pond_ripple's Fabric Blog

Okay, so it's been awhile since I have posted any real projects, but I've been busy crafting for my ren faire outfit. This is my first time going to one of these events so I pretty much started from scratch. Everything has been rolling along and falling into place, and now I'm finally ready to start posting some pictures. I'll start with my bag: This backpack is made from the fabric I had after making the dress. It wasn't really part of the plan, but the thought of this fabric languishing in a drawer unused was too much. I started hunting around for smallish projects that I could make and I stumbled across this pin on Pinterest. It brought me to this tutorial.  The fact that I was working with scraps meant that I had to dig into my stash and tweak the pattern to really make a project this size work. It feels good to create something like this without buying a single thing! The red brocade came from the underskirt. This one is my favorite fabric, but it was...

The medieval embroidered pouch that I wrote about here needed a little something extra to make it complete. Even before I started on this project, a row of little coordinated tassels was up on the agenda, but the thought of making them was intimidating. After cruising around on Pinterest several times looking for tutorials, I thought I had the general idea down, and set about making a few simple tassels. The tops of my tassels were frankly, a bit of a mess. Fortunately I planned to cover up that sad poof with this DIY .  Even more fortunately, I started trying to make my fancy buttonhole stitched top on a throwaway tassel (above). It took a lot of sewing and unsewing, stitch tutorial videos and frustration, a process that did some damage to that poor gray thing. Finally I figured it out, and got down to the real business of making my delicate looking black tops. Here you can see the unfinished top of one of my green tassels along with the embellished ...

This intricate embroidery project has kept me very busy for the past month or so. It started out with a pattern book that I found online:  Modelbuch aller art Nehewercks un Strickens, by Christian Egenolf, 1527 There are a ton of embroidery designs, but these two pages caught my eye: I did a lot of fiddling around with the patterns on my computer to create a perfectly mirrored combination pattern. At first I made it to fit a standard piece of printer paper, but the detail required me to scale up my version to fit on a piece of legal sized paper. This gave me a little bit of trouble when tracing the design onto my fabric due to the loss of resolution. That was solved by first tracing onto a piece of thin tissue paper with a fine pen then using that version to trace with water soluble pen onto my fabric. Here's a group of pictures taken near the tail end of the embroidering stage. Most of the work that I did on this happened while I was on a long car trip over the ho...