dragonlady7

I cross-posted this here from Myspace because Myspace ate the embedded images, which makes the post pretty boring.

This spring I decided I was going to learn to sew. Over the summer I got slowly better at it (though with some setbacks, like the accidental finger-piercing with the sewing machine). By the end of summer I had decided I needed to learn to cross-stitch as well. I completed one or two cross-stitch projects, but realized I totally suck at counting.
Lo! Embroidery!
C.N. Red, a crafty sort, linked me to Sublime Stitching, which has-- gasp!-- a roller derby pattern!!! Very excited, I went to look at it.
Hey neat! Cool skates and cool socks and... Hey, um, what's she doing?
Okay, it's cool that she has a roller derby pattern, and it looks quite well-designed, but could it be any more banked-track? Nice flying elbow, and the Farrah Fawcett hairdo is a good addition. I am actually a fan of the pink hotpants, though. I would probably do them in metallic gold.
Really, it is a good pattern, and the company seems very cool, and I quite like Jenny Hart's blog as well. But I know if I actually bought the pattern, it would bother me ceaselessly that the girl is committing a major foul, and I'd definitely do something about the hair. And the kneepads look a bit awkward, and one of the wristguards looks like it's missing, so I'd have to fix those too. ... Except, wait, if I iron on the pattern, it's indelible, so I'd have to stitch over it. Which means I would have to... copy over the parts I want by hand? ...
...
When I was a junior in high school I had planned on applying to college to get a degree in illustration, but my dear darling art teacher dissuaded me. (His "constructive criticism" on my work consisted of statements like "There's nothing wrong with it, but I don't like it so you get a C." What? What's that supposed to even mean? How can I use that to improve? What bullshit.) So I gave up art and haven't really done much of anything in about ten years. (Though the professor of the painting class I took in college to round out my credits asked me why I wasn't studying illustration.)
I thought to myself (getting back to the story at hand, here) "I know! I'll just make up my own pattern!"
Well, there were some setbacks. I had forgotten how to draw. My grasp of anatomy and perspective had slipped. My first few attempts, to make things up out of my head, looked like a ten-year-old who thought she was a Serious Artist had drawn them.
So I did what we used to do in Junior High: I found a reference photo.
Fortunately, Holly's dear boyfriend Match takes beautiful and clear photographs. I clicked over to his photo galleries and found a few photographs that had good clear shots of one or two figures in dynamic poses, preferably interacting in some kind of context.
And I made about two dozen sketches, and then copied the sketches over to make them clearer, and finally had one I was totally happy with. I wanted two figures, but I wasn't confident in my ability to depict interaction-- a blocker knocking down a jammer might look wooden, for example, and it might not be clear what precisely was going on. So I settled on a pose showing a jammer rounding a corner at full stride, and a ref pointing at her to indicate lead. Two figures, clear interaction even if I can't get the motion quite right. Also I would've had to pick two teams if I had two skaters interacting, and I'd rather not until I know whether I can do enough to be fair to everybody.
What galvanized me to finally get going on the project was Dreadnought's derby quilt project-- I wanted to submit something to her, and she wants things by Halloween, so I had to stop just thinking about it, and sit down and do it. But that made it doubly necessary that I not depict only some of the teams on our league-- I wanted something non-partisan. I decided to put the skater in our travel team's colors, even though I haven't seen their uniform yet-- close enough! I adapted the Syracuse travel squad's "uniform" to the right colors and went from there.

I blended this photo, this photo, and a little bit of this photo to make a single pose.
I sketched the pose, then drew it again more solidly. Then I copied it over onto a square of plain white cotton, using a water-soluble transfer pen.
(I'm not 100% happy with it-- I think I accidentally softened her posture so it's not as interesting as the first photo, and I could have paid more attention to the ref's posture and made him a bit more exciting too. Maiden effort! I'll improve.)

I decided on the colors, separated the floss into two strands in appropriate lengths, wound them onto floss bobbins, clipped the bobbins onto a binder ring, put my cotton into an embroidery hoop, picked out a reasonably good needle, and went off to practice. (Here's a shot of my equipment. That yellow hexagon is a cake of beeswax, which is really handy to wax the tip of the thread to get both/all three strands through the needle eye. It's also really essential with the metallic thread, to keep it from separating into its components immediately. But it dulls the colors, so only wax the first inch or so.)

I hurt my foot, see, so I couldn't skate. I've missed too many practices, though, so even though we no longer get attendance points for observing, I wanted to do so anyway. So I picked a spot on the wall under a plain white fluorescent tube, and sat and stitched while I watched my teammates nearly puke.
(I should feel more bummed that I missed out on practice, but damn.)
After an hour and a half of stitching (with breaks to cheer on teammates), I had most of this done:

The blue lines are the transfer pen.
I worked another couple of hours that night, and the most notable progress I made was the skater's stockings. I hadn't decided how I was going to do them, but I knew from the moment I decided to do an embroidery of a roller derby skater that they were going to be extremely flashy. I settled on gold glitter thread, which I already had in my stash and can't remember why. Dewey asked if they were going to be fishnets, and I wasn't sure, but decided during practice that they definitely had to be. So I got home and looked up trellis stitch. According to the embroidery manual I borrowed from a friend, the way you do it is by taking long stitches in a grid, then going back and securing every junction with a small slanted stitch or a cross stitch. I can't find this on the Internet, though-- everywhere I look has something else as trellis stitch. So I'm going to claim I invented it, and I'm going to call it Fishnet Stitch, because that's exactly what it looks like.

