-- and some tulle too!

Double posts today again. I mentioned in my previous post today that I didn't just buy some cheap taffeta, but also some tulle. Originally I bought one piece of black and one piece of (what I thought was) white tulle, thinking I'd have a go at making these lovely flowers. The white tulle turned out to be baby pink -- the light in the shop and the properties of the tulle itself fooled me. So now I have to bleach or colour that tulle before I can do anything with it.

Getting back to the craft shop a few weeks later when passing by Väla, I also bought some shiny grey "bridal tulle", which is much finer than the stiff tulle I bought first. No idea what I'll make of the leftovers from the flower making, but I did do a few tests this week, trying to figure out the best way to embroider, bead and embellish tulle. These photos show the results of my little tests and doodles.

The colours aren't that great, but that's of cause due to the fact I just used was I found nearby. All of this will be ripped up so the tulle can be used for my projects later. Therefore I didn't bother to make the stitches neat and tidy or to think about the colour choices.

One of the first thing I did was to thread some novelty yarn, Red Heart Aurica, through the holes in the black tulle, thinking the style of the yarn would fit well as I would space my running stitches so that the coloured sections would all end up on the same side.

Thinking that my space-dyed bouclé yarn worked well when weaving it into a chain, I thought it might work with tulle too. Killing two birds with one stone, I decided I'd try to hem an edge using the yarn. I ended up making three rows of darning stitch, which probably would look better if the stitched section was longer.

I also tried one of my favourite stitches, feather stitch (kråkspark). As the tulle is a see-through net rather than an opaque fabric, you will see the "back" of the stitches through it. In this case, that makes the feather stitch look like leaves on a vine.

As you can see, I also had to bead a bit. All in all, there are three different beading techniques. The red fire-polished are stitched using running stitch. To fasten the beads and keep them in line, I then stitched through all of them a second time (not stitching into the tulle). Click on the first pics in this post for a close-up where you see exactly how the beads were stitched.

The green beads are stitched using tambour beading (sometimes called bead couture). As the tulle has such large holes, I could use a fine crochet needle rather than a tambour needle. Lesson learned: this probably works better if you use a hoop with a fixture so your hands are free to work with the beads on the thread and the needle.

The third technique used, which I did on the finer "bridal tulle", is just the good old back stitch. One of my most used bead embroidery stitches.

...and that's it. That's how far I've come, exploring tulle. Well, I have also cut a few pieces and layered in a collage (you can get some nice effects in colour and texture when layering tulle), but that isn't finished and won't be until I come up with an actual image to create.

Footnote: Seeing how hard it can be to gauge size from photos, below is a pic of the two tulles used with a ruler placed on them. The scale is centimetres.

*

Well, now I'm getting back to my needles, threads and beads. But not to keep working with my tulle. I have a much more urgent project that I need to finish first. I'll show it on Nov. 30th when it's time for the 2nd Annual Challenge of Color blog hop, hosted by Erin of Tresori Trovati. [I chose to work with... yellow!]