Hitting it out of the Sewing Room

Plano ASG member, Tricia Kemp, showed off her latest creation at the November Toujours! Couture meeting.  It is a story of creativity and the value of ASG relationships, so we knew we had to share.

With the help of ASG friend, Penny Hanstein, Tricia developed a blouse sloper that she can now use to design any blouse she wants.  On her very first attempt, she hit it right out of the ballpark, or should we say sewing room.

Her inspiration for the blouse came from Bobbi Bullard’s embroidery design collection called Curlies, which she purchased and loaded to her software.  The blouse design began to develop into an exciting vision of multiple panels and fabric layers with embroidery elements from the Curlies design used throughout.

Tricia describes her process like this:

I cut pieces of the silk large enough to allow plenty of room for each pattern piece and stabilized each piece with sticky wash away.  Next, I arranged the designs in my software trying to get mirror embroidery images on the front and back sections.

The side front sections and the cuffs were made by placing silk organza over the main silk pieces.  I embroidered those with a stipple design from the Curlies collection through both layers of fabric.

The sleeves sections were embroidered, then overlayed with the sheer.  

One the rest of the blouse, the embroidery was scattered directly on a single layer of the silk dupioni.  After embroidery was done, I washed away the stabilizer, dried the sections flat then constructed the shirt.  I was thrilled to find buttons in the perfect color with a curly design on them.

One of the favorite parts of most of our ASG meetings is the show and tell.  We share our successes … and our not so successful.  We celebrate with ooo’s and aaaah’s and help each other find creative solutions.  Thank you, Tricia, for sharing your grand success with us.  We celebrate alongside you!