G[r]eek Alphabet : L is for Luggage

Hello! Another letter finished and in double quick time. this was a fiddly one because of the extra surprise, but I guess it was a relatively simple design in other terms. The shapes were also mostly quite blocky which helps.


First thing was I had decided to use the fake brown leather for the luggage but I was starting to wonder if it was contrasting enough. The colours all go together but the luggage has disappeared into the background. I'm sad because I liked the idea of the leather for the luggage.

So I tried another brown fabric which was slightly lighter. This worked better.

I spent some time debating the feet colour due to having chosen pink ribbon for the L and wanting a contrast with that and the background, and I ended up going with a strong yellow.

Decisions made, the purple base fabric needed sewing together as it wasn't quite big enough a remnant. Then I jumped right into the most interesting bit, the lid of the luggage which (surprise! - ish) I had decided to make so it opened and closed and had a big fat tongue in the middle rather than hanging out like in my reference picture:

 

I made the lid separately to get the lining and the outside hemmed to each other and also made the tongue out of a small bit of red ribbon separately. I then sewed down the lid, sewed in the tongue and sewed down the bottom half of the luggage. I really liked how it turned out.

Then all that was left was sewing don the L and defining the legs a bit with purple and yellow embroidery thread.

The lid does not stay closed without pins so I'm still debating adding in a snap or hook but for now I'm leaving it as it is. Yay! That was fun.
Moving on to M for Medusa I'm thinking of doing a bit of a redesign but I'm having a think first. Can't believe I'm up to row 4 already!!

G[r]eek Alphabet : K is for KRAKEN!

So at some point  recently I got fed up of having to constantly hunt for the same images repeatedly as references during this project and I got a Pinterest account.

It's really handy right now when I want to tell you what images I was using as colour and design references while making the Kraken image. I am slightly mystified by the few friends on there that I follow constantly repinning pictures of food but it's all good really.

Anyway, the basic colour of the square was a dark streaky blue and I'd decided on a high contrast white ribbon for the letter.

I had a vague idea about pink for the kraken as it seemed somewhat octopus or squid like colour to use. The googled images I ended up saving for reference were :

I had decided to do the kraken limbs using embroidery and I was originally planning to do them very simply just in perhaps varying tones of pink with a bit of purple to separate them out and differentiate.

I had done most of the tentacles when I started to feel just a bit of purple to outline was not enough and the tentacles were looking a bit like weird worms rather than kraken tentacles. I had also just used varying shade and some very light purple as outline in places so I added more darker purple over the top to create definition

I also went back to the reference images to think about adding suckers. They seem to make the undersides and suckers lighter but I wanted something more visible and contrasting so I found a dark pink that I thought would work. I'm a little nervous about them but I think they look good.

Finally just to give a small touch of water I added a few wavy vees.

Although I love how this has turned out, because the more embroidery you do the harder it is to add on more over the top, and because an amazing friend had given me a ton of ribbon, I did wish afterwards that I had used cloth or ribbon for the tentacles as it would have been so much easier but as it came out so well I don't really mind! Looking forward to L which is a rather simple design with a little twist I'm planning.

G[r]eek Alphabet : J is for Jam

"You couldn't have it if you did want it," the Queen said. "The rule is, jam to-morrow and jam yesterday – but never jam to-day." Alice through the looking glass

This was a relatively simple design which I could build up in straightforward layers. Because of the many pins on each layer, I sewed each layer down separately in order.

I started building up the layers before I had chosen the colour for the letter J although I had narrowed it down to yellow or green.

I chose this fabric for the jam jar because it is a mixed pattern as I liked the idea of the different colours as jam in a jar isn't normally just one plain colour.

When I came to finally choose the letter J I was still debating green but I took a small poll and they voted yellow. I'm afraid it wasn't a hard sell as I love yellow.

Final touch was the writing on the label. Yesterday went fine but tomorrow took some unpicking to get the letters to fit.

By chance some friends saw the following jam on sale and had to buy me one. Fab!

Also, an update on Icarus, votes were in and they said yes to feather details on the wings.

Here it is!

G[r]eek Alphabet : I is for Icarus and Ionic columns

I rather enjoyed this one even though parts were fiddly.

