Book Review — The Art of Modern Lace-Making
January 26, 2008 at 9:27 pm | In Book Review, Lace | Leave a CommentSo, while nothing much is going on around here that I could show you, here’s another look at the contents of Project Gutenberg’s Crafts Bookshelf. The Art of Modern Lace-Making explains how to make the kind of lace called “Irish Lace” in the Encyclopedia of Needlework. The basic idea of these kinds of laces is to use different woven braids for the pattern and fill in the forms built out of those braids with decorative stitches.
The book, printed in New York in 1891, consists mainly of examples of lace designs. At the beginning there is a short introduction about the history of lace-making, which seems to have more legend than fact in that regard. Following is a description of the different lace stitches, accompanied by illustrations of the techniques employed. The different types of braid commercially available at that time are shown next, before the main section of the book starts.
This section has short descriptions of different projects, each with an illustration. There are lots of lace projects, and a short section about darned net at the end of the book. Here’s an example of the type of projects shown:
Some projects are just shown as a pattern, not as a finished project, like this butterfly:
And here’s an example of the darned net work introduced at the end of the book:
Overall it’s really a fun book to look at, although of limited practical use nowadays, since it’s nearly impossible to get the materials needed to try out some of the stuff shown.
Beaded Jewellery
January 20, 2008 at 3:53 pm | In Other Crafts | 1 CommentTags: Beading
Although I usually don’t wear a lot of jewellery, I sometimes have the urge to make some. Here are the results of some small projects I made a while ago:
The bracelet was embroidered an a light blue fabric band 2.5 cm wide, the closure is a piece of velcro. For the embroidery you take all the beads for a whole line on the needle, take the needle down at the end of the line and on your way back to the beginning you couch the thread down between the beads. I cut the band a bit more than twice as long as the finished bracelet, so I could make a nice clean backside by folding it back over the embroidery and sewing the edges together.
The brooch is about 4.5 cm in diameter. I made it mostly in a 90 minute workshop at a crafts fair a couple of years ago. You take a pretty dense fabric, lay it double and draw the form you want (a circle in my case). You then sew it together, cut out the form including a seam allowance and turn it inside out. Fill the little resulting pillow with wool and sew shut. Then you start to embroider the beads on it, using a double thread and always stitching through all the layers, so the filling gets compacted. When finished, this leads to the pillow being really stiff. Attach the fastening needle to the back and voilà, a finished project!
First Try at Temari
January 13, 2008 at 3:31 pm | In General | Leave a CommentTags: Temari
I’ve always admired the colourful patterns of Temari balls when I saw pictures of them somewhere. So, when I stumbled upon Temari für Einsteiger some weeks ago, the book followed me home. And here’s the result of my first try:
And here’s a view from a different direction:
This ball is made from a styrofoam ball 6 cm in diameter, wrapped in yellow sewing thread and decorated with Nr. 5 Perle Cotton. Wrapping the ball in sewing thread is not really an enjoyable activity, and I think I stopped a bit too early, not thinking that I’d need to hide all of the perle cotton ends in there. So those ends are visible in some places, but hey, it’s my first project, and I enjoyed making it and really like the result.
Here’s a nice English-language site I found while looking Temari up on the web. Enjoy!
Hand-Quilted Pillow Cover – Finished!
January 5, 2008 at 3:38 pm | In quilt | Leave a CommentI finally finished making the hand-quilted pillow cover that I started during a one-day workshop on hand-quilting. As this is my very first hand-quilted project, it’s interesting for me to see what kind of progress I made. So on this picture you can see a comparison between my very first lines on the bottom and the last ones in this project at the top. While the lines are still not very straight, the stitch lenght has gone down quite a bit:
But there’s definitely a lot of room for improvement. Here’s a picture of the whole motif before sewing it up into a pillow cover:
And, finally, the finished cover peacefully sharing its space with a previous project:
I really enjoyed making this one, now I need to think of my next project so I can continue practising.
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