Earlier in April The Sewing Loft announced a
Trim Swap.
I decided to join in since I have a large stash of lace that I have no clue what to do with.
My partners said they liked surprises, so I just dug through the boxes until I found a few pieces that looked good together
Original pictures of the trims selected
It looked boring, so I decided to do something more interesting before I shipped them off.
I started with this Antique Corset Advertisement image found on
Besottment
I altered the image to turn it into a jointed doll. Her left arm works better than the right arm, but you can now put the right arm over a skirt!
I printed this out and colored it with pencils, one in Blue and one in Pink. To joint the arms I used shanked buttons with the little plastic clips that hold shank buttons to cards. Hey, buttons are trim, but Brads may not be considered trim by some. (Also the only color of brads I had on hand, clashed with the lace!)
After assembling the figure, I drew around the waist and hip section onto some cardboard and drew a rough skirt shape and length, sorry no pattern image for this.
Then I took a single hole punch and punched holes along the sides of the skirt for the gathered lace to grab into as I wrapped it around the skirt shape. I tested out how to wrap the lace so that it looked nice, made a few notes and then glued the waist of the skirt to the print out. Let it glue while I worked on the other doll.
After the glue is dry, wrap the lace around the skirt so it is horizontal in front and at an angle in the back, make sure to catch the tail when you start wrapping at the bottom. Secure at the top with a pin, paper clip, or what ever these things are called that come on some men's new dress shirts. (yup I save a lot of stupid stuff, you never know when it comes in handy!)
The finished product is a very lovely way to display some of the lace I sent out, each piece was at least a yard long, hopefully my swap partners liked theirs, and I won't be offended if they couldn't bear to take the lace off the doll. I probably couldn't!
I have timed this post so that my swap partners are likely to have already received their package, as they wanted a surprise, but had likely already seen the first photos.
