Monday, April 13, 2015

Fancy Finishes: Embroidering The Sailor Moon Viking Dress

Let's get down to business. To defeat, this dress!

Embroidery:

Now, I've done seam treatments on viking dresses before using the herringbone stitch and someone who I'm sure didn't mean to say in the way it was taken (peer-like qualities Fortune, try to see the best in people) looked at my dress and remarked how interesting it was to see only one line of herringbone stitches...

Well. F'nah. So this dress I intended to do two lines of red and yellow interwoven herringbone stitches to the seams. Because I like to work with the garment as flat as possible I did this before sewing the back two trapezoids to the front.

Here is how the herringbone stitch works by itself:


Also called a catch stitch, this was used primarily as a decorative seam treatment, occasionally as a hemming stitch in period.

I fell in LOVE with a website showing all the different "Dark Ages" stitches from Viking and Saxon garb that was extant. http://nvg.org.au/documents/other/stitches.pdf Research heaven.

Detail of one of the seams:


Seam Treatement Detail of Viking Sailor Moon

The other stitch I used extensively was the blanket stitch. Now, I'd been told time and time again that the blanket stitch is not period. Well, time and time again I'd been lied to. Thanks to the above link I found no only was the buttonhole stitch used in period but it was used to apply bands of silk tablet woven trim to fabric. Used to apply bands of trim you say? Like on the under dress?

Red "glove" bands on the under tunic dress



One way to procrastinate finishing your underdress is to research a variety of blanket stitches.

So I did:

http://www.needlenthread.com/2012/06/up-down-buttonhole-stitch-video.html

https://www.coletterie.com/tutorials-tips-tricks/tutorial-5-simple-blanket-stitch-variations

http://www.embroidery.rocksea.org/stitch/blanket-stitch/double-blanket-stitch/

http://sarahwhittle.blogspot.com/2010/07/blanket-stitch-variations.html

I also got fancy and whipped a line of blue along the blanket stitch. The finds at Bjerringhøj (Mammen parish, Denmark) known as the Mammen finds show whipped stem stitch, so creatively and anachronistically a whipped blanket stitch isn't such a stretch right?

I also did this detail on the faced collar.
I'm a little punchy at this point
 At some point I will do an entire post on the faced collars, but the detail pictures are all on my iPad.

Here is the finished underdress:


Sailor Moon Underdress
 
The other stitch I used extensively on this project was a whipped backstitch on the butt bow detail. Pictures of which are in the wool applique post.


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