Thread by @lizcostume

My wee thread (pun not intended, but we'll go with it!) on the pattern darning #embroidery on Claire's "Dressage" dress in #Outlander Season 2

The dress had been made from woven upholstery fabric that Terry ( .@OutlanderCostum ) had found in the Britex fabric store in SF (sass3journey.com/2017/01/25/fin…)

The dress had been made up with an asymmetric bodice, and I was asked if I could #embroider a flower on to the right-hand side, and if I could do it on the machine. The bodice had metal boning and I had rayon/viscose, wool or metallic threads, so that wasn't possible.

To get the threads I needed, I went to the back of an offcut of the fabric. This is a technique used in invisible mending and repairs to get matching threads, though they will always be fairly short. I took a colour photocopy of the rose and reduced it to 50% to get my pattern.

I rotated the design a little and cut holes in the pattern so I could mark where the white areas were to be stitched. Then, using the withdrawn threads I imitated the weave of the original fabric. This was the progress on the first day.

By day 2, I'd got a lot further on and you can see my pattern in the background and some of the woven white threads by the seam. The majority of the white below the seam is #embroidery

Day 3 and I've put in 2 shades of pink, still using the threads (floats) from the back of a spare piece of fabric for the #embroidery , using my stitches to imitate the texture of the woven sections, like the yellow part.

The centre of the reduced size image was quite muddled, so on Day 4, I added an Easter Egg cat paw print (for Ms. Eddie Balfe, Caitriona's cat)

Then I finished off the #embroidery with some green leaves and black shadows. The left of this image shows my pattern darning and the right shows the woven pattern. I've kept my stitches parallel with the slubs in the fabric, as it is in the woven areas.

And here you can see the half-size rose on the bodice, rotated through about 90 degrees, when you compare it to the on on the skirt hem.