one of the little details that excites me the most about vintage style is the prevalence of embroidery. it's so personal, so crafty, so kitschy--it's just somehow exactly the kind of vintage touch that can lend an unexpected elegance to a garment. my heart melts a little bit every time i see a 40's or 50's pattern that includes a little monogram or motif on the pattern art. so i've been trying to collect vintage embroidery transfers and learn more about embroidery than making friendship bracelets (i could do a double diamond pattern when i was 13!) and the messy satin stitches i used to embellish my high-school backpack.
i found mccall 909 sneaking around ebay one afternoon, snatched it up in a fit of "buy it now!" and immediately made plans for several of the transfers, collecting fabrics and patterns and plotting out where the embroidery would go. only i was still intimidated by it, like it would take too long to do, or be too difficult or too fiddly, and i even considered taking it to one of the embroidery places on 35th st in the manhattan garment district to have them do a motif.
happily, i got over all of that:
 |
i did a split stitch as described in the delicious primer doodle stitching. this transfer, unlike the others in this pattern, was not designed to be filled in with a satin stitch but i still wanted something with some visual interest. i also wanted it to be very subtle, so i used a white floss against the cream-with-purple-pinstripe fashion fabric.
and it only took me about an hour (or, to measure time more accurately when i am doing handwork, two episodes of NCIS, with commercials fast-forwarded)!
i'm interested in what experiences others have with adding embroidery. for instance, to hoop or not to hoop? i did not hoop, because the side front princess panel of my fabric was cut on the bias (so that i wouldn't have any stripe-matching issues) and i didn't want to stress the fabric. i did, however, stabilize the fabric with some wonderful lightweight, super-flexible fusible interfacing from the shop on off-the-cuff. are all vintage kaumographs so fantastic? this one ironed on like a charm, so i didn't have to fiddle with tracing or transferring. the pattern actually came with multiple samples of each motif, which meant i didn't have to fret about destroying a little piece of pattern history by using the transfer.
more questions: i did this embroidery by hand, obviously, but i would love to do more of it by machine. not on an embroidery machine, but on, say, a featherweight or my basic kenmore. are there good resources for this type of work? a cursory (and not-so-cursory) google search suggests that perhaps there is not.
cross-posted at my blog, puu's door of time