After painting the silk taffeta for the dress coat, I’m ready to begin adding extra detail with some hand embroidery.

Choosing Thread for the Hand Embroidery:

For this project I used 100% cotton embroidery floss. There is six strands of cotton that make up the thread. I cut a length off and used two single strands on my needle at a time. I used 10 different colours, each colour complimenting the colours used in the silk painting.

This is one of the flowers that I did the watercolour study for:

Stitching the Silk:

The silk taffeta was beautiful to embroider. Keeping the fabric stretched on the silk painting frame was very important so that I could always see the painting in its entirety. This allowed me to keep the areas of embroidery balanced in relation to the rest of the silk, all the while imagining the silk cut up and sewn into the dress coat.

There’s only a small amount of embroidery, just enough to add a little bit more detail. It has helped me to define the shapes and add clearer lines in the drawing.

As uncomfortable as it was leaning over to embroider the silk stretched on the frame like this, it meant I was able to duck underneath the silk to stitch the ends in.

Now this silk is ready to be made into a dress coat! Off to the dressmakers!

Back to: The Making of a Silk Dress Coat – Part 2 or keep on going to: The Making of a Silk Dress Coat – Part 4