Most fun thing to ever happen to embroidery: that rat’s nest of tangly-tangly threads on the back of your work that manage to ensnare your…
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Scissors don’t come with directions. Much like a screwdriver (the mechanical kind), they are supposedly a tool so simple that you should just look at…
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So I’ve been doing a little embroidery lately (which is an odd statement from She Who Doth Not Embroider, but it’s true). And then…. loopies.…
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Ever wondered how, exactly, pants work*? What kind of crazy pattern-making sorcery goes into drafting a pant? If you’ve ever looked at a “from scratch”…
2 CommentsIt happens. We all loose our way some times. And we all reach for the seam ripper. I remember the way I was taught to…
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Since it’s that time of year when people here in the U.S. start thinking about what to do with their tax returns, I thought I’d…
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Geometry is important in pattern making. I know I go off about that a lot, but it’s true, and it’s why I’m obsessive about squaring…
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I recently had to make a pseudo-cavalier tabard-y-thing, using tissue lamé (hmmm…. reads like “lame”) for the appliques and trimmings. It wasn’t anyone’s fault, really, it just had to work with the ones that had been bought for other costumes. If you need to tame the “HELLO, I’M SHINY” factor of lamé, there’s a way…
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…without anyone looking at the finished tab and asking if you were drunk and wearing mittens when you sewed it. I mean, everybody “knows” that if you want to bind rounded tabs you just have to use bias tape. Like, duh. But be honest with me – how well does that action really work when you try it? Between you, me, and the interwebs, when I try to machine bias onto a rounded tab in one swell foop, it usually looks poo. But a miracle happened last week, and my brain kicked in. There’s a little bitty-bit of magic from millinery that makes the difference between the top corset (the drunken-mittens approach) and the bottom corset (so much nicer…). And it’s fast, people. It’s faster than fighting the normal Battle of the Bias…
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So here’s the trouble with tutus… They are made of many, many layers of tulle*. And tulle, these days, is made of hate. I don’t want to sound all judgey-pants, but it’s true. Your average fabric store tulle is made of nylon, a fiber which suffers from a constant string of cheap, tragic affairs with single electrons. By the time you have 6 layers of nylon tulle mounted on the basque (that’s the shaped waist-band bit), you’ve actually sewn yourself a fluffy little Van de Graaff generator. A tutu-in-progress is amazing – you can actually watch threads fly from the floor towards the tutu where they permanently bond with with tulle. Effective for cleaning, perhaps, but not so good for the tutu which should ideally not look like some sort of worm-farm. Just in case you, dear reader, ever find yourself herding tulle through a sewing machine, here are a few tricks I’ve picked up from a couple years of sewing dance concerts at the shop…
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