Feather Kimono

This piece was made for a show called "Myths and Legends," and I worked entirely too hard on it and learned several things which will be useful if I can ever again bear to make a piece with so much machine lace: (1) do not "build" the entire piece out of non-overlapping ovals of fabric, so that the stability of the whole piece depends on perfect coverage of each and every surrounding bit of machine lace; and (2) try not to make a design which requires you to change thread colors 7 or 8 times per panel. (This was assembled from 7 or 8 flat panels - I can't recall without digging out the designs, and I'm sorry, it's still a painful memory.) If I ever do this again, I'll lay down long thin overlapping strips of fabric on the Aquafilm before even starting to build the machine lace.

On the other hand, I did figure out an easy way to make sure that all the little bits and pieces of thread and fabric you lay down in a Solvy sandwich before stitching....stay where you put them. Use a heavy water-soluble stabilizer, like Romeo or Aquafilm or Super Solvy, for the base. Lay out your fabric bits, not covering the base completely (gotta have some open areas to show off the machine lace, and to make this fixing technique work. Cut out a matching piece of water-soluble stabilizer; this can be the light and (comparatively) cheap stuff; drape it over a chair or something, ready to grab at the right minute.

Now take a spray bottle of water and very, very lightly spritz your arrangement of fabric and thread snippets. Yes, some of the water will touch the base stabilizer and start to dissolve it. That's why you started with a good, thick, heavy stabilizer.

Now lay the top layer of stabilizer down over everything else, making a stabilizer sandwich with fabric, thread, and a few drops of water as the filling. Pat it down gently with your hands. In the open areas, the damp bottom stabilizer will kind of merge with the top stabilizer, and this will create a series of mini-cages that keep your fabric and thread snippets where they should be.

The hardest part about this is waiting for the stabilizer sandwich to dry before you start stitching, and you do have to do this, because damp water-soluble stabilizer is extremely fragile. I recommend hanging it up in a warm room and going away to do something else for a while, becase a watched sandwich never dries. Once it's convinced you're not interested in it any more, it'll dry out completely and will be perfectly safe to machine-stitch on.