Once upon a time, in the days before lockdown, I visited an Irish linen factory and purchased some small offcuts of charcoal blue medium weight linen (among other things, ahem!).
I immediately fell in love with the muted tones of this linen and thought a striking white thread would contrast beautifully with it!
And that started my pursuit of a series of small sashiko designs which I could stitch and frame as a set.
I found a few free designs I liked on Pinterest and played around printing out various sizes. I settled for 6" designs and cut out my linens at 7.5".
Then came the problems!!
Trying to transfer the designs onto this medium weight linen proved tricky! First I tried my lightbox, but the linen was too dense to allow the design to show through enough to trace!
My pattern transfer pen is dark purple and wouldn't show up on the linen.
So after watching a few YouTube tutorials I ordered some yellow carbon paper. I traced the design through the carbon paper onto the right side of the linen. But the yellow pigment barely left a mark!
Aarrgghh!
So the only option I felt I had left was to trace the design onto baking paper, sew through the paper, and then tear the paper away at the end. I wasn't too keen on this idea because hand sewn stitches are much less secure than machine sewn stitches and could get pulled out of shape.
So I fused some woven interlining onto the back of the linen and tried one design to see if I could get away with it, and bar one or two stitches that needed 'settled down' again after removing the paper, it worked relatively well.
I didn't have sashiko thread so used an old spool of fine crochet cotton instead!!
And the 7.5" box frames came from Hobbycraft today, so I wasted no time getting them framed and photographed (I took out the glass for the photoshoot!).
All I need to do now is decide where to hang them!!
Happy sewing!
Your stitching is too large to look good... You should study the traditional sashiko of Japan to see how this looks off-kilter. And transferring patterns is not that hard..you can buy transfer paper from most sewing stores, just layer it with the pattern drawn on paper and trace over it, leaving the pattern on the fabric.
Hi, many thanks for your comments. Could you send me some links to stores which sell the pre-drawn patterns please? My little pictures were never meant to be a study in true Japanese sashiko, rather evoking the style of the technique. I quite like the length of the stitches for my composition and I was just using materials that I had available to me at the time (we are still in lockdown here). I look forward to your recommendations on patterns. J
Great success stitching through the paper and not disturbing your stitches too much. They are a really sweet set of textile pictures. Of course, I want to have a go now.
It was very satisfying in the end, but over all too quickly!! Jxo