Great Louisiana Thread Pull

I am home again from Avery Island and LaBroderie Bayou 2010. Or affectionately known as The Great Louisiana Thread Pull. Had a good time. It is always wonderful to see stitching friends, have your meals brought to you and then someone else does the dishes. What is there not to love?

This year the additional teacher besides Wendy Schoen was Gloria Rivera from Puerto Rico. Gloria is also known for pulled and drawn thread work. The above picture is not lace insertion, it is drawn thread with net darning. Amazing isn't it?

This little daygown was the project for Gloria's class. Of course it is linen.

Gloria's gown has lots of little details that are so sweet. Tiny bit of embroidery inside the tucks,

featherstitching on either side of the lacey hemstitched hem.

Some other examples of Gloria's work. This is the dress bodice with the work that resembles inserted lace.

Drawn work worked on batiste. It truly does look like lace.

Another dress front. Some of these are a friend's photos. I left the charger to my camera at home. Of course the murphy's law of it would be, the battery was almost drained before I got there. So thanks Sarah for sending me some of your photos.

This photo was from my phone, so its quality is less. Wendy's project was a vintage inspired little dress with faggoted trim on the bodice. It is made from imported dotted Swiss.

A close up of the sample dress. Mine won't have the lace. It shouldn't take me long to finish it up. Not at all sure about the drawn thread work gown. It will be a bit more time consuming.

So I am back home trying to catch up on life as we await the arrival of a very important little person.

Pulled thread on linen, tutorial

Bunny said she wanted to come stand over my shoulder and watch me do pulled thread. Well any and all are welcome, just give me a heads up so I can run a rag through the bathrooms. Until then this is the best I can do.

Jane asked if I got up in the morning and started pulling threads or if I cleaned up the kitchen first. I laughed right out loud. Because there are dishes in my kitchen sink right now. No I don't get up in the morning and pull threads. If I did, I would probably be done with all nine diamonds by now. I can do one diamond in about an hour and a half. That doesn't include the netting and darning. So here is my attempt at a tutorial, I think it should really just be a story in pictures. Not sure how tute like it is.

First off the method that Mirella uses is to mark your area with thread. This diamond will be 17 squares by 17 squares done in groups of three threads. These particular diamonds I started from the bottom up, using my drawn thread for the hem as a my point of reference to measure from. Mirella just pulls one thread up and across to place her marking thread, I found if I withdrew all three I could see better. So my center lines are marked by stitching a thread over and under every three threads. Where you see linen on top of the thread is where you clip. Mirella says that the marking thread tells you, "Don't cut me!"

The outer points are just one "square." I don't clip those threads until I have the diamond finished. It worked better for me to always have that bottom reference point and I mark each one with blue marker. Again so I could see. It is easy to lose your place when doing pulled thread on 1300 weight linen.

You have to train yourself to see the diamond in your minds eye. I found that if I worked in the left bottom quadrant each time I could "see" better. I rotate my fabric for each quadrant so that each time I am working in the same direction. The above picture if what you are going after.

So you are stair stepping up the side of the diamond. When I used to do cross stitch or even when I picture smock I talk to myself, "up one, out one"; " down one, out two" So for this pattern it is always up one, out one. I mark with a pin the bottom of the row I am going to pull. This keeps me from pulling too far. Ask me what a pain in the neck that is! Then you get to "learn reweaving" as Mirella calls it.

Then I mark where I am going to clip with another pin. On top of that pin is where I clip. (Try balancing a VERY sharp pair of scissors, the fabric and the pin while you try to take the picture!)

Then using a tapestry needle to pull with I withdraw my threads from the fabric down to where my "stopping" pin/needle was placed. Remember my bottom square of the diamond I didn't clip yet. So imagine that blue mark as one square. When I pull the threads on the right side of the marking thread I will have three squares across. I will increase the same way until I reach the middle of the diamond that will have 17 squares. Eight on either side of my marking thread.

Lori wanted to see how to use the do-lolly. As you can see in the pic of the do-lolly it has a needle threader looking side and a "hook" side. I come through the fabric at the bottom of my pulled thread row with the needle threader wire. I use the "hook" to pull those threads through the wire loop. (Sorry I just didn't have enough hands to hold everything and take a picture of the hooking action.)

Then I pull those threads to the back. Mirella leaves all of hers on the front. I found myself having a more difficult time "seeing" where I was if I left them on the front. So I pull them to the back.

