The Sweater Project - Laying Down the Limbs

I'm happy to share some major progress on the project I've undertaken to save my beloved sweater. I shared in my last post my sketch of how I plan to add cherry blossoms to the sweater. First step: limbs!

I thought long and hard on how I wanted to approach this, and even had a few false starts. I knew I wanted different lengths of limbs, and I knew I wanted the main limb to be chunkier than the others. I considered hand embroidery but I knew I wanted everything to "pop" a bit more and, quite frankly, to be a bit easier.

For the smaller limbs it was easy - I just did a bunch of chains in various lengths.

The main limb was where I tried out a few things to get it right. What I ultimately settled on is the Romanian Cord. 

It's a bit tricky to understand the written instructions, so here's a link to a video that shows exactly what to do: Romanian Cord Video. Warning - it gets a bit addictive to make these! I can see doing these with a bunch of different colors and then working them into baskets, but I digress.

Once I had my pieces ready I had to think about how I wanted to attach everything. I thought about using a couching technique with a different, textured thread, but ultimately decided to keep in simple since the flowers will be the main focus. I used a brown cotton thread to sew the limbs in place. To do this I placed the sweater on my dress form and then just started pinning the limbs in place.

The first picture shows the first round of limbs attached. The second picture shows where I pinned the next round of limbs for sewing.

Sewing the limbs in place went pretty quickly. I was expecting it to take FOREVER but I was able to wrap it up in 2 or 3 sessions. I'm pleased with how it turned out.

Next up - the flowers!

Craft Joy!

Caré