Appliqued Wolf

 

Appliqued Wolf Tunic

Years ago when I first started playing SCA I attended a A&S competition. One of the entries by the winner (5 entries was required) was an appliques heraldic cotehardie. I was very impressed. I remember it was parti-colored and on the one side it had all these stars. At the time my sewing skills was still very basic (T-tunics with applied trim) and the cotehardie seemed like it required an almost unimaginable level of work and skill.

What does that have to do with this tunic. This weekend I found myself telling the recipient of the tunic: “of cause its hand appliqued!” and I realized that I had actually surpassed that cotehardie that was machine appliqued. Despite how it might seem, I am not saying this to brag. I have been playing SCA for more than 10 years now and in this time I have made hundreds of pieces of garb. I in fact still make t-tunics with applied trim. They still mostly get made on the sewing machine. I have upgraded a little bit and the t-tunic are now more likely to have gussets and gores (mostly because my husband bought me a serger and gussets and gores are easy on a serger), but T-tunics are an essential part of SCA life especially if – like me – you like going to war. But sometimes I do like to take my work to the next level and I really do hope that I sometimes inspire (and maybe awe) a newcomer.

Applique Celtic Wolf Tunic

Applique Celtic Wolf Tunic

I have always loved Knot work and Knot work Animals. I have made many scrolls and painted items using knot work and even some cross stitch and counted thread embroidery. So naturally once I finished my wolf monotone applique and started thinking about doing applique in multiple colors, my mind went to Celtic knot work.  I am not going to even try to pretend that I know a single thing about Celtic Embroidery. At least with the Viking embroidery I knew how badly I was breaking the rules. I very vaguely remember seeing a note once mentioning that tunic design was similar to the basic Viking tunic and even more vaguely remember seeing something once about a tunic embroidered in silk. A lady once got pointed out to me at Pennsic wearing the most amazing embroidered dresses that I was told was very early period Celtic, but then again, you see people in chain maile bikinis at Pennsic, so its maybe not the best reseach.

Honestly, I was trying out a new technique and thought it would look awesome and someone would be happy to wear it.

So – lessons learned from this tunic.

* Gores are triangles. You would think that this is self explanatory, but in fact I had never attached a really thick band to the bottom of a tunic. Even a band that is an inch wide will actually have a slightly smaller diameter at the top than at the bottom. A bad that is almost a foot wide will have a big difference between the diameter of the top and the bottom. When I drew the knot work animal on a nice flat piece of fabric I did not really think of that. If you look at the picture you will notice that the point of the tail knot (middle right) is about 3 inches away from the chest. What isn’t as clear is that there is a seam right where the tail and leg joins at the narrowest part of the body – All this happens because the animal continues on onto the gusset and if I did not do something his back foot either did not fit on the fabric or I had to put him much higher up (and he would have ended up half under the belt)

This was actually an awesome lesson to learn as the next 4 tunics I made had thick embroidered cloth bands around the bottom and if I had just embroidered them as a straight think strip I would most likely have most likely ended up with a fold somewhere covering embroidery.

* You cant fake knot work. I have told myself more times than I care to count that I really should put more time and effort into the design of something that is going to take me 50 hours to make. I played a bit with the knot work, got it mostly lined out and started embroidering. About 15 hours into it with it more than a quarter done (at midnight of cause) I had a thought: ” I wonder if the colors match up in the back?”. Not only did they not, one of the lines actually got himself lost and ended up as a space between the lines somewhere along the back. It took he HOURS to get the whole thing sorted out in such a way that you could not find the mistake anymore (and you really can’t – yeah, me)

I would like to say I learned my lesson, but then I would just be laying to you and myself.

 

Tent Doors

My period pavilion is a French Double Bell Wedge. Mine is blue and yellow, my best comrade in crime’s is purple and yellow (as you can see above) I love it. It is huge. I think 15 feet by 23 feet footprint with rounded ends. Obviously you loose some space due to the sloped sides, but not there is still lots of space. The pavilion has 2 center poles (That fit next to the driver seat in our van and can thus be transported as one piece.) and a ridge pole that is made as 2 pieces with a sleeve (thanks partner).

