. How many people have still had their hands in making it now. 

I never understood why so many cultures placed such importance on textile gifts as ritual, like many native americans gifting blankets. I get it now.

Tons of other stuff too and it's all the time!

And I'm only halfway through!

Anyways OP thank you for bringing this into my life it's literally reshaping the way I think in a way I'm constantly in awe of <3

(the book if anyone was curious)

[foodforthineownminds]

Here! I found it in an online archive!

It functions as a digital library, so you have to sign in and wait your turn. I'm not sure why you have to do that with a digital book, but it's free so i don't care.

Textiles : the whole story : uses, meanings, significance : Gordon, Beverly : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

304 p. : 27 cm

[justangrymacaroni]

as a knitter, you start to notice how rare it is for characters in tv shows and movies to knit correctly. from worst to best, it ranges from:

- laughably incorrect, just flinging yarn around

- knitting the most basic scarf incredibly slowly because the actor Learned How To Do It For The Role

- old lady actresses casually knitting an intricate lace pattern while doing a monologue

- gromit from wallace and gromit

[justangrymacaroni]

1. that’s a garter stitch, which you can clearly see despite it being made of clay

2. they took the time to animate a modified continental style of knitting, including showing how his working yarn is wrapped around his pinky, and that he’s flicking with his index on his right hand

3. he only has four fingers and yet this is better than the vast majority of knitting on tv

[just-late-roman-republic-things]

The one bizarre thing to me about textiles is that warp-weighted weaving is at least 6500 years old, but our oldest knitted artifacts are only ~1000 years old, and crochet 200 years old. Even though you need less equipment to knit (two sticks) or crochet (one hook) compared to warp-weighted weaving (frame, loom weights, batting, heddles). Why the big gaps between these inventions? And why did each one appear and spread when it did?

[cognitivejustice]

Download this easy DIY clothing repair guide (only 10 pages) from Uni of Kentucky

link to PDF

[ramshacklefey]

Excellent resource if you're new to sewing and want to start doing some clothing repair!

[queenofzan]

Professional seamstress here, who has taught intro to sewing many times, saying: this guide is excellent!

[kohanakonohana]

Your weaving is so beautiful, I hope it gets as famous as Mr. J and Kofu someday!!

Hm... it sounds difficult, but I'll try my best!

[vinceaddams]

Any tips on learning to make buttonholes? I've been putting it off for.... *checks notes* like three years.... but better late than never and all that. I don't have any fancy machines so I gotta do it by hand but that seems right up your alley.

Thanks!

It IS up my alley, yes, I do most of my buttonholes by hand!

I'm actually part way through filming an 18th century buttonhole tutorial, but I expect it'll be a few more weeks before I finish that and put it on the youtubes, so in the meantime here's the very very short version. (The long version is looking like it'll probably be about 40 minutes maybe, judging by how much script I've written compared to my last video?)

Mark your line, a bit longer than your button is wide. I usually use a graphite mechanical pencil on light fabrics, and a light coloured pencil crayon on dark ones. (I have fabric pencils too, but they're much softer and leave a thicker line.) You may want to baste the layers together around all the marked buttonholes if you're working on something big and the layers are shifty and slippery. I'm not basting here because this is just a pants placket.

Do a little running stitch (or perhaps a running backstitch) in fine thread around the line at the width you want the finished buttonhole to be. This holds the layers of fabric together and acts as a nice little guide for when you do the buttonhole stitches.

Cut along the marked line using a buttonhole cutter, or a woodworking chisel. Glossy magazines are the best surface to put underneath your work as you push down, and you can give it a little tap with a rubber mallet if it's not going through all the way.

I'm aware that there are some people who cut their buttonholes open using seam rippers, and if any of them are reading this please know that that is abhorrent behaviour and I need you to stop it immediately. Stop it.

Go get a buttonhole cutter for 10 bucks and your life will be better for it. Or go to the nearest hardware store and get a little woodworking chisel. This includes machine buttonholes, use the buttonhole cutter on them too. If you continue to cut open buttonholes with a seam ripper after reading this you are personally responsible for at least 3 of the grey hairs on my head.

Do a whipstitch around the cut edges, to help prevent fraying while you work and to keep all those threads out of the way. (For my everyday shirts I usually do a machine buttonhole instead of this step, and then just hand stitch over it, because it's a bit faster and a lot sturdier on the thin fabrics.)

I like to mark out my button locations at this point, because I can mark them through the holes without the buttonhole stitches getting in the way.

For the actual buttonhole stitches it's really nice if you have silk buttonhole twist, but I usually use those little balls of DMC cotton pearl/perle because it's cheap and a good weight. NOT stranded embroidery floss, no separate strands! It's got to be one smooth twisted thing!

