I have signed up for another of Kathy Shaw's crazy quilting classes. The first two assignments were to embellish 'silkies', printed images on silk or cotton. For the first silkie, we needed to stitch hair. Most of the examples we were given were of Victorian women or children in fancy dresses with hats or flowers in their hair. Instead of printing one of these images, I chose to use a piece of mermaid fabric from Windham's Mendocino line.
Her hair is stitched in one strand of varigated 50 wt. Wonderfil Tutti Cotton. It took me 3 evenings: over six hours just to stitch her hair. Kathy's instructions said to use small stitches and thin thread. I'm very happy with her hair, but I'm not sure I'll invest the time to do that again!
The second task was to stitch silk ribbon flowers to a silkie. This time I printed out an image I found on the internet and added silk ribbon. Again, a lot of the people in my class are using the Victorian images of women or girls. I chose an image of a bird.
I am not entirely happy with the silk ribbon embroidery I used as a border. I think the color is good, but my stitching is sloppy because I was trying to stretch the little ribbon I had. I'm not sure where it came from, and I really liked the color, but if I had more if it, I would have done a neater job. Pulling the ribbon through the background bruised my fingertips, and I wish I had used shorter lengths of silk. I need to remember that if I'm having a hard time getting the needle through the fabric,the silk is being abraded. Punching a hole with a large needle helps a lot, but I didn't do this until I was half way around the image. I will be smarter next time!
