Now that you know how to get started, and do the basic stitch, you may as well start embroidering things a bit more fun than straight lines. I’ll start you off with something nice and simple. For this tutorial, I just sketched out a little gently curved vine with small, rounded leaves. It’s a motif that appears often in embroidery from the early 19th century, so it’s one I’ve done a lot.
You can extend this design to create a simple, lovely border for hems, ruffles, handkerchiefs, veils, sleeve cuffs, or just about anything!
Step 1: Transfer your design.
The first thing we need to do is get the design transferred onto our netting. I do this in one of three ways.
With a water-soluble fabric marker. I would have done this for this tutorial, but the only one I could find in my house was a white one, which would be absolutely useless on my white fabric! This method is fast and easy to remove, but no good if you’re planning to use the piece you are working on as a period demo.
With pencil. This method is also quick, which makes it my go-to. Pencil is dark enough to see well as you work, but generally rubs mostly out by the time a project is finished, and only needs a quick wash to remove it completely. If you are someone who stresses a lot about being able to remove the markings, though, I wouldn’t recommend this for you.
With a basting stitch. This is the superior method I have found, but it also takes a good deal more time and patience than the other two, so I often rule it out as too time-consuming. You simply run a basting stitch around the design with a needle and fine white thread. Later, you can either pull it out, or leave it in and trim the ends, as the tambour-work usually obscures the basting completely from the front.
With any of these methods, I start by pinning the fabric down smoothly and securely over the design. You want to make sure it moves as little as possible while you are copying.The pencil looks frighteningly dark while it’s over the paper design, but most of that is really just the drawing showing through. Since I am right-handed, I like to begin at the top left corner of the design, and work my way down and too to the right. That way my hand can’t smudge the pencil as I go.
Step 2: Find your path.
One of the great things about tambour is how quickly it works up. The best designs for this style of embroidery are those that can be worked all in one continuous line, especially when you are just getting started. An efficient embroiderer can create even a complex design without ever cutting the thread. (Our next lesson will cover how to skip from one place in a design to another without cutting the thread, and without pulling out your previous stitches.)
Many designs are easy to work out, you can see the path you will take just by looking, but if you are having trouble I would suggest copying your basic design on a piece of paper, possibly blown up larger, and working out the path there before you begin stitching. Believe me, it’s very annoying to get through most of a design and realize you made a mistake, and can’t get where you need to go! The last thing anyone wants is more ends to weave in because you were forced to cut the thread prematurely.
In the case of this design, each pair of leaves is worked together, in a figure-eight pattern. Up the stem, over the top of one leaf and around, over the top of the other leaf, around, and on up the stem. This may seem counter intuitive, and you may be tempted to work the leaves in a heart-shape instead–over one leaf, around the bottoms of both, and back down the top of the second. However if you do this, you will find yourself with a very sharp point to work as you turn from the top of the leaf to go back up the stem. Sharp points are best avoided, as they slow you down if worked properly. (The next lesson will also cover how to work points without creating an unsightly bump in your stitching where one stitch is straining to go around the corner.)
Step 3: Begin stitching!
If you read Lesson 1, then you already know how to start your thread, and you’re ready to begin stitching.