When we get onsite we put the ridge pole down, then we have a piece of rope with a knot in it that we use to figure out 6 points around the ridge pole. We pull the canvas open and put down 6 stakes. All this can be done by one person. The we find a strong person and borrow them for 2 minutes to raise the poles. This is the only part of raising the tent that requires more than one person. After this we go around the outside of the tent and add the other 18 or so stakes. This tent has withstood gale force winds and just about anything else mother nature can throw at it.

When we go to an event that we know is going to be really cold out night we pack our 4 person pop-ups and put them up in the bell ends of the tent. Or the bell ends are big enough that one can be used as a kitchen, one as a bedroom and we still have the whole central area (10 feet by 15 feet open). Now I am going to add a shameless plug for the maker of this tent: Midwest Tents <http://midwesttent.com/ps/index.php?id_category=8&controller=category&gt; where you can buy this tent for under $500 (just the canvas, no poles of pegs or ropes, but everything else we needed cost us less than $100). My household now have 6 Midwest tents and we love them.

This is not why I am writing the blog though. The one problem we found with the tent is that the “door” is also the “porch” and we hated having to open and close it every night. So I said: “Why don’t I made some doors?” They would not have to be structural or weatherproof (in really bad weather we could close the real door), but they could be really nice. I decided straight away that one of the doors would be our household device (and it just happens to do double duty as a huge banner when we need it) and the other door would be personal devices.

Finding the fabric for the household device was easy, painter’s canvas (they are on sale at Harbour Freight right now – 9 feet by 12 feet for $15.29) and the left over green fabric from making the dags. My device was also easy, painter’s canvas and black trigger (who does not have black trigger laying around?) But my friend’s device required both yellow and purple. The yellow was easy, she actually had some. (yes, our craft rooms are scary), but she mentioned from the start that she had always had trouble finding purple trigger. SO I started searching and literally went to every fabric store anywhere near my house. They would tell me that they had some, and show me blue, a really dark blue. This also made me very scared to order online since I might not agree with their definition of purple either.

Purple is a strange color. Being a combination of red and blue on the color wheel it can veer towards either color. I am no expert in dying, but my friend who knows more tells me a lot of purples in the middle ages veer more towards the red side of the wheel than we think of purple with our modern eyes. Just as I was about to give up and order online I got a call from my local fabric lady at Walmart to tell me they magically got in a very “crimson-purple”. (It helps when you know the fabric lady at Walmart personally). So I went in and it was perfect.

My friend had actually registered her device mumble, mumble, mumble years ago when she thought yellow and purple and butterflies and suns were the height of cool. Although she still liked all the elements she had mostly fallen out of love with the overall look of her device. I think a big part of it was due to most heralds and heraldic artists. When I draw my device, witch has 2 mullet (5 pointed stars) around the top, the starts are huge, their point just barely not touching. When a herald draws my device the starts are tiny, each taking up only a 6th of the width of the design. Whenever anyone had made or drawn my friend’s device they had always made the sun and the butterfly tiny. A busy little circle in their diagonal space. For my friend’s door I went even further. This was not in fact a device. It was a piece of art representing her device. So I did not even try to fit in their diagonal spaces. I made them happily stretch out. This was also because I was doing applique – and bigger is easier.

I have posted before about my applique process and the butterfly was done in much the same way. For the sun I did a lot of math and made templates (a triangle and a ray) that repeated. I also almost gave my husband a heart attack. Everything was cut he looked at it and said: ” shouldn’t the sun have a face?”. So I took the circle, folded it in half and freehand cut out the face – did not even draw anything first. If after 30 years of art I don’t know the most basic proportions of a face I might as well hang up my paintbrushes, and pencils, and needles …

When I gave my friend’s doors to her she almost cried and actually confessed later that they had made her fall in love with her device all over again. We can not go to a camping event without people complimenting us on the doors. They are bold, they are colorful and thus they fit us perfectly.

 

Applique

Can you believe it – I actually once recorded how I do my applique. I have done a lot of machine applique, but lately I have also done some hand sewing.

