My JEC order did not arrive yesterday, which gave me some extra time to research how to transfer a pattern using shell powder. By delving deep into the obscure corners of the internet and finding random blogs from 10 years ago, I discovered there are basically two techniques for transferring a pattern using shell powder — neither of which were what I imagined and neither of which would likely work for me.
What I had originally thought was that I should add water to the shell powder to get a thin paint and then, after pouncing down the general pattern, paint the shell powder paint over the pounced pattern, as one would with watercolors or oil paint. This was not the case — at least not from what I could find on the internet.
There is really very little about Japanese embroidery techniques on the web. It's like a secret society that one has to infiltrate little by little, picking up clues here and there — which is part of why I'm detailing all my trial-and-error attempts to figure it out. Hopefully it may help someone else who is trying to learn without the benefit of a skilled teacher at hand.
Anyway, in case you're interested, I'll explain how it appears that shell powder should actually be used. The first technique seems to be to use it dry as a sort of pouncing powder, but it looks like it may be brushed through the pricked pattern, rather than pounced. However, my fabric is quite light, so I thought my grey pounce powder would probably work better for that part since the dots are small and I need to be able to see them.
The second method involved adding water and painting along the lines on the reverse side of the tracing. Then after the paint dried, you were supposed to put it paint-side down on the fabric and use your thumbnail to rub over the lines and transfer them down. This sounded very tricky, and the blogger who described this method did not find it easy to do and was not particularly successful — the lines were much too thick. I decided I had better wait until a Japanese embroidery teacher can give me some help before I try to use shell powder.
Since I was not going to be using it after all, I decided to just use the prick and pounce method described on Mary Corbet's site in excellent detail. I made only one minor deviation, which I'll explain later.
First, I pinned my pricked pattern to the fabric by sticking the pins straight down into it:
Next, I dipped my pounce tool into the grey pounce powder, tapped it gently on the lid to remove the excess, and then pounced (or rather lightly rubbed) the powder all over the pricking:
I removed a few pins at the bottom just to check that it was going through. And it was, so I carefully pulled out the pins and lifted the pattern off, trying to keep it level so the powder on it wouldn't fall onto my fabric. This is the pattern that appeared on the silk:
It actually had some darker, smudgy areas where too much powder had gone through the vellum. But I blew lightly on it, as suggested by Mary, and miraculously, the dots stayed, and the excess powder went away. I admit, I didn't think this would work, so I was very pleasantly surprised.
After that, I deviated slightly from Mary's technique in that I did not use watercolors to paint the lines for the simple reason that I didn't have any. Instead, I used a blue mechanical pencil, which I bought for transferring whitework patterns, to carefully trace over the lines:
Then I took the entire frame outside and tapped on the back of the fabric to release the powder. There was still some left, so using a soft sable paintbrush, I brushed over the entire design and anywhere on the fabric that I noticed grey powder. This worked remarkably well and got rid of every last grain. My transfer pattern is now complete and very easy to see:
You can see that in a couple places, I missed the dots a little and had to draw a new line, so there are a few double lines, but the threads I'm using should be thick enough to cover them both up. I was also able to make them a little fainter using a colored pencil eraser I have to gently rub over the lines without damaging the silk fabric.
At any rate, this was my first time using the prick and pounce method, and I found it surprisingly easy. I'm reasonably pleased with the results and excited to actually start embroidering this project!
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