Star Attachment

The sea star has landed...



As usual, it always takes me longer to do things than I think it will.  All I had to do was cut out that sea star and sew it to the block right?

Well...in my beautifully anal way, I first had to tissue transfer the outline of the starfish onto the block.

OK.  I heard you moan.  It does take a lot of time to tissue transfer the design.  Why didn't I just chalk it in with pencil or something?

Well first, remember I'm superimposing the sea star over lots of layers of fabric and stitching.  It's tough to get a good outline with a marking tool over all that texture.

Secondly, I wanted to make sure that I didn't lose the movement of the star's arms when I sewed the piece down. I also wanted to make sure that I knew the correct width of the arms. I had beaded the arms wider than the pattern hoping that, when I appliqued the piece down, the arms would dome up.

If I hadn't transferred the original design, I was afraid I would end up with fat sea star arms...I didn't want that. I don't think you get fat arms by eating tiny mollusks and crustaceans, do you?

Now, this was the second tissue transfer for this guy because I used the same method to outline the starfish on the ultrasuede.  By using a tissue transfer, I was able to keep all my beading stitches within the outline plus it gives me a great line around which to cut out my beaded applique...



I had also really packed my beads, adding a row of silver-lined crystals in between the central dark line and the creamy, arm edges...this served to force the arms to dome up a bit once cut out...
 

Here's a pic of the piece after it was cut out and just placed (not sewn) on the block...



To be honest, at this point, even though I knew the piece would look smaller when I domed up the arms, I gulped in disappointment. I felt like I may have overdone it on the size and my friend the echinoderm would be too big of a star on my 8" block.

I went forward anyway.

After investing this much time I thought I'd better just figure out a way to make it work, so I began sewing down the arms along the edges, using my transfer outline as a guideline and tucking the ultrasuede edges under by angling my needle as I went...

The last thing I did was sew an amber outline around the arms with one strand of floss to give the appearance of the tubular feet or suckers...



Here's the entire block with the sea star attached.



He's pretty dominant at this point so I'd better get busy giving him some competition.  I think I can tone him down a bit with some seaweed and counterbalance his star power with some shells and an urchin.  Well...if I can't...those nine-armed sea stars are pretty big. Anywhere from 30-40 cm or 12"-20"!  Compared to that this guy seems small at 8-9cm (3"-3.5").

See you next time!