Here's a comparison pic between silk buttonhole twist (left) and cotton pearl (right). Both can make nice looking buttonholes, but the silk is a bit nicer to work with and the knots line up more smoothly.

I've actually only used the silk for one garment ever, but am going to try to do it more often on my nicer things. I find the cotton holds up well enough to daily wear though, despite being not ideal. The buttonholes are never the first part of my garments to wear out.

I cut a piece of about one arm's length more or less, depending on the size of buttonhole. For any hole longer than about 4cm I use 2 threads, one to do each side, because the end gets very frayed and scruffy by the time you've put it through the fabric that many times.

I wax about 2cm of the tip (Not the entire thread. I wax the outlining/overcasting thread but not the buttonhole thread itself.) to make it stick in the fabric better when I start off the thread. I don't tend to tie it, I just do a couple of stabstitches or backstitches and it holds well. (I'm generally very thorough with tying off my threads when it comes to hand sewing, but a buttonhole is basically a long row of knots, so it's pretty sturdy.)

Put the needle through underneath, with the tip coming up right along that little outline you sewed earlier. And I personally like to take the ends that are already in my hand and wrap them around the tip of the needle like so, but a lot of people loop the other end up around the other way, so here's a link to a buttonhole video with that method. Try both and see which one you prefer, the resulting knot is the same either way.

Sometimes I can pull the thread from the end near the needle and have the stitch look nice, but often I grab it closer to the base and give it a little wiggle to nestle it into place. This is more necessary with the cotton than it is with the silk.

The knot should be on top of the cut edge of the fabric, not in front of it.

You can put your stitches further apart than I do if you want, they'll still work if they've got little gaps in between them.

Keep going up that edge and when you get to the end you can either flip immediately to the other side and start back down again, or you can do a bar tack. (You can also fan out the stitches around the end if you want, but I don't like to anymore because I think the rectangular ends look nicer.)

Here's a bar tack vs. no bar tack sample. They just make it look more sharp, and they reinforce the ends.

For a bar tack do a few long stitches across the entire end.

And then do buttonhole stitches on top of those long stitches. I also like to snag a tiny bit of the fabric underneath.

Then stick the needle down into the fabric right where you ended that last stitch on the corner of the bar tack, so you don't pull that corner out of shape, and then just go back to making buttonhole stitches down the other side.

Then do the second bar tack once you get back to the end.

To finish off my thread I make it sticky with a bit more beeswax, waxing it as close to the fabric as I can get, and then bring it through to the back and pull it underneath the stitches down one side and trim it off.

In my experience it stays put perfectly well this way without tying it off.

Voila! An beautiful buttonholes!

If you want keyhole ones you can clip or punch a little rounded bit at one end of the cut and fan your stitches out around that and only do the bar tack at one end, like I did on my 1830's dressing gown.

(I won't do that style in my video though, because they're not 18th century.)

Do samples before doing them on a garment! Do as many practice ones as you need to, it takes a while for them to get good! Mine did not look this nice 10 years ago.

Your first one will probably look pretty bad, but your hundredth will be much better!

Edit: Video finished!

And here's the blog post, which is mostly a slightly longer version of this post.

[unicyclehippo]

AJSJJDKSJD THE QUILTING SHOW MY GMA WANTS TO GO TO HAS A “FREE TICKET FOR UNDER 30s” IM!!!!! that’s SO funny ?? They wanna encourage young ppl SO much to get into quilting

[unicyclehippo]

what i imagine the quilting convention back room looks like

[unicyclehippo]

this is happening tmrw im soooo excited!!! my gma is bringing her walking stick for age related reasons but also so she can quote “knock those old ladies OUT of my way”

[unicyclehippo]

y’all it was so much fun, there were so many Incredible quilts there, i had an awesome time. here are some photos i took of the quilts, forgive me for how crooked most of them are, i took them v quickly bc my gma was getting tired

i wanna shout out this last one—ITS ALL THREAD PAINTING. THE WHOLE THING. it’s. i should have got a close up of it but it’s all thread painted it’s so so cool

[unicyclehippo]

& yet MORE quilts…

i wanna shout out the top picture — the skull quilt was so cool first of all & it’s ALSO the artists FIRST QUILT??? it was so incredibly cool & detailed I rly loved it. i also wanna point out the last quilt here, all of these flowers are applique & i had so much trouble keeping from TOUCHING it (which ur not allowed to do ofc). it was so gorgeous. the close up square above it is from the same quilt. just wow!