Bring your thread up at the base of the stem.Begin to work the basic stitch you learned in lesson one, up and over the top of the first leaf. You could begin with either the left or right leaf, it makes no difference, as long as you follow the pattern.Sometimes, as you work, there will be no cell in your direct path, and moving to either side would distort the design. In this case, you may have to skip over a bar between two cells in order to get to the next available cell. These stitches will be slightly longer than the others, but not enough to be obvious in the design. Make sure you do not pull the loops too tight, or you will risk puckering the fabric.Continue down the bottom of the leaf, and up over the top of the adjoining leaf. Where you cross the original line of stitching, you should be able to stitch right over and into the same cell as your previous stitch. You don’t want to skip over a cell completely as this will create one longer stitch, which can detract from the beauty and evenness of the work.Continue to stitch around the bottom of your second leaf until you reach the place where the threads all meet in the middle.At this point, in order to maintain your neat, even stitches, and to keep the design crisp, you will need to stitch down through place where all your lines of stitching meet. There won’t be room anymore to simply stitch in the same cell, and you will have to go through the center of your previous stitches. Move slowly and carefully, especially your first few times, and don’t get frustrated if your hook catches in the stitches as you pull the thread back through. Minute rotations of the hook are usually enough to help you find a place where it can come through. This part can be a bit tricky, but the result you get will look much nicer than skipping a stitch over the area.Continue up the stem and work the leaves as before. As you go, insert your hook each time in the next cell that most closely follows your sketched design. If you are unsure exactly where to go, err towards the outer edge of the pencil line as you get used to going around these small curves. Once again, we will go over making sharp points next time! As before, if there is no good cell to go to, skip over a bar, and make your stitch in the next available cell.Repeat this process over and over until you come to the final leaf.Stitch up and around one side of the leaf, which way you go makes no difference.Continue around until you get back to the point where the leaf meets the stem. Make your final stitch in the same cell as the end of the stem, and pull your thread out long.Clip the thread under your work, being sure to leave enough of a tail to weave into the back of the design. Make sure you don’t pull on the thread while you do this! The last thing you want is to pull out your lovely work before it is secure!Return to the front of the work and pull the long thread loop until the tail comes up to the top.And use your hook to pull the thread tail back down through the same cell but crucially, NOT through the last stitch you created.And there you have it! Simply weave in your ends as you learned in Lesson 1, and your work is done!
Once again, if you have any questions, or requests for future tutorials (tambour or otherwise), don’t hesitate to ask!
There has been enough interest in my new Tambour project, that I thought I would start putting up some how-tos! It’s not the sort of thing that I can do all in one go, so I will be putting up several lessons over the course of the next few weeks and months.
I will be focusing on lace in these lessons, since that is how I primarily use tambour at the moment. I may expand this in the future as I work on other projects, but all the techniques you see here are basically the same for work on woven fabrics.
A bit of history: Tambour is a form of embellishment that originated in or around India many hundreds of years ago, and eventually spread to Europe in about the mid-1700s as tambour embroidered textiles became popular there. While at first tambour-work was all imported, by the late 18th century it was a popular pastime for wealthy women, and became especially beloved as an embellishment for the diaphanous dresses of the 1790s and early 1800s. Tambour lace remained very popular until sometime around the 1840s, when machine-made lace really began to take over.
For a more detailed look at the history of tambour in Europe, check out this post by Two Nerdy History Girls.
Today, I am going to walk you through three basic steps:
Preparing your materials and starting the thread.
The basic tambour stitch.
Finishing the thread at the end.
What you will need:
A free-standing embroidery frame/hoop. Round ones are usually seen in images of women working tambour at home, while large rectangular frames are used by professionals working on entire garment pieces. Your frame can be floor, table, or lap sitting, but must leave you free to use both hands.
A tambour hook/tambour needle–these come in a range of sizes depending on your fabric and thread. I believe the one I’m using in this tutorial is a #90, but to be honest I put it in the holder a long time ago, and I’m not completely sure! You can get varieties both with or without a latch. I prefer without, but feel free to experiment if you find that you have trouble holding onto the thread without one!
A hook holder–this is the wooden handle that holds your hook while you work.
Fabric–I generally work lace on cotton bobbinet, but you can also try your hand at silk net, muslin, linen, silk chiffon, or any number of other fabrics. I would not recommend trying to work tambour on tulle from your basic fabric store. This isn’t one of those times when starting with cheap and working up to the nice stuff is helpful. Basic synthetic tulle is too flimsy, and tends to catch on the hook, and you will end up pulling all your hair out before you go far. Please don’t decide you hate tambour because of an experience with synthetic tulle!
Thread–any non-divisible thread will do (i.e. no embroidery floss). I am using DMC Cordonnet Special in size 70. Embroidery threads like this are nice because they have a lovely finish, and they work up into crisp, substantial stitches. If I want something very fine to fill in motifs, I use plain Gütermann 100% cotton sewing thread.
Scissors
A needle
A pin
A pair of pliers can also come in handy, but are optional.
