Vintage Laces on the Embroidery Machine-Continued

The last week I have spent literally married to both my semi and commercial embroidery machine stitching out gobs and gobs of freestanding laces. They are actually for a competition that I am working on and hopefully (fingers crossed) I should have the outfits done well before time. But while I was stitching out the laces, I also took in a bit of time for myself and stitched out a runner using the upcoming Vintage Lace 3. When I had designed the various elements for this type of lace, I kept on thinking of better ways to enhance it. One of my biggest desires was to be able to have as much of an open weave type of lace but it should be strong enough to be handled for ages to come. With this in mind, I took the weakest thread being rayon and stitched enough motifs to make this long runner. I used Fufu thread which has an excellent hand when all the water soluble stabilizer is washed out of it. Now my home embroidery machine does not mind Fufu at all, rather it stitches perfectly fine without any breaks. But what I was not prepared for were the umpteem breaks that would happen with the thread when used in the commercial and semi commercial machines. Making a few phone calls to various dealers and suppliers, I was surprised to find that Fufu although an excellent thread, yet is not preferred in the commercial market. Rather it is Isafil that is the preferred choice.

Looking closely at fufu I realised that it is a twisted double strand thread and thus is more liable to twist when coming off the spool and hence the breaks. I have talked about this in one of my previous blogs. Isafil on the other hand is a single strand not twisted thus less likely to have twists and breaks. Generally rayon threads are not considered long lasting threads as they are weak but yet I love their sheen and their feel. Running the machines at half the speed finally did the trick for me and I was able to stitch out enough of the motifs and their joining parts to create the runner. The real task came in hand to join them as I wanted it to look like hand made. Using a very loose zigzag stitch with a lenght of about 2.5 was the best trick and the pieces were joined up. It took rather a long while than I had imagined, partly because I was being questionable to myself at every thing. As these laces will be available for purchase on my website I wanted to be able to question each and every step and make sure that every step was the easiest and best possible. Looking at the close-up you can see the round which is the base block which is connected via a squished in square (very open weave) which joins each of the rounds perfectly. The edge was further enhanced by a half version of the same squished in square but with my signature candlewicks. The look and feel of the lace is extremely beautiful and I cannot keep my hands off the lace to feel it again and again. Now comes the task of attaching freestanding flowerets in the center of each of the lace rounds to further enhance the beauty.

While the laces were stitching out I was busy playing some more with ideas in making borders and or edges similar to the lace….ideas for Vintage Lace 4 I suppose.  I had enough of the edges stitched out which were actually test pieces. Just playing around I realised that I could put them to use in creating a vintage look handkerchief. The look indeed was stunning since the meshy type edge really lends to looking and feeling like hand made crochet. And the stitch count….well, I was rather surprised. As the whole lace is created using only one stitch (which is a specialty stitch that I have created) the stitch count is extremely low for such an elaborate design. A definite plus I say! The ideas keep pouring in so fast that I’m afraid I will not be able to bottle them all but I’m keeping notes. As to the competition outfits made with the laces, I’m rather pleased so far and yes I’m using polyester thread with them. As much as I would have liked to use the rayon, I just cannot see the use of it much in garments as it would hang to distorted proportions whereas the poly threads will keep better shape.