Hello.
You might remember that a few posts back I was telling you the reasons why Spring Top #1 came into existence. One of those reasons was because the nice one I had made a couple of years ago doesn't fit me at the moment (see? I'm being optimistic here). And thinking about that led me to thinking about a door curtain that I made for my little cottage in Suffolk, and if you're wondering what the one has to do with the other, the answer is appliqué flowers. Would you like to see?
Where I lived in Suffolk was very rural, in the middle of forests and heaths, and one consequence of this was that there were lots of insects flying about. Insects that liked me a lot. Boah, I have never been bitten by so many things as when I lived in Suffolk! So I decided to make a door curtain, so that I could have the door open, but fewer biting things could get in and chew on me.
I made it with a sort of cross between cheesecloth and muslin (in a natural calico colour which doesn't really show in the photos), and to make it a bit more interesting, I appliquéd self-coloured flowers on it, like this...
I call this shadow appliqué, but when I Googled this term, it came up with a somewhat different technique(see here for instance).
I don't have any photos of the curtain up in my cottage so I draped it over the curtain rail this afternoon and tried to produce at least some semblance of what it would have looked like...
Can you see the little beads at the bottom? I sewed those on to add some weight to the curtain because it would blow about quite a lot.
Having sort of invented this decoration in my head and decided I liked how it worked, I used the same idea on the bias top I made a few years ago. I had bought several colours of very light, almost semi-sheer cotton when I was in Suffolk, with the idea of making little sleeveless blouses with frills down the front, but that still hasn't happened. Instead, the red got turned into this bias top...
The pattern is Burda 8987 which has since been discontinued. It's a simple bias top with facings, and a slit and button at the back. As you can see, I didn't use either of those! I used a matching (shop-bought) bias binding around the neck and armholes, and the top was easy enough to pull on without needing an opening in the back.
Because the fabric is very light, I decided to put a bit of extra coverage over the bust and my shadow appliqué flowers seemed like a good idea. I had to put the bust darts in first, and then, because I wanted at least one of the flowers to go right up to the neck opening, I had to put the neck bias on too. So the appliqué was pretty much the last thing I did.
And it really isn't this sheer, but I have to show you this photo too, because I think the effect is so pretty...
We needed a door curtain again when we moved to Ireland (not to keep out the critters, but for a bit of privacy), but of course the cottage curtain didn't fit, so I made another. This time out of a white muslin, and with fewer flowers because I was feeling impatient...
(That criss-cross-y thing in the door is a paper cut-out I did, but I'll tell you about that another time). The flowers have much fatter petals than the first curtain, but you get the same sort of effect.
I made two this time, one with a few less flowers than the other, so that you can open them on both sides of the glass doors. And that one there had a fight with a bike or something as soon as it went up, hence the crappy black marks on it. Grumble.
Anyway, here's a kind-of, not-really-a-tutorial kind-of tutorial for this technique. I was going to include it in the body of this post, but it turned out longer than I thought, and I didn't want to write War and Peace again!
Happy Thursday!
You might remember that a few posts back I was telling you the reasons why Spring Top #1 came into existence. One of those reasons was because the nice one I had made a couple of years ago doesn't fit me at the moment (see? I'm being optimistic here). And thinking about that led me to thinking about a door curtain that I made for my little cottage in Suffolk, and if you're wondering what the one has to do with the other, the answer is appliqué flowers. Would you like to see?
Where I lived in Suffolk was very rural, in the middle of forests and heaths, and one consequence of this was that there were lots of insects flying about. Insects that liked me a lot. Boah, I have never been bitten by so many things as when I lived in Suffolk! So I decided to make a door curtain, so that I could have the door open, but fewer biting things could get in and chew on me.
I made it with a sort of cross between cheesecloth and muslin (in a natural calico colour which doesn't really show in the photos), and to make it a bit more interesting, I appliquéd self-coloured flowers on it, like this...
I call this shadow appliqué, but when I Googled this term, it came up with a somewhat different technique(see here for instance).
I don't have any photos of the curtain up in my cottage so I draped it over the curtain rail this afternoon and tried to produce at least some semblance of what it would have looked like...
Can you see the little beads at the bottom? I sewed those on to add some weight to the curtain because it would blow about quite a lot.
Having sort of invented this decoration in my head and decided I liked how it worked, I used the same idea on the bias top I made a few years ago. I had bought several colours of very light, almost semi-sheer cotton when I was in Suffolk, with the idea of making little sleeveless blouses with frills down the front, but that still hasn't happened. Instead, the red got turned into this bias top...
The pattern is Burda 8987 which has since been discontinued. It's a simple bias top with facings, and a slit and button at the back. As you can see, I didn't use either of those! I used a matching (shop-bought) bias binding around the neck and armholes, and the top was easy enough to pull on without needing an opening in the back.
Because the fabric is very light, I decided to put a bit of extra coverage over the bust and my shadow appliqué flowers seemed like a good idea. I had to put the bust darts in first, and then, because I wanted at least one of the flowers to go right up to the neck opening, I had to put the neck bias on too. So the appliqué was pretty much the last thing I did.
And it really isn't this sheer, but I have to show you this photo too, because I think the effect is so pretty...
We needed a door curtain again when we moved to Ireland (not to keep out the critters, but for a bit of privacy), but of course the cottage curtain didn't fit, so I made another. This time out of a white muslin, and with fewer flowers because I was feeling impatient...
(That criss-cross-y thing in the door is a paper cut-out I did, but I'll tell you about that another time). The flowers have much fatter petals than the first curtain, but you get the same sort of effect.
I made two this time, one with a few less flowers than the other, so that you can open them on both sides of the glass doors. And that one there had a fight with a bike or something as soon as it went up, hence the crappy black marks on it. Grumble.
Anyway, here's a kind-of, not-really-a-tutorial kind-of tutorial for this technique. I was going to include it in the body of this post, but it turned out longer than I thought, and I didn't want to write War and Peace again!
Happy Thursday!