I like to shop in the Lacis Museum online store for my tools. You can find both a lap frame like the one pictured in this tutorial, and a table-standing tambour frame on this page. You can find hooks and holders here. You can find all of these things other places by googling the items, but they all tend to be the same products sold through different retailers.
On my Pinterest page, you will find a board of Tambour Resources, which I will try to keep updated as I find new or interesting suppliers. Note that I won’t necessarily have personally tried all of the things pinned there.
Step 1: Prepare your materials.
Insert your hook into your hook holder and tighten the screw. Keep the hook facing in the same direction as the screw so that you always know which way the hook is facing without needing to look at the hook itself. This is VERY important. It is easiest to manipulate the hook if you keep it quite short. Mine is coming out of the holder about 3/4″.
You will want to transfer your design to the fabric before you place it in the hoop. Since I am just demonstrating the stitch at this point, I did not draw a design, but there will be upcoming tutorials in following a design where I will discuss it in more detail. I use a blue water-soluble fabric marker to mark designs if I will not be demonstrating to the public in period clothes while I’m working on them. (Always test your marker on a swatch of fabric first to make sure it comes out). Otherwise, I draw it in pencil, which generally rubs away enough to be un-noticable by the time the project is finished, or I baste over the design in very fine white thread that will be hidden by the work when finished.
Put your fabric into your hoop. Tighten the screw enough to hold things still, then pull the fabric as taut as you can and tighten the hoop more. Do this several times, until the fabric is as taut as you can get it, and the hoop screw will not tighten any further. I use a pair of pliers at the end to make sure I get it as tight as possible. The word ‘tambour’ means drum, and this art is so called because the fabric needs to be as tight as a drum head. This helps keep the stitches from puckering once the fabric is released from the hoop.
Step 2: Secure your thread.
Place a pin in the underside of your fabric, off to the side, several inches from where you intend to begin your embroidery.
On the underside of the fabric, wrap the end of your thread several times around the pin until it feel secure. Leave the working end of the thread connected to the spool. If all goes well in a piece of tambour-work, you will not need to cut the thread at all until the end.
Step 3: The Basic Stitch
I suggest that you read through this entire step a couple of times before trying it yourself. Having all of the information in your head before you begin will help avoid confusion.
With your non-dominant hand, hold the thread beneath the fabric. With your dominant hand, insert your hook through the fabric. The hook itself should be facing in the direction you intend to move. The handle should be approximately perpendicular to your fabric. Wrap the thread around the hook, rotate it so that the hook faces AWAY from the direction you want your line of stitches to go (in this case the hook is facing directly towards the camera, and I intend to stitch along the line directly away from the camera), and pull up a loop of thread.Rotate the hook so that it once again faces in the direction you want to travel. This ensures that the thread stays securely in the hook while you move to the next stitch.Insert the hook into the next net cell along the line you are embroidering. This first real stitch will be the trickiest, so don’t worry if you drop it and have to start over a few times.Rotate the hook back away from your line of travel as you wrap the thread around it so that the thread catches in the hook as you draw it back up.Draw the hook back up, bringing the new thread wrap up and through the first loop you created. I cannot stress enough that the hook MUST be facing away from your line of travel, towards the stitch you’ve already made when this happens. This allows the hook to travel through the point of the chain, rather than catching on the loop of the thread. You can also facilitate the hook coming through the fabric by putting a slight pressure on the holder in the direction of travel, so that the back of the hook is pressing gently against the net. This will give the hook as much room as possible to clear the fabric without catching.Continue to follow these steps to create the signature tambour chain stitch. a. Rotate the hook to face where you want to go. b. Insert the hook into the fabric. c. Wrap the thread and rotate the hook back towards the existing stitches. d. Pull the new thread loop up through the fabric and the last thread loop.
You can see in the video that I both wrap the thread and rotate the hook clockwise. Doing both in the same direction makes it easier to catch the thread in the hook. I then “unrotate” the hook counterclockwise above the fabric, so that it untwists the thread loop as I move to the next stitch.
