Jackson's Practical Companion, Page 126

I have two more patterns from The Practical Companion to the Work Table, by Elizabeth Jackson that I have charted out: German Lace Pattern from page 124, and Open Pattern For Shawl from page 126.

Well, I haven't gotten around to knitting swatches up yet, but lillybomm on Ravelry has already tested the Shawl Pattern: in a lovely orange yarn. So I thought I may as well post the chart without knitting up a swatch to go with it. It is a fairly simple pattern.

The german lace pattern appears to have several errors in the written instructions, so I won't post the chart until I've actually swatched up what I think is the correct pattern.

Jackson's Practical Companion, Page 105

The next edging swatch I made in The Practical Companion to the Work Table, by Elizabeth Jackson was the Brussels Lace pattern, on page 105.

As with the prior two patterns (Pointed Lace, Open Lace), this pattern is again written in garter stitch lace, and I have charted (and swatched) both the original and a stockinette style version. These charts use two additional symbols. One is a double decrease. The other is a non-standard symbol indicating two yarns-overs; on the following row only one of the yarn-overs is used and the other is dropped. This results in an extra loose yarn over, and a larger hole.

This pattern has an 8 row repeat. The written instructions for row 9 say to bind off some number of stitches then continue with row 1. In the following charts, row 9 is fully diagrammed. Thus row 1 is only used at the beginning, and the pattern then repeats between rows 2 and 9. When ending, the last full row of the pattern should be row 8, with the 9th row being the bindoff. Here is a chart of the original version, with even rows knit.

Jackson's Practical Companion, Page 103

I continued swatching some of the edging patterns in The Practical Companion to the Work Table, by Elizabeth Jackson. Following is the sample and corresponding charts for the Open Lace Pattern, on page 103.

As with the prior lace pattern, the instructions were written for a garter stitch lace. I concluded after knitting both the version as written and the modified version in stockinette style, that I actually preferred the garter stitch version for this particular edging.

The original instructions are missing a single knit stitch at the end of row 8. Here is a chart of the pattern, with the correction marked in orange:

Jackson's Practical Companion

I was thinking of making a baby bonnet for my future niece, but I was unimpressed with the selection of baby bonnets I found on Ravelry so I decided to browse through the victorian era public domain books on Google. Well, I didn't find much in the way of baby bonnets (so far), but I found a number of edging patterns that looked interesting.

So I've started to chart and knit a few of them. Almost all the patterns I looked at are written out as garter stitch lace, but I've charted them out as both garter stitch and stockinette stitch. Thus, the following charts show the front of the lace. For the most part, the charts use the JIS symbols (a list and visual instructions of how to knit the stitches can be found at this helpful site, and more general information on Japanese knitting symbols can be found here), but the following key can also be used (in the following, SSK is used instead of SKPsso).

I started with the pointed lace pattern, on page 102 of The Practical Companion to the Work Table by Elizabeth Jackson:

V&A Fashion In Detail

At some point this summer, when I noticed Amazon was out of "Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Fashion in Detail", [Amazon, B&N,GoogleBooks,V&A], I hurriedly ordered "Nineteenth Century Fashion in Detail" before it also vanished, [Amazon,B&N,GoogleBooks,V&A]. At some point "Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Fashion in Detail" came back in stock and I got around to ordering it. Well, last week I ordered "Underwear: Fashion in Detail", [Amazon,B&N,GoogleBooks,V&A]. So now I have three V&A books of eye candy.

The cover photos on the books are of course ©V&A
Shop at the V&A: 17th & 18th C., 19th C., Underwear

The "Underwear: Fashion in Detail" may have somehow been both the most disappointing and the most interesting. Despite having a gorgeous corset on the cover, I think most of the book covered 20th century underwear. They had plenty of earlier pieces (chemises, shifts, drawers, stays, corsets, hoops, and bustles), but the book was organized to highlight certain things, and the 20th century had so much change in underwear, including underwear as outerwear, that there seemed to be a lot of 20th century selections. I found this is what made the book interesting; the text explained a lot of the changing fashions and how they sometimes fit within the more general social context.

