A New Thing

I got a text yesterday morning from Mum telling me there was a package waiting for me at home. I'm waiting for a few different things, so I asked her the dimensions of the package before I raced over there all excited to pick it up. Lookee!

MY COLLINGWOOD ARRIVED! I raced home to pick it up before work, and even had a short look at the double face chapter in one of my breaks. I'll have a proper read this morning, and start drafting up a pattern for the strap of my awesome bag of awesome. Now all I need is to order some thread and wait for that and my new set of cards to arrive. I think the main motif pattern will be in gold and red, and I'll add a selvedge border of green and purple. I haven't decided what sort of weft to use. I have a feeling that I'm going to have epic problems with the motif stretching along the band way too much, so I'll need something smaller. I want to use size 8 thread for the warp, which means using a sewing thread weft again, or size 12 cotton. That probably means dealing with snapping issues again. I guess we shall see what happens when I warp up my loom.

I've slowed down a bit with my embroidery. I've only done another three motifs since last week, and that's only because I carried it with me all weekend and worked on it while I was doing social things. I haven't been picking it up as much at home in my spare time. It's a good thing I started this project so early!

One Quarter

I've finished one quarter of my embroidery! I forgot to bring my camera to A&S tonight, so you get a dodgy phone picture :)

Yay what an awful picture. But you get the idea. Only 22.5 more motifs to go and I'll be finished! This week I've also been starting to think seriously about the band I want to weave to make the strap. I've found a place online that sells DMC crochet cotton in all the colours, so I can get an exact match to the embroidery colours. I'm thinking I'll use size 8 cotton because it's fine without being stupidly fine, and I have a feeling that if I try to use size 5 with doubleface weave it'll stretch out a lot. I've counted the stitches in one motif and it's 53 stitches across. From the information I've looked at about doubleface weaving I think I can use the embroidery pattern as a weaving draft as well, with each stitch being two turns of the tablets. But I only have 50 cards, and as well as the motif pattern I'll want a couple of cards on each side as a doubleface border, and another couple as a selvedge. I'll need roughly 60 cards, so I ordered another pack of 25 today from the internet. Last week I also ordered my very own copy of Collingwood, so hopefully that should arrive sometime next week and I can read up a bit more about doubleface and get to actually drafting a pattern and working it all out.

One thing I've been pondering is how I'm going to attach the strap to the bag. The strap is going to be about 3cm wide. I could have it running all the way down the edges of the bag, making a walled bag with tassels in the bottom corners. Or I could make the bag like a big pouch and have the strap coming out from the inside, or attach it to the outside somehow. At this stage I like the idea of a big pouch, even though it gives me less room inside. I can do tassels no matter what I decide. I'm really bad at decisions, so I'm going to leave this one alone for now until I absolutely have to decide :P

Progress Update

Happy new year! I've been working on my embroidery quite a bit over the last few days, and I've now completed a couple of motifs and worked with all the colours.

I'm very pleased with my colour choices. The colours aren't quite the same in this picture as in real life, but you get the idea. The white was the last colour I added to my first motif, and it was amazing how awesome it made the whole thing look. The red is amazing, and I think that's what really makes the whole thing look so good. I didn't start the purple until my two green motifs were finished, and I wasn't really sure about it when I started working with it. The white makes it look better though, and even though I think maybe I should've stuck with the lighter purple that the Wymarc pattern suggested, it still looks pretty damn awesome.

We've started seriously discussing Pennsic plans, which is all very exciting. I had always intended to spend a week in New York beforehand whether anyone else wanted to come or not, but it looks like the others are pretty keen for New York. I'll probably end up doing a lot of things by myself anyway, because I want to see as many Broadway shows as I possibly can. I've also started thinking about garb that I'll need. I need to make some more linen hose and chemises, and I could do with another cotehardie or two like my ginger one. I think I'd also like to make a linen man-cote. I need to fix up my green brocade surcote and/or my wool surcote to throw on over whatever I'm wearing for cold evenings. I pondered a couple of sideless surcotes, but I look kind of funny in them because I'm so skinny. The front bit has to be really narrow, or I end up looking kind of square, but it looks kinda funny being so narrow. Anyway soon I'll start ordering linen and hopefully I'll have some stuff started by the time uni starts.