Don’t worry too much if you drop the thread, or accidentally take your hook out of the loop. Simply put it back through the loop, and the next cell, and continue. Do be careful, though, if you pull on the working thread while the hook is not through the last loop, the entire work can unravel! This is great if you realize you made a mistake in the design and want to go back to fix it–you can simply pull the thread until the mistake is gone, reinsert your hook into the free loop, and carry on as if nothing happened. But it’s not so great if you just got the hang of things and accidentally pulled out all of the beautiful stitches you just painstakingly chained together!
Once you’ve gotten the hang of how to make the stitch, the most important thing to focus on is tension. If you don’t hold the thread taut enough in your off hand while you embroider, the stitches will be loose and sloppy once the hoop tension is released. If you hold it too tightly, it pull the stitches too tight, the fabric will pucker. Focus on letting the thread glide lightly between your thumb and finger below the fabric. Think of the gentle, flexible tension you feel when pulling out the bobbin thread on a sewing machine.
Step 4: Finish your thread.
When your design is finished, pull the last loop out long. This helps keep the work from unraveling while you turn the hoop and cut the working thread.Lift your hoop and snip the working thread so that you have enough of a tail to thread onto a needle.Flip your hoop back down so that the top side of the work is facing you, and pull your long loop so that the end of the cut thread comes up through to the top of the fabric. You will now have a thread end coming up from the middle of your final stitch.Insert your hook up from the bottom of the fabric in the same cell as your final stitch, but NOT through the stitch itself.Wrap your thread end around the hook.And pull the thread end back down to the wrong side of the work. This may not seem like much, but it is all it takes to keep the stitches from unraveling.
Step 5: Weave in your ends.
I cannot stress this enough: do this as you go! How do I know this? Because I regularly leave my ends until I finish a project because weaving in ends is BOOOOOORING and I always want to put if off. But believe you me, weaving in ends is about 10,000 times more boring if you leave twenty or more of them until the end of a project and you have to spend hours weaving all of them in at once. Learn from my mistakes. Much better to do it as you go. Luckily, if you are good at plotting out a path for your design, you should be able to do a single tambour motif, or possibly more with only two ends to your thread. In later tutorials, I will show you how to skip from place to place in your design without needing to cut the thread, and other fun time-saving tricks.\
And now: weaving in ends.
Thread one of your trailing ends onto a sewing needle.The back of your work should look basically like a row of small back stitches or machine stitches. Insert the needle through one of these stitches and pull through.Insert the needle through the next “back-stitch” and pull through. Continue this for at least an inch or two, or until you feel comfortable that the thread is very secure. Since this line is very short, I only did about a half inch to show. Make sure that you do not pull these stitches too tight, or you will pucker your chain stitch on the right side! You can also use your hook to weave the ends through, but I find it goes faster with a needle.
Do the same with any other loose ends, and trim any excess thread.
The work from the back.The chain stitch from the front.
You can lean more in Lesson 2, which covers following a simple pattern, including advice on transferring your pattern, deciding how to work through it, and going around curves!
Keep your eye out for more tambour tutorials coming soon, and if you have any special requests or questions, please feel free to ask!
Despite my long time love of late-Victorian silhouette and detail, it has taken me a long time to jump in to an outfit. This is partly because I didn’t have any immediate upcoming event at which to wear a bustle gown, but mostly because all of those underlayers are intimidating! You have to dig through a lot of non-visible structure before you get to the pretty dress, and once you’re there, the gown is no picnic.
Chief among these complicated structures is the corset. I have made multiple sets of Regency stays before, but as far as I’m concerned, those are nothing compared to the Victorian corset. So I dragged my feet for a long time, but after the dullness that is making chemise and drawers, the corset looked much more interesting.
And you know what? It was! I was shocked how much I enjoyed making this thing. Two rounds of test corsets were boring, and took me a while, but once I got to the real thing the process was surprisingly fun, and even more surprisingly fast. The only part of making the corset that took as long as I expected was binding the edges. Oh, and flossing, which took much longer than I expected.
I used Laughing Moon 100–the same pattern I used for the chemise and drawers. It has two corset options the Dore, which has no bust gussets, and the Silverado, which does, I chose the Silverado.