In any case, some of the 20th century pieces were still stunning. One of my favorites was the stocking with the embroidered, sequined snake encircling the leg, circa 1900, Item V&A:T.53-1962. Another was one of the dresses, circa 1930s, shown on the back cover (the one on the left), Item V&A:T.308-1984.

Again, photos displayed on the front and back covers are ©V&A

I am also vaguely tempted to try and crochet a whirlpool bra. Don't know what I'd do with it if I made one, but designing and creating something like the bra on pg 150-151, Item V&A: T.196-1989, just seems kind of interesting.

Omiyage Bags, Set 1

As I mentioned in the last post, Spoonflower is not the only business to print fabric on demand in small amounts. And I have decided to test as many of them out as I can; this has turned into an ongoing, and very slow project.

At some point in my infrequent browsing through craft books in bookstore, I came across "The Perfect Bag" by Linda McGehee [GoogleBooks,B&N,Amazon]. Well, I managed to find this book in my current local library not too long ago, during one of my browses through the craft section.

I also came across "Omiyage: Handmade Gifts from Fabric in the Japanese Tradition" by Kumiko Sudo [GoogleBooks,B&N,Amazon]. I'm not much of a purse person -- I have one purse that I use constantly (it occasionally switches, approximately every 2-5 years I think) -- but Omiyage completely captured me. The only problem is that nearly all the projects involve a whole bunch of piecing. I got taken with a quilt/piecing bug once, and made myself a chair cushion cover; I have since lost nearly all interest in projects that involve piecing (the prospect of crazy quilting still has me captured though). To eliminate the piecing problem of those fantastic bags, I decided to make a cheater print of custom fabric. And since I had almost 50 designs by this point, I decided to try and use them all as a sort of sampler.

So I laid out the necessary pieces for 6 bags from the Omiyage book, and one purse/bag based on what I remembered from The Perfect Bag. Originally I was going to print them out through Spoonflower, but I wanted a slightly heavier weight fabric than their quilting cotton (and I didn't want to pay the price for the cotton sateen). So I took a look at Fabric On Demand, which offers a 62" wide 6oz cotton poplin for $16.75 (probably the best price per cloth area I've seen).

On Demand and Custom Fabric Printing

Spoonflower is not the only site that will print custom fabric, but at the moment it seems to have the best combination of price and easy to use site/ordering. I figure, however, I should spread my business around where it seems appropriate and try to promote competition.

Following is a list of the current set of sites I have looked at (or rather found) thus far for custom fabric printing (in small amounts).

More Fabric Design and Spoonflower Contests

I decided after the tessellation contest result (and looking at the winners of that contest and previous contests) that my design has too many colors, or too much variety of colors. So I set out to learn something about fabric design. I borrowed "The Fabric Design Book: Understanding and creating patterns using texture, shape, and color." by Karin Jerstorp and Eva Köhlmark from my local library [GoogleBooks,B&N,Amazon]. At this point I've still only made my way through about a third of the book; I keep getting distracted with working on new designs.

Around this time Spoonflower held another contest; this time to design a one yard cheater quilt. Inspired by Gerry Smeltzer's "Black-White and Chartreuse" quilt at PIQF (2009), I decided to make something similar with a slightly more 'steampunk-ish' flair. Here's a picture of "Black-White and Chartreuse", which I am in love with still (I like the color green, especially lime green):

As an exercise from the book, or based on a couple exercises, I decided to make a fabric collection using variations of a single element and a restricted palette. For the design element I started with two simple gears, then used a quarter or half of the gear as the basic element. For the palette I picked a single hue of brown, then selected three saturation levels and four intensity levels at each saturation level. The final design set didn't fit in a single 'collection' on Spoonflower's site, so its separated into two collections: Variations on a Gear and Gear Flowers.

I then used a subset of these designs to make my gear quilt cheater print (click the image to get to the Spoonflower page).

I concluded after the contest that Spoonflower's contest voting display favors somewhat simple designs, especially when the contest entries are for a full yard of fabric. Some of the top designs looked great on the screen, when the image was only 2 inches wide, but after thinking about what the design would look like on a full yard of fabric I noticed that at least one design featured flowers (or something) where the center of the flower consisted of a plain white circle 8 inches in diameter.

