Slow Silk With Silk

Slow stitching with only silk materials is beautiful and inspiring and maddening as hell, so I don't do it very often. But while I was digging through my art fabric basket two pieces whispered to me: C'mon. Take us for a ride.

I found a scrap piece of muslin and some low-loft batting, and put them together with the two silk pieces. Once I'd pinned them together, I basted the whole thing with some oyster silk thread. The silk pieces are so thin and lightweight that they flutter if you breathe on them.

I have a small collection of other new and vintage silk threads to play with, too. The old spools are only good for embellishment on things that won't be stressed or washed, so I don't get to use them very often. Their luster is out of this world:

Sewing with silk thread on silk fabric is like stitching a cloud with cobwebs. If you try to be perfect you'll end up going crazy. But the way the needle whispers through the fabric . . . amazing.

I didn't worry about what I was doing or how I stitched or what it would look like.

The narrower piece of silk had some tears, so I stitched over them:

This is how much I got done in one evening:

Hard to see the details, I know. Here's a closer look:

I love sewing on silk with silk. :)

Comments

nightsmusic said…

That is absolutely gorgeous!! I have a few spools of antique silk thread from my grandmother. It's shimmery and light and I always hesitate to use it because there's so little left on each spool.

August 3, 2020 at 4:02 PM

Downsizing

This was my fabric stash once I sorted everything -- 22 full bins. I spent a day taking out and boxing up what I could part with, with the goal of trying to reduce it by half, so I'd have 11 bins. I was very strict with myself, and removed everything that for one reason or another I was sure I wouldn't be able to use. This is what I ended up with -- 12 bins of fabric that I'm keeping. It's not quite half, but close enough. Half of what I took out went to a local quilter friend, a school and Goodwill. These four tightly-packed bins will be going to the local quilting guild once I make arrangements with them for a drop-off place. I am relieved and a little sad and now determined to control my impulses to thrift more fabric. I don't want to do this again, so until I use up six bins, I can't for any reason bring any new fabric into the house.

In Progress

I promised myself I would show you the good, bad and ugly of my cleaning this year. This is what it looks like when you dump thirty years' worth of stashed fabric on the floor -- and oy, what a pain in the butt to pick up again! This is what it looks like after it's been sorted, folded and placed in containers, which took me about a week. Now the hard part is to downsize my stash by at least half, I think (that's my goal, anyway.) I've already e-mailed the president of the local quilting guild, a local friend who is a quilter, and a public school art teacher I know to see if I can donate some of the excess to them. The rest will go to Goodwill. Already I've reduced my vintage textiles from two bins to one, and my scraps from three bins to one. It's probably the hardest clean-out I've done, which is why I saved it until last. I know I have too much fabric, more than I can use in my lifetime -- but at the same time, I love it. So I have to

Other Stashes

Along with clearing out the spare bedroom and tidying my office and our guest bedroom, I decided to reorganize some of my stashes. This is all the yarn I have on hand, sorted by color. It looks like a lot, but lately I've been using up a minimum of half a bin every month, so this is approximately a year's supply. All of my solid color cotton perle thread. I go through a lot of this every year, too. I need a container in which I can fit all of it together, but I haven't found the right one yet. I won't show you all of my fabric -- I'm still reorganizing this stash -- but I went through everything and donated two bins of fabric I won't need to the local quilter's guild.

Valerean

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