Behind the seams | cropped car coat, tartan, material count,
Size S cropped car coat cut from ac pdf pattern
Tartan stencil and ac treatment of the tartan stencil with beading
Five men's tees. Used 3XL but that size is bigger than necessary.
Organic cotton. Colour is not ac ochre; it's darker and more like gold brown. It was called tobacco.
Triple layer garment. Used an ugly brown for the middle layer. This garment doesn't have any cut outs so the middle layer is totally hidden.
The back of the embroidery work is none other than ugly. Get rid of it from eyesight with third layer. The tees are typically store weight tees which I think is around 160gsm while ac medium weight is I believe 220gsm and ac light weight is I believe 115gsm.
Preciosa seed beads size 11/0 = 50g in total used
Floss DMC skeins, sewing at four strand thickness.
6 per front and back panel
2 per sleeve
1 per pocket and flap
1 for collar
Total = 24, 4, 2, 1 = 31
I bought 11 from Joelle + 15 eBay + 7 eBay = 33 bought. One and a bit left over. Roughly 32 used, with more wastage at the start (for example wasted half skein or more on making paradise couch which never eventuated).
So on repeat, for one colour floss, would require probably 31 is a decent estimate.
Bugle beads used = 200g is enough yielding some extra.
Finished weight of garment 840 grams. But it really doesn't feel heavy. For someone who likes down jackets and lightweight clothing, I don't find this clunky, heavy or annoying. (Phew?)
Bugle beads in the big empty squares definitely make the garment special on this rendering of the tartan stencil. The seed beads took it up a cute special. The bugle beads make it really grande and royal. It is looking really good.
I thought the bugle beads would make the garment very heavy but it hasn't. One of the comments about this tartan stencil appliqué was that there would be sag. I really can't see that. It's not that heavy. It's not even heavy. Reading too many opinions isn't always a good thing.
M25 thread requires a size 9 needle. Using straw needle at the moment.
Preciosa beads have been tested by me before. These gold ones I have soaked in water for months with napisan in them. They did not give up the silver lining. Napsian works on releasing the silver lining after the bead has been bleached. The bleach must erode the protective layer. Then napisan takes care of the rest.
One of the reasons had to go up quality with beads is the consistency in size and hole size. This kind of work is extremely frustrating if you need to search for beads with consistent size. Then if the holes are inconsistent then your sewing becomes a real time waster. If I could compromise on beads I would. But I'm just making the process easier to work on.
Adding these bugle beads is way faster than I thought. Can probably do one front/back panel in one day. If I spent the day with sewing as a primary activity.
Doing the floss/straight stitch .... probably can get through two skeins in a day for this tartan application (although at the start it was probably one skein per day). This is using my technique of sewing consecutive row by row in all four directions.
To cut additional squares for the bugle beads, drew up a customised grid ruler on transparent hard plastic. Like creating a quilting rule but 3.5x3.5 cm. Makes the ruling up of the squares on fabric very very fast. But the accuracy per square isn't as good. Later found its better to trace a 3.5x3.5 square and cut one by one.
Front panel x1 used 45g bugle beads.
Back panel x1 used 40g bugle beads
Also remember that this count doesn't include the discarded beads, which for preciosa aren't many.
Beading glove no go.
If the double sided tape is too sticky, press it on some couch fabric or carpet a couple of times to help it loose its grip. Then needling bugle beads off the sticky tape will be more feasible.
Another way : very sticky double sided sticky tape + beading strap that is pretty taut on the hand. That way you can pull beads off easier. If it is not taut then you'll be pulling off the beading belt at the same time. Having a well fitted, little stretch beading belt is very useful.
Use beading strap instead of glove for bugles. Gives option to use it like a conveyor belt where you can rotate it. I only find having around 5cm x 2cm sticky tape about right for me.
Spinning the cloth panel around and around will slow you down. Having to rearrange holding the cloth in your hand over and over again is a very tedious task when you just want to get some stability and get on with it. Sewing the whole square of bugles without turning the panel will help a lot. After sewing the bugles on tartan for around four days I wish I had worked this out earlier. It takes time to get your head around this.
