Progressing

Work continues. Last night I took the project on the road to Nordskogen's Wednesday meeting to much acclaim. Everybody wanted to know what I was working on and was very wowed. I may have to borrow this plan for some of my own garb in the future.

I got all the pearls done on the second strip, and just barely started applying cord to the third. The second still needs a few beads, but it's all but finished.

Also fabulous was that Constanza was there, likes the design and decided to order a whole bunch more pearls to be mailed directly to me, which means that the pearling will be uniform and I will have no fear of running out. Yay!

After meeting, I went and hauled boxes for Idonea, Crispin and Sefa as part of phase 1 of their move. As a result, I currently have all of Crispin's archery equipment in my car. Bwah ha ha! *ahem* (If you know Crispin, it will come as no surprise that while Constanza may have wound up with custody of the title of his car, he readily admitted that the archery gear was significantly more important to him.)

I can sometimes work on projects while on meetings where I'm mostly listening, but sadly today I'm hosting, which is very much not conducive, and after work I will be (probably ;-) giving Crispin back his gear and helping with the move, so I don't know how much progress I'm likely to make today. But there is still lunch, so I'm going to try...

New photo

As noted, at this point I'm down to about half the beading left on the second strip, and I'm pondering end treatments. I kind of like the wrapped one, rather than the splayed...

And pearls!

At this point, posting pictures is going to get a little repetitive, but I'll try anyway, if my phone cooperates. With a couple of nights of solid work, I've now got one complete strip and a second one with all the cord and half the beads applied.

Even more bling arrived in the mail yesterday, so the variety of beads has gone up substantially. Now the pattern is garnet, grey pearl, garnet, crystal beads, garnet, gold beads, garnet, tiger's eye, garnet, green pearls, garnet, small gold beads, garnet. It's difficult to get a photo of the whole length, but I like the beading pattern. There's enough regularity with the pearls and garnets that it's all unified even with the variety of materials.

Pretty soon, I need to start thinking in more detail about how this is going to interact with the body of the garment. My plan is that the long strips I'm currently working on will be the vertical panels on the front and back, so now I need to work on the bars of the Ys. I'm assuming the total requirement will be four strips - two long ones and two short ones back and front. Hopefully if that's off it's that we need less, not more. I don't think pieceing this would be fun or very easy to disguise. On the plus side, the way I've been working, the motifs are separate, so it would just be a matter of cutting at the narrowest point and securing the ends of the cords.

I've also been having conversations with Annetje, and we think that the best plan is to use a narrow band of red velvet so that it ends up being about 5 inches wide. That means there will be 3 inches of gold trim, and an inch of red velvet on either side.

Onwards!

Now with beads!

I've started beading and I'm very pleased with how it's turning out thus far.

I'm using Constanza's pearls for the top and bottom curves. For the accents I'm alternating a set of garnets with either peacock pearls and crystal beads. Meaning it goes garnet, peacock pearls, garnet, crystals, garnet... and so on.



And don't worry, it's only askew against the red because I was using the velvet as a backdrop. It's not attached yet. :-)

Bling has arrived!

The velvet and various bits of bling just arrived on my doorstep, so here's a quick photo what the band looks like against the velvet. (And my couch. You're likely to see a lot of my couch as this project moves along...)




I think this is going to be really impressive.

Chasuble project

THL Dahrien Cordell is being elevated to the Pelican this Pennsic, and he has asked people to create a chasuble as a thank you gift for Fr. Olav, the priest who has agreed to say Mass for him. I and a bunch of other folks volunteered, and Annetje, who's running the project asked me to design the orphery, which is the ornate embellishment which overlays the body of the chasuble. Due to time constraint of needing to finish by August 9 and preferably earlier so I can send it to Pennsic complete, while I want as much period accuracy as we can manage, realistically we're not going to be able to get much heavy duty embroidery in place by August 9th.

So those are the constraints. On the upside, people have been very generous with materials and I think I understand what the overall vision of the project is. Handmade, period style, with as much bling as we can manage in the limited time we have.

My hope has been to find fabric that will help us get as much bling as we can for the effort. In this case, I have a gold fabric which happens to have the sort of S curves that Annetje asked for as part of the design. It'll be going over a wider piece of red velvet, which will then be applied to the gold silk body of the chasuble itself. We've decided on a Y shape like the St. Bernard of Clairvaux chasuble.



I decided to try to add some visual definition to the fabric with black satin cord.





I'm pretty happy with the effect. It does definitely make the pattern pop from across the room as compared to the plain fabric.

Once I finish applying the cord, the next phase is beading. Constanza was good enough to donate several strands of pearls, and more will be arriving with the velvet, plus garnets, and possibly gold beads and peacock pearls. So this is my somewhat optimistic beading layout idea. I don't think I'm going to finish it all, front and back, but if I get the arms of the Y finished I'll be pretty happy.




My Paint skills are pretty nonexistent so don't zoom in too close, but this should convey the idea of what I have in mind. The white dots are pearls, and the red and grey are garnet, peacock pearls and whatever else ends up in the final package of bling.

So that's the plan. Now I just need to make sure everybody else is okay with it and make it happen.