Made: Little Pouch with sashiko embroidery

First project of the year: a tiny little embroidered pouch. This was one of the small portable projects I put together to take home and work on over Christmas, and I actually got round to making up the pouch from the embellished pieces this weekend. It's made with some scrap silk dupion (left over from the Wedding Clutch) and a spool of metallic thread that came in a kit I bought towards the end of last year.

For the sashiko element, I used the "Hemp leaf" sashiko pattern that I tried out last month. The pouch itself is from my favourite small bag/clutch pattern maker, Michelle Patterns. When I bought it, it was about $2 and a "pattern pieces only" pattern. Now it comes in a package of two patterns: Little Pouch and Long Pouch. As the name suggests, this is a small easy pattern, of a type I've made a ton of before. I thought it would be a good thing to try out a small project on silk before I attempt anything more drastic.

As far as the embroidery is concerned, I am pretty happy with how the pattern turned out on the fabric and my own stitchery. However, the thread is actually not really thick enough or shiny/visible enough for the outcome to be quite as visually interesting as I had hoped. I doubled the thread to try to get some extra oomph to it, but I don't think overall it was entirely successful because the thread was just not the right weight. On the other hand, I then tried to do the fish-scale pattern with quadrupled silver thread of the same type on another piece of silk, and I had two problems: one, the many threads wanted to snarl up and leave loops; and two, it was too thick for the silk fabric I was sewing it into. There's definitely something remaining to be figured out about thread thickness on this fabric. I have a few more scraps left of this very dark blue silk dupion so I might try again. I did enjoy the process and I still think it might be interesting as an embellishing technique.

In other news: My tax return was burning a massive hole in my pocket so I ordered a coverstitch machine, which I have been wanting for about 9 months now. Watch this space for coverstitch news!