TPATD: Part 2 - Construction (Patreon)

QUICK RECAP: I made fiber fan art of Jen Wang's graphic novel, The Prince and the Dressmaker. Part 1 explains my inspiration, how I created the design, and how I picked out my fabrics.  Part  2 explains how I used appliqué to construct the face and dress. Part 3 covered my embroidery stitches. Part 4 concludes with beading. 

SO.

Next step: PREPPING THE FABRICS. 

Being that my t-shirt was a bit threadbare after a decade of wear, I worried it wouldn't be sturdy enough to support all the dense stitching that would be applied to it. Fortunately, there is this durable fabric stabilizer you can bond to the backside of your material with an iron to double up its strength. 

(Stabilizer ironed onto the back of my t-shirt, resting on my tiny ironing board that I've had for, like, 12 years)

Here's the Prince traced onto my flesh-toned fabric with a water soluble pen.  This is a super cool invention because those blue lines just disappear when they get wet!

The red and flesh-toned fabrics were each individually bonded to another material called "fusible heat bonding web" or something like that, so that I could adhere them like stickers to their base fabrics-- which is a process called "appliqué". This was my first time doing it and I  was SUPER NERVOUS. So much so that I had put off starting this project for months and months because I didn't wanna have to learn something new D: But it turns out, it wasn't hard at all!! You just iron the fusible web onto the back of your fabric, cut out the shape you want, then.... iron it onto the other fabric. Easy fucking peasey. I haven't actually read this tutorial, but from my skimming it looks like it's a good guide if you wanna learn more: How To Appliqué – an Introduction to Fabric Appliqué 

So then I  ironed together all the appliqué bits and got it all situated in my embroidery hoop:

Even though the dress and face shapes were now glued to each other, I still wanted to extra secure their perimeters down with stitches. 

Cool!

All that I had left to do was... embroider everything.

TO BE CONTINUED....