Here I have pulled three more rows in the quadrant. I pull first the vertical then pull the horizontal threads out to the outer square for each row. Again I got lost if I pulled all vertical rows and then tried to go back and pull the corresponding horizontal rows. It sounds time consuming to watch each row, but like everything else you get in a rhythm and it goes more quickly than you expect.

Here is the first quadrant pulled with

the threads pulled to the back. (There is a boo-boo in there. Can you find it?)

I do an extra little step that helps me keep my place. I tack down those threads on the back to 1) keep them out of the way and 2) to protect them from shredding as I handle the fabric. If I keep them from shredding, then IF I have to reweave they are in decent shape to do so.

I have turned my fabric so I am again working in the lower left quadrant,

and again

until all of the quadrants are done. This diamond has already been back stitched around and the netting done. I will take pictures of that process next time.

And the linen continues...

Are you beginning to feel like this is the project that won't end? Kind of like the switchover to DTV (or other recent non-stop coverage I am sick of.) Well here is the next installment in the linen daygown. I have 5 squares netted. 3 completely embroidered. I need to get crackin'! I want to enter it in the fair. I also need to get some smocked things done for the fair. YIKES!

I kind of hit a snag, I lost my do-lolly. ( I did not purchase it at the link provided, but it gives you the info you need to find it at your own cross stitch, needlework shop.) When I bought this trinket about 12 years ago, I admit that I bought it just because Eva Lou did. If she bought it, then I needed to buy it. You know how that goes. I am pretty certain I didn't pay $31 for it. I have taken it out on occasion but never really thought that it was a necessity or could get the hang of using it. Well it has become a necessity for this project. Thanks Sarah M! I finally found it in the crevice of the sofa. The sofa I don't sit on. Not really sure how it got there, but it has been found. You would be amazed at the other stuff I found too!

A couple of parting shots. This past weekend we made a fly by trip the new Lincoln museum and also his home site. We didn't make it into the library. We will have to go back for that. Our family are museum people anyway, but as far as museums go, this one is whizzbang!!!!! Really done well. And since it is the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln's birth they have even more going on. If you get to Springfield, IL it is well worth it.

Linen daygown part 2 of 100

Well I have been working on putting holes in perfectly good fabric as my husband calls drawn thread work. Which if you think about it is true, but I don't like to think of it that way.

You can see in the diamond on the right I am in the process of stitching the buttonhole border. (My needle is just parked there.) Then I will do the net darning on these two squares. Boo-boo'd around one of the diamonds pulling too far but I was able to reweave that tiny bit. Whew.

I have been working on "pairs" of diamonds so that if I do mess one up, I only have to adjust one other diamond instead of all of them. The next two I will work on are the two diamonds that will be opposite each other on the front. It is actually going faster than I expected. I will try to get a picture of just the threads drawn out, before I bundle the grid. The order of work on each diamond is, you mark it with the threads as seen in this post. Then you withdraw the threads to make your holes. Stay stitch around the diamond to help stabilize it. Next you bundle the remaining threads to make a grid. Buttonhole stitch around the edges, and last do the net darning. On all eight diamonds. It is not until all of that is done that you do the embroidery then construct the gown.

Linen daygown part 1 of 100

I pulled out the daygown from Wendy's school. I have three more diamonds to mark, then I will start pulling threads. The above picture is the first diamond I did in class. A huge learning curve with that. I am hoping that the others go more quickly.

This is the lower back of the gown. Sorry for all the wrinkles, this is how linen looks in progress. The stitched diamond is in the center back. The entire gown is cut in one block. The only other pattern piece is the sleeve. That center diamond is a bit higher than the others along the hem. Those "stitching" lines you see are the markings of the center of the diamonds. Hopefully next time I will have a diamond pulled so you can see.

To answer a couple of questions, Bunny asked which thread I used for the shell stitched hem. I use DMC 50 weight normally. You could use Madeira 80 wt but that is really too fine for construction.

Julia asked when the school on Avery Island is held. It is USUALLY the first week of June. Watch Wendy's website for more details after the first of the year.

Till next time, stay cool and pick up a needle. It does the soul good.

Almost Done

Here are a couple of pics. I am almost finished. I was so glad to have the embroidery finished while I was on retreat, that I just had to wash it. The only thing I had to wash it with was shampoo. I wish I had taken a picture of it before. It is amazing what a bath and an iron can do for a piece.

Note that the dark spot in the lower right hand corner must be from the camera, all of the pictures I took had it on there. That is something I am finding to amazing, the number of pictures you have to take in order to get some that work for you. A friend had told me that and I didn't have the experience that it was true. If you takes lots and lots of shots you will get some that work.