[gallusrostromegalus]

Reminder to everyone to go join your local quilt guild.

[embroiderycrafts]

[aldieb]

“I had a dream last night,” he said quietly. “I was on a road and there was no one with me. And in the dream I said, ‘I don’t understand but I can learn if you will teach me.’ Do you suppose anyone was listening?” —The Sparrow, Mary Doria Russell

my first embroidery project, made for @boudiccabeautiful! ID in alt text.

[themakeupbrush]

To everyone losing their mind over this picture of the Dior artisans making Natalie Portman’s golden globes dress:

This is basically a visual representation of what couture means. Every one of those heavily detailed/embroidered/beaded couture gowns you see during haute couture fashion week is made this way. In order to be considered couture they have to be, but that’s a separate post.

I feel like the work is more visible here because of the effect of the pattern, but pretty much every couture gown is made with this absolutely insane level of work and detail

[tunameltd0wn]

[ID: a close up of a person from the Chanakya School of Craft (Mumbai, India) hand-sewing flowers onto fabric. Their hand and a sliver of their face are visible. The flower appear to be small flower petal shaped sequins held in place by a single seed bead each. The flowers are shades of white, blue, green, pink, and yellow. /end ID]

[changan-moon]

双面三异绣 shuāng miàn sān yì xiù  is a new genre of suzhou double-sided embroidery. It is done on both sides, but the patterns, stitches and colors are different, hence the name 双面三异绣( literally double-sided triple difference embroidery). It enables the viewer to appreciate the image of traditional chinese embroidery art with different patterns, stitches and colors on one embroidery. 

cr 花锦城手工

[antique-scarecrow]

Embroidery is a high art form

[naughtypiggy]

Okay… but how does the fiber change colors? I’ve been doing needlework fo decades. I’ve never met any sort of embroidery floss that was a different color on the back than it was on the front. (Don’t throw variegated at me. You can see this shirt ain’t variegated.)

[princeofthesandgourd-deactivate]

The stitches are smaller on one side! Ive done something similar by couching one thread with a different colored in a satin stitch worked in one direction. With silk threads being so thin, you could make long satin stitches with one color on side a, but you wouldn’t be able to see the very tiny stitches made on side b. Then you do the same thing vice versa with side b, giving you two different colors on each side

It could be more complicated, idk, I couldn’t really find tutorials for it, but that’s how I do my double sided embroideries. it doesn’t look as good but here’s how the couching method looks when it’s done!

🌿🌸🌿

🌙 luna and artemis ☀️ finally figured out how to make the wrong side a different color! here’s my first double sided embroidery using this m

[fred-erick-frankenstein]

Picture by @amiguruineapig

[catcrumb]

i sent you an ask a while ago about if i could embroider one of your cats on a shirt! it took a bit longer than expected because life happened but here she is… calico wizard… bravely covering up a bleach stain on one of my favourite shirts

-

@linuxuser​ !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[sosuperawesome]

Oliness Art Studio on Etsy

[lazy-cat-corner]

Reminder that if you’re crafting something and you’re worried that the person you’re gifting it to won’t like it, it’s important to remember that the person you’re gifting it to doesn’t care about what it looks like. They care that you thought of them when the occasion was announced, logged online to search ideas, consulted your crafting friends, went to the store to pick the supplies and spent hours putting it together.

You could be a first timer or expert but the heart you put into it is all the same. ❤️

[blankie-wanky]

I grew up with a grandma who quilted, but she’d never been interested in passing along the hobby, so when she finally kicked it I was the grandkid who got all her materials, ‘cause I was the only one who knew how to use a sewing machine. Then, in 2015, a friend had a baby and I figured I’d make her a quilt, ‘cause how hard could it be?

oh

my

god

Luckily I am the stubbornest human alive, ‘cause I never woulda finished otherwise. I didn’t know what I was doing, didn’t know the terms to look up how to do anything, I musta reinvented the wheel like eight times and it took ten months, BUT I DID IT.

Figured I’d suffered enough and would never do it again and now I’m on quilt #9 smdh

————————–

I’m hyperventilating.

Holy shit. Holy SHIT.

This is INCREDIBLE.

Oh my god.

I’ve gotta go lay down holy shit look at this how do we just walk by other human beings every day and live our separate lives when there’s a person sitting next to you on the train or in line for coffee who goes home and makes things like this what even IS being human holy shit.

GOOD FUCKING JOB.

[awheckery]

Oh heck I did not expect the notes to blow up on this, UM

Okay so on a purely technical level, this is not that difficult, you just gotta come at it a little sideways.

