Starting, at last, on the Lotus Flower Coat

You might recall that a gorgeous piece of turquoise tweed came my way and provoked thoughts of a jacket or coat decorated with lotus flowers. So, not part of the “Dreams of Amarna”, but once you have an interest in something, or an attachment to a design style, it never really lets go!

And I didn’t find myself a Twixmas project, so rather than having a small pause, I’m moving straight on. It will be worked in the hand, so it fits the challenge of not needing the place the Christmas Tree lives, and to be honest, I’ve not been finding the last few months stressful in embroidery terms (in others, yes!) and I don’t feel I need a reboot. So, onward!

Anyone who attended the ThreadTalk I did for the Embroiderers Guild, or who was reading my planning for Stella’s Birds will be familiar with my paper cutouts by now! You can see that this isn’t quite right. It looks a bit too abrupt, the spaces are maybe in the wrong places.

This is altogether better. It’s not so abrupt, it’s paying heed to the botanical form while keeping to the stylised appearance of the original ancient Egyptian inspiration.

My intention is that the shapes will be filled with rows and rows of line stitches, chain stitch and feather stitch variations mainly, and at the moment I am planning to leave a line of untouched fabric showing around each of the elements. Once I have the thing finished, I can decide whether to fill in the gaps!

I’ll be using a mix of threads, too, wool, silk, cotton, some plain, some variegated.

More Thoughts on a Coat..

I want my design for the Lotus Coat to be big and bold, maybe a bit blousy, so what I have here may be a bit formal, and need rethinking.

Well, happy to do that, I had a lovely morning in the studio playing with these ideas, and I think what I have now is a good point for further play.

The idea of this set of designs is that the single lotus in the image to the right here will reach almost the whole way across the top of the back, from one seam setting in the sleeve to the other, while the supporting buds will be set in fact a little lower than they are shown.

Meanwhile, on the front there will be something very similar on the left and right front.

I don’t want to make these identical – that would be too formal. So I want to create something that looks balanced, that doesn’t make me look as though I have one shoulder higher than the other.

I’m also planning how to actually achieve all this. At the moment, I’m thinking that I will try to find a light, loosely woven silk fabric that I can dye to match the tweed and stitch on that. Then I can do the stitching and be making the Coat at the same time. I’m not much of a dressmaker, so it might take a while. So I’ve ordered some samples from Whaley’s of Bradford, to try stitching on.

And for the stitchery? At the moment, I think, lots of line stitches in varying shades of white, lilac, and pink, using relatively heavy threads (at least in comparison with Aethelflaed’s filament silk!). Opportunities to use my favourite chain and feather stitch variations, to layer up stitch and effect – I might even find some angora or similar for some slightly fluffy areas. Not so densely stitched, perhaps, that you can’t see the silk, and through it, the tweed.

Of course, by the time I get to doing the stitching, I may have an entirely different idea…

Lotus Flower Coat – starting to plan..

When we visited last year, my aunt gave me a lovely length of faience blue tweed, and although I could, of course, make a skirt (another skirt!), the idea eventually came to me to make it into a sort of cross between a cardigan and a jacket – something that I can wear with lots of things, that makes a good additional layer in our cold house, but looks cheerful and casually smart.

I thought about the colour, and some variant on the Egyptian Lotus Flower pattern seemed like a good start. Then I thought some more, and decided that the very graphic, formalised versions used in border patterns would want to be used formally and make the garment too formal. The tweed is relatively unfulled, and widely sett, so anything too structured won’t work well.

Something like this, I think. It’s a Simplicity pattern from the Seventies or early Eighties, and it won’t be hard to lengthen. It will be lined (which the pattern doesn’t call for), but there are few pattern pieces and almost no shaping.

Naturally, it won’t be going to go undecorated…!

Maybe a border pattern?

Somehow, no. I’ve not done one before – the Coat of Many Flowers has a swathe across the middle, and the Jacket of Many Stitches has the pattern dripping down from the shoulders – but I think it might end up looking a bit obvious, and a bit formal. I’ll still think a bit more about this one, but I’m pretty sure it won’t be this.

Watch this space, as they say…