Back from our annual escape to North Truro, and reporting progress on the recently dormant Trifles sampler, being stitched for Younger Daughter to take with her off to college next fall.  I decided that for my no-longer-little Steampunk (and Dr. Who) fan, instead of working lots of bands, the design for this one would feature gears.  But I had a lot of problems hand-drafting up a nice set of them.  It took a while, but eventually I hit on the idea of using a commercial stencil intended for airbrush work, then filling in the traced gear shapes with blackwork counted fills.

Here’s where I am now:

I’ve finished the main motto and the frame around the to-be-worked area.  Minor brag: Note that having marched all the way around the piece without drafting first and using only counts of the border repeat to stay on target, I ended up even, perfectly aligned.

All of the fillings I will use on this will be from my free eBook, Ensamplario Atlantio.  The ground patterns are stitched using two plies, mostly in double running, with lots of departures to accommodate the non-continuous nature of many of the fills.  The outlines are plain old chain stitch, done in three plies of the same color as the gear filling.  I am not taking any special pains to make the cam teeth totally square, or to make them mesh.  I am liking the rounding and imprecision.  Right now I’m thinking of covering the entire piece with gears in burgundy, brown, gold, and silver, relying on classic Four Color Theory to avoid making any two contiguous gears the same hue. Choosing fills for color in addition to density and form is adding a new dimension to this decidedly un-traditional yet somewhat traditional blackwork piece.  And I may insert a surprise Trifle or two, just to emphasize the point.

On execution, I can report that I’ve managed to tame the extremely unruly Indian “silk” (in reality, man-made rayon) thread. 

Beeswax. 

I occasionally wax the last inch or so of my silk threads to make threading easier and to help ward off “ply creep” – when one ply of a multi-ply threading is consumed faster than the others.  But I usually don’t wax the entire length unless I’m working with linen thread.  However this stuff is hellaciously difficult, shredding and sliding, breaking and fraying, and catching.  Using shorter lengths wasn’t the answer – no usable length was short enough to use comfortably.  So I moved up to waxing the entire strand, and when I did so, most of my problems disappeared.

I am very pleased with the results using the fully waxed threads.  They don’t break.  They don’t escape from the needle’s eye.  They don’t shred.  Both plies are consumed at the same rate.  Double running is nice and crisp.  A major improvement that’s increased the enjoyment factor of a project that might have been truly tedious.

And I’ve wanted an excuse to stitch up those griffon-drakes since I drafted them up for the book.