#Hand sewing

[paladinbaby]

i have not drawn much this year but i did entirely hand sew a quilt

[drathym]

turning this in tomorrow for my sculpture class... gerard way...

he got that fuckin domo build gtfo

[idliketochill]

plush donqi

Horrid goblin crimes

[icterid-rubus]

Sorry pajamas, I’m pulling you from the grave once more.

My ass patch collection grows

[vincentbriggs]

Finished another pair of gloves last week, this time in dark brown leather from ItalianSkins and sewn up with some olive green silk thread that was a very lucky thrift store find. (It was in a mixed baggie and I didn't know it was silk until I got home!)

In my glove video I mentioned wanting to re-draw my pattern so the fingers are angled in more tightly, and so the thumb piece is longer, and I did that for these. The thumb fits much better, and the bases of the fingers are no longer too loose.

I also tried the straighter style of fourchettes, but didn't like them as much as the V shaped ones. I think the curved edges put a bit too much material onto the backs of the fingers and made them wrinklier. (Though this particular leather is not the stretchiest, so it may be better with a stretchier one.)

I did 3 rows of feather stitch on the back of the hand, since I'd seen that on an extant pair and thought it looked nice. I used a regular needle for that part because I was worried a leather needle would damage the thread.

[redhairedfish]

I found an old plush rat in my shed (on the right) that I sewed about 7 years ago and WANTED TO MAKE IT AGAIN

behold

thick good nutritious

I made one green.

as if creativity dump was born from normal parents

🐀🐀🐀

[bookshelfdreams]

yk when you see someone share a finished handmade item that they clearly spent a lot of time and money on and it's just. The absolute tackiest thing you have seen in your life. And then you ask yourself why someone would waste all those resources on such an eyesore.

(no, of course you can't relate to that because you're a much nicer person than me)

In any case.

BEHOLD!

A wool coat!

The top fabric is handwoven and handspun, the whole thing is sewn by hand, too.

Leftovers. Barely anything, all things considered, which is very satisfying.

This thing took me well over 3 years to make, on and off. And now I'm done.

Thank you for your attention.

[forcefedthelies]

there is something very beautiful about the irresistible human desire to create

clowns like these will be on etsy very soon <3

UPDATE: etsy fucking banned me lol. currently selling these via cashapp within the united states only

UPDATE: I HAVE SOME PREMADE CLOWNS LISTED ON DEPOP UNDER @mishandmars

[raggednorth]

I am quite proud of this stitching line.

I wish they all looked this nice, but in the end they won't even be seen. I will just enjoy the pretty ones while I can.

[leo-fie]

We all know existential dread, but I propose (and please tell be if this is already a thing) existential awe.

Sometimes when I handsew or weave or something I get this immense feeling of connection to humanity. People for thousands of years all over the world have sat down and sewn a garment. Archeologists find needles and awls all the time. When I'm tablet weaving I have the same frustration at the arduous process of threading the tablets as the person 2600 years ago must have felt when they made the bands that were found in a celtic man's burial mount not far from my home. They probably also felt their back after a few hours of this.

[vinceaddams]

Any tips on learning to make buttonholes? I've been putting it off for.... *checks notes* like three years.... but better late than never and all that. I don't have any fancy machines so I gotta do it by hand but that seems right up your alley.

Thanks!

It IS up my alley, yes, I do most of my buttonholes by hand!

I'm actually part way through filming an 18th century buttonhole tutorial, but I expect it'll be a few more weeks before I finish that and put it on the youtubes, so in the meantime here's the very very short version. (The long version is looking like it'll probably be about 40 minutes maybe, judging by how much script I've written compared to my last video?)

Mark your line, a bit longer than your button is wide. I usually use a graphite mechanical pencil on light fabrics, and a light coloured pencil crayon on dark ones. (I have fabric pencils too, but they're much softer and leave a thicker line.) You may want to baste the layers together around all the marked buttonholes if you're working on something big and the layers are shifty and slippery. I'm not basting here because this is just a pants placket.

Do a little running stitch (or perhaps a running backstitch) in fine thread around the line at the width you want the finished buttonhole to be. This holds the layers of fabric together and acts as a nice little guide for when you do the buttonhole stitches.

Cut along the marked line using a buttonhole cutter, or a woodworking chisel. Glossy magazines are the best surface to put underneath your work as you push down, and you can give it a little tap with a rubber mallet if it's not going through all the way.

I'm aware that there are some people who cut their buttonholes open using seam rippers, and if any of them are reading this please know that that is abhorrent behaviour and I need you to stop it immediately. Stop it.

Go get a buttonhole cutter for 10 bucks and your life will be better for it. Or go to the nearest hardware store and get a little woodworking chisel. This includes machine buttonholes, use the buttonhole cutter on them too. If you continue to cut open buttonholes with a seam ripper after reading this you are personally responsible for at least 3 of the grey hairs on my head.

Do a whipstitch around the cut edges, to help prevent fraying while you work and to keep all those threads out of the way. (For my everyday shirts I usually do a machine buttonhole instead of this step, and then just hand stitch over it, because it's a bit faster and a lot sturdier on the thin fabrics.)

I like to mark out my button locations at this point, because I can mark them through the holes without the buttonhole stitches getting in the way.

