Parklife!

Yesterday I had an all-day hospital visit, but instead of being the super dull day I was dreading, it actually turned into the most relaxed and chilled day I’ve had in months! Some women go to the spa, I go to Nuclear Medicine for a bit of radioactivity, ha.

Part of the day was that I had two hours free before having to report back in, so instead of wandering around Camberwell, I went into the big park next to the hospital. We’re having absolutely gorgeous weather in London right now, and everyone was out with their babies and dogs, having impromptu picnics and tennis matches, so I found myself an empty picnic table and brought out my embroidery. Here’s my view of my project, and of my view of the bandstand:

Yesterday I had an all-day hospital visit, but instead of being the super dull day I was dreading, it actually turned into the most relaxed and chilled day I’ve had in months! Some women go to the spa, I go to Nuclear Medicine for a bit of radioactivity, ha.

Part of the day was that I had two hours free before having to report back in, so instead of wandering around Camberwell, I went into the big park next to the hospital. We’re having absolutely gorgeous weather in London right now, and everyone was out with their babies and dogs, having impromptu picnics and tennis matches, so I found myself an empty picnic table and brought out my embroidery. Here’s my view of my project, and of my view of the bandstand:

It’s just a Sublime Stitching apron I’ve been working sporadically on, but it was really calming to just sit for two hours listening to the birds and watching people go by. And I’m really glad I brought my first batch of iced tea for the season (you can take the girl out of America, etc etc). Sometimes I bring garment handstitching to work on when I’m out and about, but having the embroidery to pick up whenever I fancy it is quite nice, too, and very portable!

And I’ve finally started sewing the Colette Patterns Eclair dress after taking way to long to cut everything out. But I’m having the problem I occasionally get when I sew really thin fabrics. Here, it’s silk crepe and silk habotai, but I’ve had it before with poly linings – the stitching puckers the fabric, despite my using a microtex sharp needle, the walking foot, and loosening the tensions as far as they’ll go:

The problem only occurs when I’m sewing two layers on their own – the interfaced sections are fine, as are more than two layers. Anyone have any advice? I’m half-wincing, hoping the answer isn’t to sew through tissue paper and rip it off, because I hate that…

UPDATE: Thank you so much for all your suggestions!! I’m wary to use anything that requires washing the silk since I’ve got really dark purple sashes next to pale gold and I’m afraid of colours running as well as changing the hand of the silks, so I don’t think wash-away stabilisers would be my first choice here.

But it looks like perhaps it was the bobbin tension that was the problem. Marie-Christine’s newspaper comment below got me thinking, so I tested a scrap using some of the edge of Saturday’s paper that didn’t have any printing… And it didn’t pucker, true, but when I was ripping off the newspaper, it was actually pulling my bobbin threads out so they were big loops. So it occurred to me that maybe my bobbin tension was too loose, even though the stitches looked fine. So I tightened that up, and the puckering is about 90% better now! Still a little bit, but enough that a good press makes it unnoticeable…

So I’m considering that a win and carrying on, perhaps with a combination of “taut sewing” and (if I can get out to Soho this weekend) sillk or cotton thread instead of my standard Gutermann Sew All polyester to reduce that last little bit of puckering to nothing…

Thank you!!

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