Tuesday, November 29, 2011

And now, for something different...

This is a hint as to what I've been doing lately: a whole lot of sewing!

stocking01
(Disclaimer: I still don't have a good camera, and I now live in a place with few ceiling mounted lights or large, airy windows.  So instead of photos with bad incandescent lighting, I now have photos with varied angles of bad incandescent lighting.)

Actually, this isn't my biggest project, but I put that one aside to finish these sets of stockings up in time to ship off to my family for the holidays.  Since I'm not at home this year, I wanted to send my family something neat.

I say "these sets" and I only have photos of one stocking... oops.  I drafted the patterns on these and layered up my fabrics so I could cut out four stockings at once, and also so that each one would have a unique combination of fabrics.  I made all four of this style, but I only have photos of the first one so far.  I'm halfway done with a second "set" of four in a wonky stripe style, and a third set I'm planning to do with applique pieces... not fully sure how yet, though.  I didn't put batting or quilting on them, which I was kind of torn over doing, but I did try some metallic decorative stitching, and I did line them fully:

stocking02

In addition to those, I also made these for my boyfriend's younger cousins:
HORDE STOCKINGS!


stocking03

All I can say is, he better be right about his cousins playing Horde-side, too, because 1) he is known to have some faulty memory errors here and there, 2) it would be really hard to applique that little lion crest thing, and 3) why would you play Alliance anyway?

So anyway, onto the details.  I always wanted to make some geeky-like applique, and this was the perfect chance.  I used a method that I think is called reverse applique, and I left the edges raw, because I felt it fit in style with the Horde--I even roughed the edges up with my fingernails.  To make the design, I printed the insignia on some freezer paper, then cut it out  with an xacto and ironed it onto my stocking pattern that I had backed with some black scrap fabric.  I then carefully sewed OUTSIDE of the pattern, and then cut right about on the edges of the pattern itself, but only through the red part of the fabric.  After I sewed the rest of the stocking up, I thought it looked kind of plain, so that was when I added the gold "rustic" top-stitching, to make it look a bit more like, say, the banners in Orgrimmar.  Ideally, I should have done this before sewing everything together; I ended up pulling the black fabric a bit weirdly since I could not hold it flat properly when sewing. 

I tried taking some detail shots, but keep in mind, low quality camera + reds + metallics = not so great macros.  I still wanted to keep some documentation of what I did, though!

stocking04

stocking05

And there you go! Hopefully I'll have more stockings to post, soon.  Sheesh, and I'm not even religious.