On Apr 28, 2004, at 16:26, Amanda Babcock wrote:
What is the difference between top sewings and edge sewings? Is there a diagram online?
There are good diagrams in Cook's Practical Skills, but I don't know of any online ones. Patty has fiven an excellent verbal description of what a top sewing (as opposed to an edge one) is and how to make them, and Karen explained what the top sewings are for. I'll add a couple cents worth (in a $5 package as usual <g>) of my own, mostly because
I've been doing a tape lace for the first time,
there are different kinds of tape laces and you don't say which one you're experimenting with.
Russian Tape and similiar, for example, do not have a sewing footside as a rule. There, the workers do not exchange; the same worker pair turns around the pin and travels back. What that means is that you can't have a top sewing, only the edge one. Additionally, the top sewing is used only in lace which is worked with wrong side facing you; Russian Tape is supposed to be worked with the *right* side up.
I cheat... :)
First of all, I learnt Russian Tape from a Dutch book and, not understanding a word beyond the ones listed in the book's "dictionary" (things like "pin", "stitch", thread, etc), never knew I was supposed to be working right side up, so worked it as I had worked the lace before (Torchon). By the time I learnt of my error, I was deep into Milanese, and had fallen in love with the top sewings both for their 3-D and their "coverup" possibilities.
Quite often, the Russian Tape patterns will have an optical illusion of a sewing footside -- a twisted, whole-stitched passive, separated from the rest of the tape (cloth- or half-stitched) by a twist on the workers, which then do their usual "go around the pin with twists", leaving a "feathery" edge instead of a solid-line one. Well then... If they can fake a sewing edge, so can I fake a top sewing; I make it onto the twisted worker, in that space between the main body of the tape and that solitary twisted passive :)
Works a treat, but only if you work wrong side up. The resulting 3-D effect (once you take the piece off the pillow and flip it to its right side) is, if anything, more pleasant than the traditional solid line. Doesn't work always, because most of Russian Tape is continuous and laid out in such a way that it's often not possible to do the "front" bits first and the "background" ones later (a necessity for the 3-D effect), but when it does work, it's great.
If you look at:
http://lorien.emufarm.org/~tpd/91-99/91-99.html
and enlarge the Partridge in a Pear Tree, I used that cheat there. The leaf (winkie pin edge) is made first, the pear outline (sewing footside) -- although continuos -- later. The pear outline was then sewn to the leaf with the fake top sewings. When viewed from the right side, it looks as if the leaf is on top of that part of the outline. One of my better designs, if I may blow my own horn a little :)
and am not satisfied with any of the ways of doing sewings that I've come up with (which thread gets pulled through, whether they need twisting afterwards, whether to go around the pin when rejoining the tape from doing fillings, etc). I would love to see the "official" way of doing this.
I don't think there *is* a single, "official" way of doing things... :) Every book you look at is apt to have something different, so you end up doing what you think looks best, depending on the particular situation. Patty's right when she says the number of twists should match on both sides of the pin. *Unless* you intend the "whatever you're sewing" to sit snugly against the "whatever it is you're sewing into" <g>.
The most common sewing is where you pull the thread of one bobbin through the pinhole, put the other bobbin of the same pair through the resulting loop, and tension both threads. But, in some regions of Russia, they prefer to do a "self-sewing" -- the same bobbin which made the loop goes through it. Me, I often like "double" sewings, especially when dealing with a plait -- use one *pair* to form a loop, and put the other *pair* through it. All of those are "right" -- in their place.
And Patty's right that, in the standard (one pair) sewing, you lose a twist and have to compensate. But you lose them in different places, depending on which side of your work the sewing is. If your sewing is on the right-hand side, you need to add a twist *before* making the sewing; if your sewing is on the left, you add the twist *after*.
In general, unless you're working with really thick thread, nobody's going to notice when you have one twist more than necessary. It's when you don't want to have *any*, or when you're sewing out into the beginning holes, that the left and right sewings begin to matter.
Experiment some more :)
----- Tamara P Duvall Lexington, Virginia, USA Formerly of Warsaw, Poland http://lorien.emufarm.org/~tpd/
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