I decided to finish the skater completely before I started on the ref. This was a good idea. She was really complicated, with so many different colors, and I kept thinking of little things to add. Her shorts were just outlined in black and I didn't like that, so I filled them in. The green stripe down the side didn't show, so I added gold accents. I even gave her a gold earring, and learned that you should never attempt French knots with metallic thread. (It's now a hoop earring. Realistic? No, but I'm not picking that sucker out.)
Then I got really crazy, all hopped up on the joy of inventing Fishnet Stitch, and decided to put our league logo on her shirt. I know. I know! Crazy. It's a bunch of little scribbles, because I knew the design was too small to even hope to do accurately, but it's roughly the right shape. Star! Crown! Wheel! Banner of text! Little dots! It's all there. Ish.

The perspective on her inside foot is a bit wonky. And it's too close to the edge, so I had to take it out of the hoop to stitch it, which made it really difficult to get the tension right.
Then I stitched the track lights. That was a disaster.
Never attempt chain stitch with metallic thread. I have learned a lot about metallic thread, and that "lot" consists of this: Metallic thread, of any type, is a BITCH. I sort of knew that, but didn't realize how much. It comes unstranded and has to be carefully wrangled. It comes un-knotted-- the last thing I had to do after I rinsed the transfer pen out was to go back with white floss and stitch down every single solitary knot holding in the ends of the metallic thread, because they'd all come undone and her fishnets were unraveling, the track lights were unraveling, even the gold star in her helmet was unraveling. Every time you start off with metallic thread, do like in cross stitch and tuck the ends under and stitch over them, because a knot will not hold. From the back the skater looks like she's in some kind of weird rope bondage, because it's all these bits of white floss holding the stockings together.
And the thread is snaggy, and it's hard to pull it through the fabric, but that at least I'd been pre-warned about. That's the only thing I'd been forewarned of.

But anyway. I survived the track lights. Fortunately I'd already planned on using The Magic Of Perspective, meaning I could do the far side in a simple running stitch. Running stitch = ok. Chain stitch = every single stitch had to be coaxed through individually, to the tune of about a minute per stitch and minor bloodshed. Yes, really. Not worth it. Doesn't even look that good.

Fortunately for my idea of ever doing something like this again, the last thing I did was the ref, and he went FAST. He's all in black thread! Well, except his skin, but there isn't much showing. It was a cinch. I made him slightly sketchier than her, because he's meant to be farther away-- darker, more solid things look closer, and lighter things with more broken-up lines look farther away. I had him done in a matter of maybe two hours at most including pauses for conversation and the like, all of it easy, pleasant, and enjoyable, and not the least bit frustrating. I rinsed out the transfer lines before stitching his lower legs and wheels because I was impatient to see how the rest of it looked, and also because I was trying to judge whether he needed more stitching in his face and shirt, which is hard to tell when the whole thing's teal blue from the transfer pen. I knew I could freehand the wheels and socks without a pattern; the transfer pen was too thick to draw fine details in the first place, so I'd freehanded just about everything else small too.

Invisible legs!
But soon enough I finished his socks, and his wheels and shoelaces (I tried to do a lazy daisy stitch for her shoelaces too, but it didn't show up like anything-- but on his feet, it worked! It might be because the rest of his skates were less densely-stitched). And then I realized I'd forgotten to give him a whistle.
I have silver thread somewhere, but can't find it, so gold it was. Again, like a moron, I tried a French knot. Don't do that. Just don't! At least whistles have a big round part, so I could just stitch the loop it left down and call it done. I gave him a whistle lanyard, and am still considering going back and giving him eyebrows, but as it is, the thing is done.

The total time is days and days if you count the sketching part, but I've gotten much faster as I've remembered how to draw. (Anyone in need of a good primer on anatomy and drawing, a lot of the best, most classic figure-drawing books are out of print and out of copyright, so you can get them for free online.) I think in terms of actual stitching time I probably spent about six to eight hours on it, but I spent longer than I had to on a lot of the details because I was having so much fun. Most of the time went on making the girl pretty, I admit it. That and the damn track lights, which I won't do again. (I like the idea of the metallic thread, and I like them being there to tie the figures together and give the thing a setting, but never again with the chain stitch.)
I will surely get faster-- this was my second embroidery project, and I didn't finish the first one. It's quite easy if you've done any hand-sewing, which I did while my sewing machine was out of commission. It's more like drawing or painting with thread, and it's a lot easier on the math-impaired than cross stitch is. I can't count, I can't see numbers over about four without having to count, which I'm bad at, and generally cross stitch is a disaster for me. But embroidery-- you just draw the line right on the cloth and then stitch over it! So easy. This is totally my new art form. Now that I'm over my junior year trauma.

One thing I might do is stitck to linen in the future-- my first embroidery was being worked on some slightly-slubby white linen, and while there were occasional issues with the uneven surface, it wrinkled and pulled a lot less than the cotton, and the thread went through easier, and it was just more substantial in my hand. This cotton has been ironed to within an inch of its life, as much as I can without flattening the stitches completely, and it's still a bit wrinkly looking, which I don't like. Unfortunately, while the cotton was like two dollars a yard, the cheapest I can find linen is seven or eight dollars a yard. I suppose I could try other materials as I go along-- I do my best work when something about it is "experimental"-- but it's a shame that the cheapest thing didn't just work best the first try. As in most things. (Maybe I'll try heavier cotton? I actually ordered a blank cotton canvas tote bag online and was going to stitch on it-- so I guess we'll see how that works. Maybe I'll have to use thicker floss, though.)

So, after this long, heavily-illustrated entry, I leave you with a question: Does he need eyebrows? What do you think?