I only managed to come in 40th out of 127, with 225 votes, in the Cheater Print contest, with my gear quilt. I've since made a reduced version to be printed out as a table place-mat, but I haven't gotten around to having it printed yet (and its one of my few designs that isn't yet viewable by the public).

I made several designs using the Summer Flowers color theme: Summer Flowers collection. I entered "Diamond Leaf Scroll" in the weekly contest. The design came in 83rd out of 136, with 91 votes.

Well, then I got excited when they announced a weekly contest with the theme of "Desert"; I grew up in the desert (the Mojave Desert to be specific). Desert is such a broad theme, however. I thought about doing desert wild flowers, but I don't actually have any personal pictures of them (or at least not any digital ones). So I asked my dad if he had suggestions for a desert themed fabric (he's an art teacher in the Washington D.C. area, and he's really good at thinking up interesting ideas for pictures). He said I should pick something from the desert with a nice pattern, and suggested the Mojave Green (a diamond back rattlesnake), and then he suggested having it kind of appear out of the background (my interpretation, not his words).

Since it sounded like a cool idea I decided to try it. I had some difficulty trying to figure out how to draw the snake in the computer. Then I had some difficulty trying to figure out scales. The scales ended up being a bump map pattern in GIMP, followed by some back and forth between Inkscape and GIMP to get a scaly skin: I made an image of a single scale in Inkscape, then imported it into GIMP and created a beveled image (I think I went with beveled rather than bump map), then created a set of scales in the diamond back pattern using Inkscape, imported the textured image of a scale as a pattern into Inkscape and applied it to each scale in the diamond, and finally exported the bitmap so that it could be imported into Inkscape as a fill pattern.

Scale exported from Inkscape:	Saved from GIMP, and imported into Inkscape as a fill pattern:	Exported from Inkscape, and bitmap imported as a fill pattern:

I then found a public domain image snake and laid out the diamond pattens, then filled in the extra spaces with solid scales, and finally took the whole coiled snake and laid it on top of a plain diamond filled area in GIMP. (Then I fiddled with some gradients to make the snake pop out a little more relative to the background, especially the head.) And I had my contest entry.

It came in a disappointing 70th out of 119, with 70 votes. I've concluded that crafters like cute happy images. And snakes are generally not considered cute, or happy. (As a side note, my dad said most of the contest entries looked childish, which made me feel better. I suppose artists and crafters have different mindsets.) The winning entry was probably my favorite contest entry (after my own of course); even I like cute.

Given my degrading contest performance, I've decided to stop designing fabrics for Spoonflower contest, at least until something really good comes up. (I haven't stopped designing fabrics, but they're for other projects.)

2010 - The Beginning

Well, I signed up to go to Costume College again this year, but I was less ambitious this year, and only had one planned outfit (that still failed to get made). This year, however, I got distracted with Spoonflower.

My fabric design journey started when Spoonflower held a tessellation contest, as one of their weekly contests back in April. Well, I remember making tessellations back in junior high school, and I also remember it being fun then. Back then, it was somewhat annoying to get all the edges exactly duplicated, but I figured the computers would be great for that part now. So I learned about cloning in Inkscape. And since I had recently been to Hawaii for a computer science/bioinformatics conference, and seen some sea turtles while travelling around Oahu, I figured I would use them as the basis for my design.

So I complete by design in time for the contest and submitted it. Link to my design on Spoonflower. I managed to come in 15th out of 60 entries, with 289 votes. Since it was my first fabric design ever, I figured that's pretty decent. Of course, I had to get it printed out as well, I was so excited about "my-first-fabric-design". (The lighting was a bit uneven in the picture, my curtains kept blowing around and I put the fabric on an uneven surface.)

A Changing Blog

This blog has fallen by the wayside as I became increasingly busy with life. I'm nearly finished with my dissertation now, and hopefully in the future I will have more time to browse sites and post links to examples of dress (and undress) that I find interesting. In the short term though, this blog is likely to become filled with projects I am working on (or thinking of working on).