Having too much fun…

I was inspired by two events, one my trip to Iowa, where I stayed with fabulous felter Gisela McDonald, who opened up her stash to me (you have no idea…) and receiving back a piece via USPS (in a smashed box) from Loretta Phipps, who was my partner for the 2008 Design Challenge for Convergence Tampa Bay.  In a nutshell, Loretta and I were randomly paired, given yarn dyed in Floridian hues, and given about 6 months to come up with an ensemble for the runway, pooling our collective talents.  I am of course a handweaver, and garment designer, and Loretta does everything else but weave.  So I created a canvas so to speak, with both a coat and tencel dress for her to embellish and bead and make runway worthy.  Which she did until her fingers bled. The ensemble traveled for a couple years, and then Loretta took the pieces home with her, and has had them for the last year or so.  We decided that she should keep the coat, most of her embellishment was actually on the coat (there is a terrific felt godet in the back), and I would keep the dress.  Her embellishment there, done with 24 hours to spare, was minimal, and though it worked with the dress at the time, as an underlay for the coat, by itself, the embellishment looks stuck on like a neck tie. I need to remake the dress anyway.  It was designed to fit my daughter, then 15 and considerably more endowed than I am or have ever been.  I’d like it to fit me.  Weavers don’t often make cloth for an evening gown, and I like the over all design, which was completely draped, but it needs to fit me so I can actually wear it. I removed the embellishment Loretta did, a few stitches, and I have preserved it to return to her, I’ll see her in Houston at the American Sewing guild conference in August. Back to my experience with Gisela.  Her gorgeous home was filled with all kinds of textile books, many of which I’ve never seen and of course instantly coveted, I don’t recall a commandment of “Thou shalt not covet they neighbor’s textile books…”, so I’m good to go…  Now her stash, there really must be a commandment for that, “Thou shalt not covet they neighbor’s stash?” All is fair in love and textiles… Gisela gave me a scarf length of silk gauze 4.5 mm from Thai Silks, which I remember visiting last September where I bought all kinds of stuff so I must revisit my own stash one of these days…  She also gave me some beautiful handfuls of merino/silk, hand dyed, and a couple of silk hankies.  There were also a couple of reelings of a gorgeous metallicky knitting yarn from Michaels, which would create some surface interest.  And I sat reading her books, and looking at ideas, felting isn’t a strength of mine, largely because I haven’t played with it enough, but I’m always intrigued by the surface, and how one can have instant cloth without bothering with the loom.  The downside is the physical labor involved… Anyway, I am sick, nothing serious, but I’ve holed up all week in my studio, since I have a cold, and I’m trying to keep it out of my chest, and to entertain myself I dug out stuff from my own stash and started to play.  One of the books Gisela had, involved felting and stitching, using a water soluble stabilizer to secure the layers when not everything can be felted.  That whole idea really intrigued me, and I thought about it all the way home on the plane ride. I came up with a sample that led to some interesting possibilities.

So I jumped in head first…  I used Solvy Stabilizer as the first layer and laid the silk gauze scarf length down on top of that.  I started with a layer of merino/silk, didn’t have enough to cover the whole thing so I pulled another color out for the middle.

Next layer was more merino/silk…

I wanted a third layer, and had no more merino/silk, so I rooted around in my stash and couldn’t believe I had a skein of alpaca/silk in the right colors.  I knew the alpaca would probably not felt or felt the way I needed it to, but I hoped the merino would grab a hold and the stitching I was going to do would hold everything in place.  Crossing my fingers.  I loved the shine-y-ness of the alpaca/silk, which might work better with the dress fabric, which did I mention was woven from 8/2 tencel sett at 36 epi, in case anyone is asking…

My friend Ginnie from Hancock Michigan sent me a baggie of shredded silk sari scraps awhile ago, for my fiber adventures, and I dug that out and there was this amazing handful of the perfect color, which I shredded some more and spread it across the entire web.  I had fibers everywhere.  Too much fun…

I took Gisela’s metallicky yarn and put that on top for some surface interest…

Covered the whole thing with another layer of Solvy

And went to the sewing machine to baste the layers together.  My one mistake here was the direction I basted.  (My Janome Professional machine has this very cool basting stitch, so I can tack things together without having to do it by hand.)  I should have basted lengthwise because the foot kept getting caught in the basting threads when I did the final stitching…

I put on a couching foot, and stitched in random swirling patterns down the length of the layered stack, using the original tencel yarn I wove the cloth with.

Once that was completed and I removed the basting I headed down to the kitchen sink and started on a section at a time, first rinsing the Solvy and then felting the area in the bottom of the sink.  It felted fairly quickly, duh, this is merino we are working with here, and now I understand why everyone rolled their eyes at my trying to felt romney…

So now I have this gorgeous textile to play with, first I have to actually alter the gown, and then I get to drape and play and see where it takes me.  I may end up doing something else with the felted length, my one concern is the elements are too disparate and that it will look like a craft project when I’m done, but it is fun to play around with a couple of textiles and see what can come of it.  This is sort of like a Project Runway Challenge, “Make a pretty dress out of these two elements…”  I’ll keep you posted…