Hand embroidery and quilting silk-on-silk

[Nancy R.]

Renata - I would be interested to hear what your mom does with the raw edges. I've got a dupioni silk wholecloth in my stack of UFOs and what I did with that was cut it large and zig-zag the edges. Haven't worked on it long enough to see if that's enough. That one's pretty far down on my list, but I just ordered some more silk for my angel wholecloth and it would be nice to have some ideas of how to handle it well.

Nancy

[Nancy R.]

Nancy, I would think that cutting your piece over size and then zig-zaging the edges should work fine. When making up consider leaving larger seam allowances, and not trimming down for binding until the binding is half on, or at least having a line of stitching holding the edges together before you trim.

[Renata L.]

Nancy, I called my mom--she cuts her piece extra-large and then does a zig-zag around it, just as you did and like Rosemary said.

On an aside, she also mentioned that if her silk is too lightweight for the job (which I doubt would be the case if you're using duppioni), she still does not fuse; rather, she adds another piece of silk behind it and works with a double layer of silk. In her case, though, she is usually hand-embroidering a block and doubles it to make it more manageable. Finally, her preferred batting for silk is wool.

Hope this helps.

[Nancy R.]

Thanks Rosemary & Renata!

Good idea to wait on cutting when binding. I don't think I would have thought of that on my own! And for batting I'm planning wool on top of cotton, so I'll get that nice puff. It'll be a while, but I'll post pictures on my blog both in progress and finished. And I'll ask questions as I run into problems!

Nancy

[Nancy R.]

Nancy, I called my mom--she cuts her piece extra-large and then does a zig-zag around it, just as you did and like Rosemary said.

On an aside, she also mentioned that if her silk is too lightweight for the job (which I doubt would be the case if you're using duppioni), she still does not fuse; rather, she adds another piece of silk behind it and works with a double layer of silk. In her case, though, she is usually hand-embroidering a block and doubles it to make it more manageable. Finally, her preferred batting for silk is wool.

Hope this helps.

alternatively you could back your silk with a piece of pre-shrunk cotton (muslin?) or linen that also works well (alter frontals which are silk damask were/are frequently interlined with linen over here)

[Renata L.]

Nancy, I look forward to seeing what you do with your silk. I recently received several half-metre pieces of silk from a friend in Thailand and I am still merely admiring them, while they keep fraying all on their own! :lol: Maybe I better hurry up and zig-zag them all! :lol: :lol: :lol:

[Nancy R.]

Alex has made me kind of excited about silk, so I'm planning on also collecting pieces and someday making a pieced quilt. I guess I'll be zigzag'ing all of the edges as I get them! Don't want to loose too much of that beautiful fabric! I'll have to think about whether I'll take the easy way out and use fusible interfacing when doing the piecing or taking the time to zigzag each piece (ugh!). I'm guessing I'll end up taking the easy way out for that, at least on my first try! But I have plenty of time before thinking about that since you know what kind of a UFO list I have already!

Nancy