Tuesday, November 12, 2013

The Himation: A Quick Update

With November 18 (the latest Historical Sew Fortnightly I'm hoping to make) fast approaching, I figured that it's time for another update on my Byzantine tunic (himation) project.

The tunic-in-progress is still essentially a flat piece (though the gores and sleeves are sewn onto it) because I got bogged down in trying to sew my blue linen strips around the neckline.  Part of the problem is that I cut the strips on the straight of grain because I did not have enough blue linen left to cut them on the bias, but another part is the inevitable consequence of trying to fit a broad strip along a sharply curved neckline.  In the end, some tucks (and a non-period steam iron) will be involved, but I will make it work.  At this point, I've gotten the trim about three-quarters of the way around the neck and have sewn it on the sleeve-ends as well.

I have given up on adding the purchased trim to the tunic, not because I can't find it (though in fact I haven't found it yet), but because although the colors of the trim and linen work together, the textures would be all wrong.  The purchased trim is very stiff and tightly woven, and has a very slight sheen.  Texture-wise, it's everything the linen is not, and that would create the wrong effect for the tunic.

So, for now, I'm going to stick with using the blue linen alone as trim.  Later, if I can think of a suitable motif, I might consider adding embroidery even though I haven't dabbled in embroidery for almost four decades now.  The recreated himation on the Levantia web site that inspired this project has a simple embroidered design based upon crosses inside of circles (you can see it in this photograph), but I'm not at all confident of being able to make the crosses or circles symmetrical enough to look good.  If anyone has any alternative suggestions, please comment on this post.  

There's also a question of what kind of thread I should use.  I'd use wool, except I want the dress to remain washable.  That argues for a commercial embroidery floss, or for linen embroidery thread.  I don't have either of those things and I need to keep costs down.  Suggestions on this issue would also be greatly appreciated.

8 comments:

  1. My solution to embroidery of any kind is to print it out (typing paper is best if you still have some, but normal copy paper works just fine), and use it as my template, embroidering right over the paper. The needle perforates the paper as you sew, so it will come off easily.

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  2. Kathleen, welcome to my blog!

    Thanks for the idea; it's a good approach to getting an embroidery pattern to come out regular. I just have to find a pattern I like well enough to try it with! As I said, it's been nearly 40 years since I tried embroidery, and I'm more than a bit nervous about trying it.

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  3. For the embroidery, printing and sewing through both paper and fabric as Kathleen suggested might end up with the stitches being a little loose once the paper is removed. Also, personally I think I'd find that unbearably crinkly, stiff and annoying whilst sewing.

    An alternative is to cut out individual paper motifs (e.g. correctly sized circles), use a measuring tape to pin them into the correct places and then do big tacking stitches in a cheap, fine thread to trace around them. Then, the paper motif can be removed and the embroidery done without any impediment between you and the fabric. This method also means you only need one paper motif which is traced multiple times, rather than to have the entire embroidery traced onto a long strip of paper. You could, of course, use Kathleen's method but put on tacking stitch tracings instead.

    As for supplies, I think you're in the wrong country for me to assist with that.

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    1. Hi, Panth! I like your idea for transferring patterns better.

      What I'm really looking for is not supplies. I can figure out how to get supplies. No, I'm looking for ideas about: 1) patterns to use, and 2) people's experience with doing embroidery, and then *washing* embroidery, worked in different kinds of threads.

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  4. Silk is more washable than you would think -- it's pretty sturdy stuff. Do test in advance to avoid running colors -- black and red seem to be especially run-prone.

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    1. Chris: Thanks for the tip about silk. If I go with that, I'll pre-wash. Thanks.

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  5. There's a fair amount of surviving early-centuries-AD embroidery in silk on linen. Linen thread is usually white or natural color; apparently, if you could afford colored embroidery at all, you might be able to afford silk to do it with. (Some of the time I suspect it might have been ravelings from imported silk cloth.) There is also embroidery in wool on linen, but less of it has survived (no surprise there!).

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    1. I have wool thread (stuff I bought from Phiala for tablet weaving) and I thought about using it, but I'm less confident that wool thread will survive washing and friction (i.e., on the sleeve-ends) than I am about silk. I have to think about the trade-offs some more.

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