Accessorize, accessorize

No dyeing got done yesterday – it was too cold to work outside in the morning, and I spent the afternoon up with Sharon.  However, we made great progress on the jacket!  It is ready for the piping to be applied and the lining to be sewn in.  One more week should do it!  And it is just GORGEOUS.

Sharon suggested adding an accessory, to draw the eye upward from all that color.  Yes,  we are adding a hat!  A most magnificent hat.  (No, not a top hat, though I was seriously tempted.)  Here is the hat pattern:

I think I will have the brim with a stripe running around the hat, and lengthwise along the segments of the top, to give some nice directional contrast.  Black button on top, of course.

Sadly, no photos of the jacket yet – I forgot to bring my camera!  But soon, I promise.

Sharon also suggested that I stamp the lining of the jacket with something interesting, so it will be less plain, and that I “sign” it as well (put in my label, or something).  This makes sense to me.  I think I may order some woven labels for the jacket.  Or weave one?

What to use for the stamp?  Well, what else but a running tiger?  (My label, after all, is “The Traveling Tiger”.)  I scoured iStockPhoto and other royalty-free sites and found this:

This is perfect!  It’s handmade, simple enough to carve into a stamp, and conveys the idea of a running tiger beautifully.  And the Chinese origin (it’s a Chinese paper-cut) is great, too.

I really like the idea of stamping the lining (or the back) of my pieces with a running tiger.  It could be a distinctive stylistic “mark” to distinguish my work from everyone else’s.

I cannot, however, trademark the tiger, as the license agreement forbids it.  (Not that I plan to trademark anything any time soon, but I like to keep my options open.)  So I will ask a designer friend of mine if he can alter the tiger enough to make it distinct from the original, or design me another one.

Meanwhile, of course, I am happily carving this tiger into a stamp for use in this particular project.  I don’t know if I can carve it well enough, and use it skillfully enough, to use on my jacket, but I’m going to practice on some leftover lining fabric first.  I figure I still have enough time to order a professionally made rubber stamp, if I need to.  But it would be pretty cool to do it using a stamp I carved myself, even if it is a little cruder than a purchased one!

And, finally, I decided to carve a horse paper-cut into a stencil, just to see if it was possible to do something with such fine detail:

It works!  Well, at least the stencil carving works.  We’ll see how it actually prints.  (It will print as a negative design, of course, but there’s no helping that.  Trying to invert this in a stencil would have been very difficult due to the large number of “floating bits”.)