Skip to main content

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.

Popular posts from this blog

Old Loves & Such

My guy kindly bought me my favorite Chinese take out the other night, and my fortune cookie offered up an interesting story starter: This sounds sweet, right? Only the first thing I thought of was an old love coming back from the dead . . . . must be October. In other lovely news, my favorite hand-dyed thread artist, Lorraine from Colour Complements , is moving her business from Etsy to her own web site. Many of my favorite sellers on Etsy are leaving due to the whole "free shipping" coercion debacle, which has also soured me on the site. To show support I did a little shopping at Lorraine's web site and got in these: I love her threads and trims; you simply can't buy anything like them anywhere. Her work makes my specialty thread box look like a treasure chest: At night I'm spending just as hour working on quilting the scrap project runner, and I'm making slow progress: I'll keep quilting the runner while I try to decide on a design for t...

Love Means This

Invested in a couple of hand-dyed bundles from one of my favorite fabric artists. This one said "Make me into something for Valentine's Day." So I went for a quilted and embellished tote. I kept thinking about what love means to me as I worked on it. Here's the finished tote. Although I was tempted to embellish with beads and pins, I got sick and only felt well enough to do a little stitching every night. As I worked I thought about how often love seems disappointing to us, especially when it fails to live up to our expectations. But now that I've experienced love in many forms, I can say that it's made me a better person than I might have been without it. Love is a precious thing, and should be appreciated in all its forms. I am very grateful for the love of my guy, my child and my friends who have stuck with me all these years. That's you two, in case you're wondering. :) Also finally found something to do with a ve...

Wild Ride

Along with the Gods: The Two Worlds is an epic, dazzling film that hurls you into the Korean version of the afterlife while showcasing some of the most impressive special effects I've ever seen in any movie. The story begins with the death of firefighter Kim Ja-Hong (Cha Tae-hyun) who jumps out of a burning building with a child in his arms. The kid lives, but he dies at the scene. Two strangers inform him that he has passed away right on schedule, and toss him into a vortex that takes him to the world of the afterlife, where he meets his three guardians: Gang-rim (Ha Jung-woo), Haewonmak (Ju Ji-hoon) and Lee Deok-choon (Kim Hyang-gi). At the gates of the afterlife Ja-Hong learns that he is considered a paragon (an exemplary person who lived a noble and self-sacrificing life) and is eligible to be reincarnated -- but there's a catch. First he has 49 days to make it through seven hells in which he will be judged on his sins. His three guardians will help and defend...