With a skirt, if you had the room and the funds, you could make an old fashioned quilt frame. 2 1"x4"x8' and 2 1"x4"x2' or 3' These would make your frame. tack some ticking material to the boards so that you can pin the fabric for stretching and you will need 6-8 clamps, one for each corner and 2-4 to clamp the short boards to the saw horses. The long boards would be the ones, once you stitch the end of the fabric to them, would roll the material up, and as you finished a section, roll that under and unroll the material to be embroidered. Selvage ends should be parallel to the short boards. If your skirt has shaped pieces instead of rectangles I would recommend that you mark the skirt shape of the fabric (basting stitches work well for this) then embroider the piece before cutting it out. Just a thought, De
-----Original Message----- First off, you *will* see *some* compression happening if you put a hoop on velvet, no matter what you do... second, if you use too small a slate or scroll frame, the same thing will happen. Of course, I can also tell you from experience that attempting to stitch on a piece as large as a skirt piece on a frame is darned difficult. In fact I've had enough difficulty getting to the center of my (rather largeish) seat cushion on my frame at faire that I've ended up making comments from time to time about how I suspect that's why there are more professional broiderers who are male than female... arms are just too short for somethings. Now.. there's hope. I managed to work on velvet a few years ago by using one of those plastic q-snap frames and using terry cloth (you can use another piece of velvet probably instead) to cushion where it is compressed to hold, and provide more 'space' for the nap. Limiting time in the frame and lightly re-fluffing it when off helps as well. You *will* have to stretch out the clips for the frame, and it's horribly non-period, so not real event-friendly, but it will work. Creating embroidery slips and then attaching them to the skirt is period for *some* periods... more than direct embroidery for certain periods and decorative types, in fact. I haven't got a picture of my embroidery frame, but what I created (mostly from "scrap" wood) fits somewhere square between pictures I've seen for medieval embroidery and mid-1600s work... both of which look *very* similar in pictures/woodcuts, so I'm taking it as reasonably period, and appropriate. Ady B. might have a picture... but I can't remember if she's taken one of the frame at faire in the last two seasons. -Liz (Mistress Mabel Ascomb, embroideress... at MDRF) _______________________________________________ h-costume mailing list [email protected] http://mail.indra.com/mailman/listinfo/h-costume _______________________________________________ h-costume mailing list [email protected] http://mail.indra.com/mailman/listinfo/h-costume
