Ribbons and Jewels

 My crazy drapery project is complete!

In an earlier post, I explained why I'd gone off the crafting deep end and was embroidering my own drapery fabric.  Now a month or so later, the draperies are complete and hung. I'm delighted with how they turned out.  

I left the white Fabricut linen cotton blend unlined so they have a lighter look.  The fabric has substantial weight and body to it so they aren't skimpy.  To create the look, I used my Pfaff sewing machine to embroider each length with a top to bottom design zig and zagging back and forth in a light gray thread. I think of these as the ribbons. Then I added shorter straight rows of a variety of decorative stitches in gold, darker gray and beige threads  including a gold metallic.  They look like rows of gems to me sort of like straight earrings.  On the backside, I had some tearaway stabilizer pinned in place and tore it away from the stitches when each length was stitched.  It did a marvelous job of completely eliminating any puckering of the fabric as I'd had in my samples without stabilizer.

Since I was making the draperies, I knew how far apart to do the embroider and that I only needed it on the face of each pleat.  A perfect pattern repeat for a deep pleat on stationary panels is about 10 inches so that is what I did. The embroidery covers about 3 1/2 inches of each repeat so there isn't nearly as much embroidery as you might think to look at them.

Still the project took over 40 hours. That sounds like a lot until you think about the time invested in a quilt, crocheting a throw or knitting a sweater.  

Now that I have that white fabric out of my craft room, I can move onto some messier projects. The next thing I want to do is a mixed media canvas but I wouldn't dare get paint out until these were completely finished.

Thanks for visiting!