I have found that folding the panel and then pinning it folded so that you're essentially dealing with a small (the necessary) space can save you dealing with flabby fabric a lot.
Doing these bugles is easy to see when you're sewing chaotically or calmly because of its straightness required.
There is so much that makes this set of embroidery more efficient. I can see why doing this is not everybody's gig. It's more than just straight stitch. It's fiddly and quite boring. However of course I use this as time to achieve other things. Sewing is secondary (or should be secondary) to my primary purposes. Having a cool output while focusing on more primary purposes is a nice thing. Sewing like this also helps me to get into my primary purpose, because hand embroidery is so slow but at the same time requires you to halt many other activities.
Husband heard I think that a friend of a friend (male) got into knitting just to do something boring and get his brain to slow down. Knitting is uber boring in my books but the ac style is my natural medium. Though - honestly I really don't meet people who notice my clothes at all hahaha.
Finished the beading. The bugle beads for the whole garment was 190 grams at around 6-8 bugles per each side of each square. Seven bugles is probably most common.
For beading up the big squares in bugle I must say this is challenging. I don't think I ever mastered it even by the end of all the squares.
Tips:
- rule up the square on the garment with washable marker. That way you always know which edge line to follow. As you sew things shift. Even the 3.5 x 3.5 cm square appliqué that is being added.
- it will help a lot once you master doing the entire square without needing to rotate the panel.
- cutting the 3.5 x 3.5 cm appliqués one by one is almost necessary to get a well shaped square. I cut many out using a lined grid and did it on mass but I won't be doing that again. Precision required is big. Won't get it perfect no matter what but it's very very square.
Because this bugle gig is all about squares and square angles it's really easy to mess it up. Frantic and haphazard sewing is really visible.
- The bugles look so good.
Blind stitched and clean finishing the sleeves.
Wow gotta say I really like the clean finish look. They allocated 1/2" inch on the ends of the sleeves, hem and top of patch pockets to do the rolling requires for the clean finish.
Because I use three layers, the innermost later needs to be trimmed short by roughly at least 1/8" because you need to shorten it in order to roll the hem and have it all fit inside the roll.
Used a ladder stitch to so-call blind stitch it. It is really barely visible on if you just use some common sense and experience to make it that way.
It is necessary to baste the roll down. Just saves a lot of time lets you get on with the sewing.
But the hem in clean finish is really nice. Really happy with it.
Blind stitch is done with only singular thread (M25 in this case)
M25 polycotton thread needs minimum size 7 sharp (name of needle type) needle to get thread through eye easily. Size 9 sharp was used for the preciosa gold square hole bugle. Size 10 was used for the gold seed beads.
The technique I used for sewing the straight stitch section of this garment actually shrinks the garment slightly. Like going from size S to XS. Worked out fine. Everything still pieced together. It's still oversized. The larger the panel, the more % shrinkage there is - although, in the end this is still negligible because it all fits together just fine. So smaller panels like the pockets and collar have less shrinkage because the dense network straight stitches does cause the panel to "ripple" more and more.
If this were a garment that relied on stretch like the fitted tee or pencil skirt then you must must must sew the tartan squares in sets of 4x4 and knot off. Then the network of unstretchy stitches are contained in small areas. I really wouldn't bother with a one size fits most garment.
Note also for bugle bead sagging insurance ..... this technique which I have used produces a lot of knots where it is necessary to knot off around parts of the stencil where you can't continue the straight stitch. There are knots all around. It does secure the garment structure if you're ever worried about bugle weight causing sagging.
I wondered at times if this was a faster technique than working on 4x4 squares at a time. It still is. Using the 4x4 technique will still require heaps of knot offs (=turning the panel back to front every single time to knot off), plus you just can't build momentum in the sewing like you can do when you're just sewing in straight lines. You can really do some massive runners when you're just sewing straight lines row after row, column after column, diagonal after diagonal. Many of these lines you can literally do from one end to the other without an interruption. Get this garment over and done with already.
The part of the garment that matters most for me is the collar. Is it a good fit around the neck? In this case it feels just right. I don't want it any tighter, made from size S pattern, but it could be looser.
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