I started with a test corset. I didn’t take pictures of the first one because it was frankly embarrassing. I am very short, so I went ahead and shorted the pattern by two inches, which in my defense, I often have to do. Turns out, not this particular pattern. I made a second test corset, shortened by one inch, which came out much better.
I ended up shrinking the gussets by one size, trying that out, and then cutting the real fabric!
I used a subtly-striped cotton twill as my outer fabric. When it came it was slightly lighter-weight than I would have preferred, but since I had a very strong backing material, I went ahead with it anyway. I anticipate needing to replace this corset in the next few years, but since I enjoyed making it, that’s fine with me. It will give me a chance to make one covered in pretty taffeta!
The first step in the actual corset build is inserting the front-closing busk, which is a little fiddly, but not nearly as involved as you might think from looking at them. For the hook side, you simply line up the busk with the seam-line on the correct front piece and trace around it, skipping over the hooks.
Then you can simply sew the front and the front lining together at the center front as normal, but leaving gaps in the seam for the hooks to poke through. Then turn it right side out, put the busk in place, and stitch around it to keep it secure.
And now: the knob side. You stitch together the other front and front lining as per usual, then line it up with the hook side on the table, as if it were closed in front, and mark a dot in the center of each hook.
Then one by one, you open a hole at each dot with an awl, and put the knob side of the busk through and stitch it in place, just as you did with the hook side.
Ta-da! One finished busk!
The back pieces come next–the fabric is sewn to the lining along the center back seam so that the grommets can go in now, when you won’t have to wrestle with an entire corset.
And with the hardware in, the real sewing starts.
First: the gussets. Bust gussets are just extra pieces of fabric that help the corset fit around your bust. They can be a bit tricky, since they are inserted into just part of a seam between two other full-length pieces, but I find them very satisfying when put in correctly. One side of the gusset gets sewn to one of the two corset pieces from top to the point at the bottom where the seam allowances on either side of the gusset piece would intersect. Then the other side of the gusset is sewn to the other corset piece from the top to the same point. The, with the extra gusset seam allowance pinned out of the way, the two corset pieces are sewn together below the gusset.
These gussets got some nice top stitching to keep them sturdy.
The rest of the corset body is very straightforward sewing, which I didn’t bother to take photos of it, but I did take the last chance to check for fit when the outer fabric was all sewn.
And good thing I did too, because it laced completely shut, and I ended up taking 1/4″ out of each seam!
The other important thing to note when trying it on at this stage is where it creases at the waist. Since the waistline takes a lot of strain from the laces, it gets reinforced with a piece of twill tape to prevent it from stretching. I simply marked where the creases were at the waist and pinned the twill tape following that line.
And then stitched along each seam to hold the tape in place.
That is the final thing that needs doing before the rest of the lining goes in!
And now, the fun begins. Boning channels!
Because I wanted to reinforce the structure in every possible way, I first stitched in the ditch to hold the fabric and lining together securely.
There are a total of 24 bones in this corset–one along each seam, two at center back, one down the center of every piece where there was space for them, and three in the middle of each side-front piece.
Before binding the edges, I basted some cute little lace along the seamline, where it would poke fetchingly out from under the binding.
I bound the edges in bias strips of the outer fabric.
And now for the part I was most excited about! Flossing! Flossing is a kind of embroidery around the ends of the bones, which is both decorative and functional. It helps hold the bones still in their channels, and prevent them from tearing through the fabric with wear. It is much easier to replace some worn out flossing than to replace an entire hole-y corset!
I did my flossing using a dark teal cotton embroidery floss.
My first attempt (right side) was a bit wobbly…
I did the wing shaped ones on either side of the grommets, then switched to criss-cross ones on the rest of the corset.
I watched North and South on Netflix while I was stitching, and Marionette was very happy to help.
Flossing finished!
I am so excited about this corset! I really enjoyed making it, and I’m actually excited about making another, fancier one in the future. It’s a pretty basic corset, but the little details make me happy.
I’m on to the bustle and petticoat, and then I finally get to start covering up all that under-structure with beautiful silk! I can’t wait!
Fabric & Fiction 