#leafkerchief

I hadn't made a leafkerchief since I made that video tutorial a few years ago, but I've just made another one in rusty brown cotton. This time, instead of joining the veins to the midrib in a straight line, I curved them on that end too. It took a while to do all the painting but I think it makes the overall effect a bit better.

It's a fairly simple thing, just a square of green muslin but it does it's job well... however as I've been steadily updating and upgrading Tessiël's stuff through the years it was starting to look a bit out of place. Then a couple of months back I also stumbled over @vincentbriggs 's leaf headkerchief tutorial and I knew I needed to make one for Tessiël.

Birches are my favourite trees so I immediately knew it had to be based on a birch leaf

It didn't make my life any easier since it turns out that sewing and later topstitching all those teeny-tiny teeth does take a lot of effort...

And that's not even taking into account all the tiny points and angles that need to be trimmed and then carefully turned out.

The end result of this all didn't turn out as neat as the ones Vincent shows in his tutorial but it is serviceable enough and after slipstitching the facing I set out to the part I was looking forward to the most aka painting the damn thing.

I first painted the veins in light green, and since I was a bit messy, I added some green spatters to hide the fact I had stained the fabric with the paint on my hand.... after concluding that it also needed a bit of extra oomph, I lastly overpainted the main veins with some silver paint, providing at the same time an echo to the vambraces and shinguards I had made two years ago which are also green with silver veins...

Then it was a matter of letting it all dry and a quick press of the iron to set the textile paint

And voilà! A brand new banging headkerchief for Tessiël. Now the only question will be how it will stand up to being repeatedly wetted and wrung out if this year's Castlefest turns out to be a hot edition again.

Got some pictures of me wearing the new leafkerchief. It's a lot more bright and fresh looking than the dark brown leaf vest, so it doesn't go together the best, but I'll make something that matches better. Heck, maybe I already did make something that goes with it better and all the photos are still behind a paywall, who knows?

Some better pictures of the leafkerchief. It’s made of a plain green cotton, with facings in a much lighter weight cotton, and after I sewed and turned all the points right side out I topstitched as close to the edge as I could. The inner edge of the facing is hand sewn with a slipstitch, and the veins are painted on.

I got a lot of questions about this, so I will do a blog post about it, and will include a pattern diagram!

Update: The blog post is written, and I put my pattern on a grid so you can scale it up!

Yay! Make a big leaf for your head, yes!!

I'm glad you managed to find it, it's so frustrating when that happens! I've gone looking for sewing blog posts I vaguely remember, and sometimes they're nowhere to be found, and sometimes the whole blog has been deleted in the intervening 8 or 10 years. Alas.

Gosh, I haven't posted anything in ages! I've mostly been working on repeating patterns for the past few weeks, but I don't want to post them until my Spoonflower samples arrive and I can list them for sale there. Here's a leafkerchief I finished at the beginning of this month. I filmed the making of this (and two others) and will definitely get back to working on that video tutorial sometime or other..

The only other garment I've finished since then is a pair of beige flannel pyjama pants, which is a practical project but very boring.

I got these little squeezy bottles back in college when I was taking Textiles, and we used them for resist for silk painting, but today I tried them with slightly watered down fabric paint* for leaf veins and it worked really well. I had to stop part way through though, because it's much harder on the hands than drawing with a pencil, but will do more veins tomorrow.