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

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.

Goodwill Gamble #2 Arrives

My second Goodwill gamble arrived; this is one I paid ten bucks for last month. Just inside the lid was a big roll of plastic mesh that I think is for latchhook work. In the auction listing it looked like fabric to me, so that was unexpected. Someone at the seller's end was nice enough to put a note on this pinned fabric. I'll put on my gloves before I take it out to inspect it. The embroidered green fabric turned out to be 1-1/2 yards of sequinned and three-dimensional designer fabric. I'll guess this cost somewhere between $20.00 to $30.00 a yard, and it's in pristine condition. But here's a shot of everything in the lot, which is mostly crafty odds and ends with a small amount of cotton fabrics, a large amount of synethetic fabrics, and some other surprises. The original owner of these was probably a Catholic school teacher; these beads, crosses and medallions are the kind of rosary kits for kids to make at Sunday school or Bible camp (and s...

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...