For the actual buttonhole stitches it's really nice if you have silk buttonhole twist, but I usually use those little balls of DMC cotton pearl/perle because it's cheap and a good weight. NOT stranded embroidery floss, no separate strands! It's got to be one smooth twisted thing!

Here's a comparison pic between silk buttonhole twist (left) and cotton pearl (right). Both can make nice looking buttonholes, but the silk is a bit nicer to work with and the knots line up more smoothly.

I've actually only used the silk for one garment ever, but am going to try to do it more often on my nicer things. I find the cotton holds up well enough to daily wear though, despite being not ideal. The buttonholes are never the first part of my garments to wear out.

I cut a piece of about one arm's length more or less, depending on the size of buttonhole. For any hole longer than about 4cm I use 2 threads, one to do each side, because the end gets very frayed and scruffy by the time you've put it through the fabric that many times.

I wax about 2cm of the tip (Not the entire thread. I wax the outlining/overcasting thread but not the buttonhole thread itself.) to make it stick in the fabric better when I start off the thread. I don't tend to tie it, I just do a couple of stabstitches or backstitches and it holds well. (I'm generally very thorough with tying off my threads when it comes to hand sewing, but a buttonhole is basically a long row of knots, so it's pretty sturdy.)

Put the needle through underneath, with the tip coming up right along that little outline you sewed earlier. And I personally like to take the ends that are already in my hand and wrap them around the tip of the needle like so, but a lot of people loop the other end up around the other way, so here's a link to a buttonhole video with that method. Try both and see which one you prefer, the resulting knot is the same either way.

Sometimes I can pull the thread from the end near the needle and have the stitch look nice, but often I grab it closer to the base and give it a little wiggle to nestle it into place. This is more necessary with the cotton than it is with the silk.

The knot should be on top of the cut edge of the fabric, not in front of it.

You can put your stitches further apart than I do if you want, they'll still work if they've got little gaps in between them.

Keep going up that edge and when you get to the end you can either flip immediately to the other side and start back down again, or you can do a bar tack. (You can also fan out the stitches around the end if you want, but I don't like to anymore because I think the rectangular ends look nicer.)

Here's a bar tack vs. no bar tack sample. They just make it look more sharp, and they reinforce the ends.

For a bar tack do a few long stitches across the entire end.

And then do buttonhole stitches on top of those long stitches. I also like to snag a tiny bit of the fabric underneath.

Then stick the needle down into the fabric right where you ended that last stitch on the corner of the bar tack, so you don't pull that corner out of shape, and then just go back to making buttonhole stitches down the other side.

Then do the second bar tack once you get back to the end.

To finish off my thread I make it sticky with a bit more beeswax, waxing it as close to the fabric as I can get, and then bring it through to the back and pull it underneath the stitches down one side and trim it off.

In my experience it stays put perfectly well this way without tying it off.

Voila! An beautiful buttonholes!

If you want keyhole ones you can clip or punch a little rounded bit at one end of the cut and fan your stitches out around that and only do the bar tack at one end, like I did on my 1830's dressing gown.

(I won't do that style in my video though, because they're not 18th century.)

Do samples before doing them on a garment! Do as many practice ones as you need to, it takes a while for them to get good! Mine did not look this nice 10 years ago.

Your first one will probably look pretty bad, but your hundredth will be much better!

Edit: Video finished!

And here's the blog post, which is mostly a slightly longer version of this post.

[jasperthehatchet]

Fabric bracelets part 2: embroidery

These took so long but it was so worth it, I'm very proud of these

[Image ID: six images of three different fabric cuff bracelets. One is a blue/purple cuff with green wavy leafy vine embroidery that curls towards both ends of the bracelet. The design is on both sides of the spikes down the length of the bracelet, same placement as the others. All three bracelets have small metal spikes down the middle. The second bracelet is a desaturated red color, with a gray barbed wire design along both sides of the spikes. The third bracelet is a red and black flannel pattern, with a lighter silvery gray barbed wire embroidery in a slightly different style. The first barbed wire design is a little more stylized while the one on the black and red cuff is a little more realistic looking in its shape, but both are simplistic designs. All bracelets have button closures and three buttons to allow the wearer to adjust the size. All bracelets are roughly 9-10.5 inches long when open and flat and 2.5 inches wide. End ID]

[wailingrock]

Zelda blanket I made as a gift for my sister and her husband! It took me 3 months to make, and I completed it two hours before I had to leave for the airport. There’s a bunch of raw edges that probably won’t last over time but I’m still very happy with how it turned out!

I couldn't film the whole process and only have a few clips from when i first started working on this.

[cheesycatz]

my brainworm

[vincentbriggs]

I started working on a braided rug earlier this month, using some of the quilting cotton that I have too much of. It's inspired by some very old rugs that my grandparents had. I'm tearing the fabric into 4 cm wide strips, double folding it and slipstitching the edges together, then braiding it and whipstitching the edges of the braid together, around and around. I also pressed the fabric strips carefully after tearing them, and have been pressing the rug every time I go around the ends to prevent it from warping. It's coming along slowly and is currently 16 cm wide. I've used up almost one metre of fabric so far, and am about to switch to a different piece of green cotton.

[redhairedfish]

I've been thinking about this amazing pattern for days....

BEHOLD

rainbow croak army

there is a black one that looks like an orca and one color of leather bag