I wanted to be able to adjust the layout a bit so I decided I would make the whole of Icarus separately and then place him on the square-ish base. This also allowed me to adjust the letter I - which had now morphed into an ivy or plant covered column.

 So then I placed the column for letter I and started the sewing down. I didn't want to do too much as I knew I was going to sew Icarus on top and I didn't want to make it too painful to sew through.

 After I had sewn down Icarus - I used his hair sewing to sew down his head. I then added some spiral in green to sew down the column. This was part effect and partly I didn't have any green dark enough to sew it down semi invisibly.

So now I have one final debate. I had planned some extra feather detail on the wings. I remembered belatedly and then wondered if I should add it at all. I've started it in a very pale yellow. Is is a good addition or should I have left the wings without it?

G[r]eek Alphabet : H is for Heracles

So yes, I'm that sort of classicist. Heracles not Hercules ;-)

My first decision was that I decided that Heracles got a bit burnty and anyway he was Greek so why would he be all pale? So I got a stronger coloured felt for the flesh. Then I struggled with the colour of the lion. I really wanted this piece of fabric I thought my mum had which was furry. But sadly it has vanished. So I had to choose between some delish yellow satin from a friend or the same orangey stuff as the apple in A and cheshire cat in C. I decided on this finally

But then I needed a fabric for the letter H. I had originally thought of the fake brown leather like for letter A, 

But looking at it together, it goes together almost too well, and wouldn't be distinguishable against Heracles himself.

I then debated a green ribbon which became my final choice.

For this letter I basically made all the pieces, then pinned them into place and started sewing down the top layer first. At this point I found that I should have made more of an overlap for the body behind the H an a right hand side foot. I added an extra bit of felt for the foot and I just had to continuously carefully adjust the ribbon position to keep the exactness of the cutting of the fabric as discreet as possible.

For the lion skin that Heracles wears but is mainly here as a modest prop I started out just giving it a mane and some folds.

Having sewn the H down as well, and the body mostly I realised that as the cutting and layout had ended up, Heracles had more face hidden than my original design called for, which I didn't like. So I undid some of the stitching of the green ribbon to pull the head in front of the H. I then started sewing the hair followed by the eyes and mouth.

The hair colour turned out to be a bit light so I sewed some extra stitches in a darker colour. You can see it here where half the hair has only the light colour and half doesn't

Then I realised the lionskin looked a bit undefined so I added in a brown some leg and paw details.

And we're done. I'm faintly debating this one as a friend who is not so familiar with Greek myth wasn't sure what was depicted - she wondered if it was Jesus or a wrong colour Hulk!

I'm wondering about including a club but I like the design as is.

G[r]eek Alphabet : G is for Ghostbusters!

Ghostbusters!!! 

This one was really quick but fiddly. I did debate using non felt cloth, but the fiddlyness put me off. Part of what made it fiddly is that white is quite transparent, which means I couldn't take the easy option and just build up layers as this would make the white go dull.

This left me with a sort of jigsaw puzzle specially as [retraction] I decided to use a satin for one part. Foolishly I had accidentally cut it on the bias which meant it refused to behave without umpteen pins. Unfortunately on this scale pins rather distort the fabric. As I don't have infinite hands and fingers it was the only option. You can see what I mean in this first picture.

Sewing down the cross piece dramatically reduced the pins (hooray!)

I also mostly sewed things down apart from the far edges and then tidied up my fabric cutting as that way I could see how much I could afford to trim. With everything sewn down, I had edged the parts of the ghost that came outside the circle to make them obvious, and to separate out the cross bar from the G. However, having done this it looked not quite right so I decided it all needed outlining in black.

For those of you interested, this is the back, where you can see I didn't quite manage to line up exactly with the plan but it more or less was the same shape and placement!

G[r]eek Alphabet : F is for flamingos and feegles!

You've seen most of the stages on this, so the last part was to work out what to do to define the chin and how to do the mouth. I even resorted to the computer to test some stuff out. Particularly as a red mouth just looked really dumb

Then my feegle expert said their defining hair thingy is they have a plaited split beard and why don't I use wool. Only I didn't have wool and it would have to be very fine to work at this scale. So I did it with embroidery thread.

It was hard work though as the threads were tiny and I should have cut them longer and then cut it off shorter.

So the feegle anatomy is a bit weird but it's all good. And I love my flamingo.