Developing designs

My designs have a life of their own! I'm never quite sure why this is so, but they do! And to be honest I prefer not to think about it. Everyone has areas that they don't like, hate doing, find boring and tedious in their project's lifetime.

Here is the basic series of conceptual drawings developing my design for the fan embellishment. Working on grid paper I find it easier to work to scale when plotting out details and my preference is to work at life-size, this way there are fewer surprises along the way!

My first step is to lay out the the area to be embellished. This I add to and remove various elements, here I've started with the basic shape that makes up the quatrefoil motif, by default it gives me a pattern to break down which will make the final pattern drafting for the applique much easier later on. Next, I decide a border would finish the overall design, so I added three bands of colour repeating the outline of the single motif. While I get used to the border and consider including dots as per the original fabric design on either edge, I move on to developing the quatrefoil.

My design has mutated the quatrefoil into a trefoil, in this way filling the space within the fan shape comfortably. After a period of will I? Won't I? I decide to go with a black area in the handle area of the fan for purely pragmatic reasons. (The fan won't be clean-able once assembled, the handle is going to get a lot of use and consequently become grimy. A black area might minimise this significantly.) To balance the trefoil shape and marry it to the black curved section, I added the central pyramidal "tongue". Working on heavy Trace papers simplifies my exercise. Copying the single motif I repeat it to the left and right of the original.

This gives more accuracy and shows me how the design will layout, the effects created by this natural progression and precisely where the central rosette will go. Lastly I can overlay the rosette on the design motif to scale and get a near perfect idea of how large the embroidered areas are going to be while I brood on which areas to chain stitch, leave blank or add details.

At this stage, I start to think of details such as; one row of chain stitch or several? Satin stitch or not? (Satin stitch I am good at, the Indian version covers only the surface and isn't worked on the underneath side of the fabric and I am not confident as I recall my College efforts.) Do I work these dots in chain stitch too by default? There is only one possible answer -- samplers.

In between the samplers and tweaking the design sheets before I start to assemble the design, I have to count and draft my patterns, cut the fabrics and sew the outline of the fan onto the prepped calico and silk cover.