A friend of mine wanted a short cloak/cape – long enough to cover her arms and hands, but not past knee length. In Idaho even mid-calf length cloaks get wet in the long grass. She decided it would be done in red and yellow and also that it would have a phoenix image.

I like to look at tribal tattoo images for my inspiration. While sometime I fall in love with an image enough that I do not wish to change it I generally change the image or merge a few images due to copyright. I am a non copyright artist, but then again, that is not how I make my living. Anyone that likes any of my images or designs are free to use it. But I do like to support artists. In the SCA I am very lucky that I can support fellow artists by exchanging my work for theirs, but I understand for a lot of artists their work is their income and I try to respect that.

Step 1: The image.

Step 1: This is a tribal tattoo phoenix image that I found on the internet. In my defense it was not on a buying tattoo site, but these days I would not just steal the image. I would use it as inspiration and re-work it so that it was mostly my own work. If you look very very closely at the photo you will see that I have drawn a grid over it. The brown paper next to it also has a – much larger – grid. Its all just a bit of math. I calculate the overall dimensions of the image, then calculate the dimensions that I want the image to be. Then its just a matter of ratios to figure out how much bigger I need to draw the squares.

Step 2 – Enlarging the Image

Step 2: When I was little I had a book where you had to copy a drawing from one set of squares to another set of squares by drawing exactly what was in each square. Its actually not that difficult. As you can see I also adapt the design to be sewable. There is no way the sharp points of the original image would have worked with fabric.

Step 3 – a Template

Step 3: I cut out all the paper. People often ask me what I use for my templates. In fact people often ask me what I use for my crafts. It all depends on who and why something is getting made. I make garments in wool with silk tread, I made garments in linen. I also make a lot of camping garb for new people in cheap cotton or mystery fabric that I found at a thrift store or garage sale.  This template was made using paper shopping bags that I cut open and taped together. Its actually a nice thick and sturdy paper and the best part about it – it is 100% free. Just ask at your local store.

Step 4 – Cutting the Fabric

Step 4: I cut out the fabric using my very nifty fabric scissors that I hide so well from my family that I usually cant find them myself. The fabric used here is a cotton flannel (that my friend found for $2 a yard at a sale – she bought several bolts and most of my household have coats/cloaks and capes made of those bolts)

Step 5 – Onto the Base Fabric

Step 5: I pin the fabric to the base fabric. This is clearly the “early days” as I had yet to discover that the way to pin a large piece of work that you are going to spend a fair amount of time working on is not to use straight pins, but in fact to use safety pins. I got stabbed by pins 100s of times while maneuvering the fabric through the machine as another part of the fabric jumps up and stabs you in the stomach or arm of leg. The you also have the problem that the pins fall out and you have to stop from time to time to lay everything back down flat and re-pin it.

A lot of people at this point will tell me to either use an applique base or spray glue. I don’t do this for 2 reasons. One is the cost. The other is that fact that you no matter how many times the product description says it does not add bulk of stiffness I have always found that it does, especially with very soft of flowy fabrics.

Step 6 – Applique

Step 6: You just sew. Two things: One: It’s not really very difficult. Just take it slow and steady. You will spend more time adjusting the fabric than actually sewing, but this is fine. If you don’t the whole thing will end up wonky or your arms will start hurting from forcing the fabric in a direction it does not want to go. Two: Do a lot of it and it will kill a cheap modern sewing machine. I had a little $100 singer that I had been using for 10 years. And not using once of twice a month. I would often (especially before big events) use my machine every day. After about the 6th big applique project the entire aluminum inner workings fused. If you are going to applique more than occasionally find a machine with steel insides (almost impossible these days) or buy a cheap machine on Craig’s list and have another on stand-by for when that one dies on you in the middle of the night, in the middle of a big project that HAS to be done by morning.

 

Step 7 – Constructing the Garment

Step 7: Assemble the Garment. This is a full circle hooded cape that is about butt length on my short friend (designed to be a few inches longer than fingertip length.)

My friends and I have an odd sense of humor – I had to add a flaming crotch – how could I not?

Robe

I have since appliqued this design at least 5 times. This is the back of my robe, my husband has it on his cloak. At least one more member of the household had it on the back of his “cloak that is a tent” and I have put it on canvas doors.