The background of this sucker is just rows of 1.5″-wide fabric strips. I can’t remember the exact pattern, but I wanna say it was something like one row 6″ strips, one row 4.5″ strips, one row alternating? I don’t remember exactly, it was a while ago. That’s not difficult, you just lay it out and sew it all together one row at a time. It’s not hard, just tedious.

The fish are a lil different. I can’t draw, there is a disconnect somewhere and my hands are stupid, so I figured out probably fifteen years ago that tracing was the way to go. For this, I legit just yanked several photos of fancy-looking goldfish off the internet and traced over ‘em in Photoshop.

Once I had enough, I printed my outlines, laid ‘em out on the background to create the idea of movement, and then traced the outlines out on fabric and pinned the hell out of ‘em.

This woulda been WAY easier with Heat ‘N Bond, but I didn’t know that was a thing at the time. From there I just used just about every fancy stitch on my inherited sewing machine to make the fish STAY WHERE I PUT THEM, and also look good.

I have since learned this is called “raw edge applique” but whatever. It’s fun, it’s neat, you can do it with a bunch of stuff and impress the hell outta people. More recently, it’s how I’ve gone from this:

to this:

(this was another project I SUFFERED over unnecessarily, because I’m the dip that decided to quilt the waves, like a moron)

god that sucked but it looked SO COOL when I was done!

[ms-demeanor]

I’m very sorry to tell you that if you thought we would be less impressed with you after this update you were very mistaken. I’ll say again:

Holy. Shit.

[rhythmelia]

@awheckery that is absolutely mindbogglingly gorgeous work *___* Also clearly you subscribe to Go Big or Go Home (and cry about stitchery) You are such a Stitch Witch, amazing <3

[awheckery]

Aw man, that is the most hilariously accurate assessment of my life; in my fam, if you don’t Go Big, did you even try? I am constitutionally incapable of half-assing anything, which is why the goldfish quilt is also, um. a chenille quilt.

The back is plushy as hell and looks like this:

If you look at the front again, you notice those diagonal lines don’t go through the fish, and yet cross the entire back. Please don’t ask me how I did that. It made me so sad and used so much thread, there’s at least a mile of thread in this quilt, but bY GOD IT’S SURVIVED FOUR YEARS WITH AN EXUBERANT TODDLER AND IT’S STILL IN ONE PIECE

[quigonejinn]

as the friend with the exuberant toddler who has the honor of having not just this quilt but the matching pillows in her home, i wanna chime in and say that this is 

EVEN MORE GORGEOUS AND LOVELY IN PERSON.

AND IT’S WASHABLE 

awheckery is too modest to mention it, but the quilt is loaded up with real specific meaning – I’m Chinese-American, and there are eight goldfish on the quilt and a ninth on an accompanying pillow.  Nine is a homophone in Chinese for “always”, “gold” is a metonym for wealth and prosperity, and “fish” is a homophone for the word for abundance, so putting nine goldfish on something for a new baby is a lovely Chinese way to wish them good luck and abundant prosperity in life.  

And the pillow shown above is symbolic, too!  You’ll notice that the two ships up top.  My family is ethnically Han Chinese from Hong Kong, so  awheckery put a distinctive Chinese ship up there, and my husband is Norwegian, so that’s a Norwegian schooner.  And then the three whales underneath are me, the husband, and our wee little whale.  

Please note that I did not know ANY OF THIS WAS COMING.  They just FIGURED THIS OUT ON THEIR OWN and by polling friends in our shared fandom, and one day the quilt with the blanket showed up at my house, and I  screamed so loud that my husband came running.  And then we got the pillows a little bit later, and I may have screamed again.   awheckery is one of the most talented humans I have ever had the pleasure of knowing or meeting.  

I’ve told OP that if my house is ever on fire, I’m grabbing the kid and the quilt in that order.  The husband can go find our wedding photos.  

DID I MENTION THIS IS WASHABLE 

[dannydanoninoo]

This post increases my faith in humanity this is so creative and the last explanation of making it specially with a meaning for their friend makes it 10000 better

[embroidery-boy]

Holy shit, its washable?? With a child that is golden!! Absolutely well done, I see this circle back time to time and it is absolutely stunning and well made. I will never not reblog.

[knittingazoo]

My sister, Casey, got married this summer, so I thought I'd welcome her new husband to the family with a stocking to go with the one she was gifted by our great aunt in 1992. Hope they like it!

Pattern credit: Snowman and Rudolph stocking pattern by Mary Maxim

[chloelemay]

Behind the scenes of my knit stop motion animation! Hope you enjoy 🐑💛

(Music: Daystar - Little bunny / https://youtu.be/qn5-caUy2xc)