Project memory Lane - the embroidered coat project

 Don't you hate it when you get those emails warning you how full your Gmail is? I've had that address since 2013 and I used to email a lot. I had pen pals, PMs on MBs, and of course, the random junk that one gets from just being online. I try to keep it cleaned out - ever so often I go in there and delete several hundred emails mostly from Promotions/social. I used to be better about cleaning out my Primary, but I don't do it as often as I need to. Where am I going with this?

Since my email has been around as long as it has, I figured I could just go in there and delete stuff from those early years. This took me down a path of nostalgia. I reread some of my old email chains from one of my pen pals - she was first a customer and we got to be good friends. At least good online friends. And then I also happened to stumble onto emails regarding a commission that I got via Den of Angels. Lucky for me, we had moved from the DoA PM system to emails to allow me an easier time of sending her WIP pics. 

I was thrilled, beyond thrilled to find these pics again. I think this project was likely 3 laptops ago, ha ha, and sadly, with the passing of each laptop, so too was the passing of many of my commission/project pictures. Just rewards I suppose of not bothering to update Flickr like I should have. I do feel the regret still. But any ways, I am so happy to have these pics. I've downloaded them and will mostly likely post them to IG and Flickr so I keep them while those platforms are still standing.

I got this project in the Spring of 2014. I honestly don't recall if she PM'd me after seeing my Open to Commissions thread (which I no longer have) or I responded to a Want to Commission thread. She was looking for a coat to fit her Luts CP Delf Type 1 doll, and it needed to be embroidered with a feather motif. Her idea was for the feathers to be similar in style to a parakeet. The coat was going to be in colors of burgundy and gold. Now, I have veeeeeeery basic embroidery skills, and because of that reason, I was a little hesitant to take it on. With that thought, she had to have PM'd me, as I don't know if I would have pursued an embroidery heavy project. I told her that I wasn't super skilled at embroidery and I wasn't sure if I could pull it off well enough. I remember that she really wanted me to make it for her and so I went ahead and took it.

This was tricky. She had drawn out on a computer program the idea of what she wanted for the motif idea and where these feathers needed to be on the coat. My job was then to take these general ideas and design a motif to fit into the spaces she wanted embroidered onto the coat, within the confines of my pattern. I had to redesign the basic idea for the front she was at first hoping for, as I couldn't get the various motifs - neck, front shoulders and across the back of the coat to seamlessly blend together. Let me also just say here, she was absolutely fantastic to work with, and was open to my suggestions as I really was committed to doing my best work for this project.  Here's my redesign of the front motif. I don't have the pics of her designs that she sent to me, unfortunately. 

I drew all of these motifs onto copies of my pattern pieces to make sure that they fit. Now, the next thing to figure out was how to transfer this to my pieces. The fabric I was using was a darker burgundy twill. That's not the easiest color to draw on with a transfer pencil, and so the journey of trial and error began. To do the embroidery work, I sewed my coat pieces onto cotton, but left the back of the pieces exposed so as to not catch the cotton in the embroidery process. If there was an easier way, I don't know of one. I ended up getting transfer sheets, where you go over the transfer paper with a pencil to transfer the design. That wasn't quite good enough, and so I got a white pencil to go over the blue lines from the transfer paper. While it worked okay, if I hadn't had good lighting, it would have been a struggle. I would occasionally have to re-go over the lines. The original plan was to outline each feather with black embroidery floss and then fill in with the gold thread. That didn't end up working, as it was far too bulky for the delicate design, so I took that out and just went at it with the gold.

The trickiest thing at this stage of the work was getting those neck feathers to go seamlessly from the shoulder motif onto the neck. 

And sadly, this is where my pics come to an end. There was a talon motif somewhere on the coat - I think it was right above where the coat's tails begin. I remember clearly what they looked like, but I just don't have the pics. We must have switched back to DoA PMs at this point. After all the embroidery was done, I still had to line the coat and sew it all together. I ended up going with a thin shiny fabric that matched the embroidery thread. I think the point where I was the most nervous was the lining. I had to be really careful sewing the coat together. Imagine if I had somehow messed that part up and had to fix the embroidery? Thankfully, it all went smoothly.

The embroidery involved nearly 90 feathers. Each feather took an average of 2 hours - more for the biggest feathers, less for the smaller feathers.  It took a LOT of hours to finish. I could only work on it for about 3 hours at a time, and at that point, I was juggling several commissions, which is really how I prefer it. All in all, it took me a few months to finish the project. This is one of the projects that I am the most proud of. I do wish that she had sent me pics of it on her doll. I remember that her doll was in the process of being painted with a lot of tattoos, and so he probably wasn't finished when she got the coat, and well, life has a tendency to just move on.