Tool swap & an embroidered waistcoat

On Saturday, I swapped Mom’s embroidery machine for my wig-wefting jig from Williamsburg. It’s a win-win, well, for me, because late last night she emailed me saying she’s already woven 9″ of hair! I kinda think that’s as much of the human hair as they gave us in the class.

Meanwhile, I embroidered one side of the waistcoat for Leonard and put in the buttonholes. Purple silk with a floral motif in purple and two shades of blue, plus silver leaves/vines (coordinates nicely with the powder blue damask of the suit). It might look a little more historical if I connected the motifs with vines or something, but I think I’ll finish the other side of the waistcoat first and then decide if a little hand-embroidered fill-in is necessary. Oh and I want to do some top-stitching scalloped edging too.

Took a while to get the hang of the machine, so I ruined one side of the waistcoat; good thing I had more fabric. Lining up and carefully spacing the motifs is a bitch. Also, the bobbin on the machine can be fussy and will occasionally just not catch at all. So I quickly learned how to stop the embroidery mid-pattern, and fix the bobbin, without loosing my place in the embroidery. Of course, the whole thing takes a while because you have to re-thread the colors — the motif I used had 4, so while the stitching took “7 minutes” according to the manual, it was twice that. Plus a lot more for re-hooping and such.

Still, I’d estimate that it took maximum 2 hours to embroider one side of the waistcoat. And the buttonholes took 20 minutes. And it looks freakin’ gorgeous!

Later that day…

There’s Mom’s machine. It’s just a little BabyLock that does some fancy stuff. Not a full-fledged embroidery-only machine, so don’t get your hopes up, heh.

I am, however, deeply in love with its buttonholes. There are at least 6 of them. Aren’t the little points on the ends cute?

Oh and thanks to Cynthia for gifting me with these buttons. Leonard will be well-appointed 🙂

Here’s a close-up of the motif I used for the waistcoat (and the only decent pic I got of it).

And here’s all of them on the waistcoat, done and blurry (and I left extra fabric on the inside edge to make hooping easier; still need to cut it off).

Back to it!