keeping busy

My big sewing machine is in for servicing, and I'm wanting to keep busy until it comes home.

Having taken Cindy Needham's  Craftsy course on reclaiming old linens not once but twice, I figured I better get to it.  I bought a hand embroidered tablecloth at the thrift store, for $1.00, to use for practice and experimentation.  It's proven to be a challenge, as the embroidered bits are not evenly distributed around the tablecloth, so the whole thing had to be completely laid out--no short cuts.  It's taken a week, but the whole cloth is now marked, ready for machine quilting.

First I pieced together tracing paper a little larger than the full tablecloth.  Then I centered the cloth itself under it, and traced exactly around each and every hand sewn motif.  Then I marked an echo around that tracing, so as to make sure that there was enough space left for that portion of the quilting..  There was not enough hand embroidery to make any sort of blatant statement, so I drafted some special motifs to accent the smaller portions of the design, and then repeated them in four spots around the outer rim of the piece.  Taking the tracing paper off the tablecloth, I next drew three concentric circles at intervals from the center of the paper to the edge of the overall design.  Given the sparse-ness  of the embroidered bits, I felt the overall design would need something like that to anchor it.  Then I filled in the rest of the empty space with various feather design and marked a grid between two of the concentric circles for a change of pace from the feathers.

Putting the tracing paper and the actual cloth together was a bit of a challenge as well. I lay the cloth wrong side up on my work table and covered it with the tracing paper, carefully matching the embroidered bits with the appropriate spot on the tracing.  Then, I made simple tailor tacks in critical spots to hold them together.

Next was preparing a light box.  With the empty machine table, I placed two aquarium bulbs, that my clever husband had connected to one plug in cord, in the space where the machine usually sits.  The I placed large piece of glass on top of the table to work on.  The ironing board is placed behind the table to support the weight of the tablecloth, as I worked on it.

The actual tracing took me three days.  The "sandwich" kept slipping around,so I ended up having too use a couple of heavy weights to hold it in place as I worked.

The cloth itself is now hanging on my design wall, waiting for the machine to return from its travels.  Here is a close up of the traced design, and a few of the embroidered motifs.

I plan to link this with Nina Marie Sayre's Off the Wall Friday, and The Needle and Thread Network.