Throwback Thursday - Ootini part 2 of (now 3) - the mask

Constructing the eyes of a Jawa costume really deserves its own post so I've decided to split the mask post in two.

Sadly I did not have time to take pictures during the construction process, but I've reconstructed what I could using pictures of the completed items.

photo credit: Bill Nolan

The mask base: 
Starting with a plain plastic craft mask I cut the nostrils into one hole and cut the mouth out of the mask entirely. Structurally this is pretty much how I wore it the first day.

I had a lot of issues with my breath and sweat condensing on the inside of the mask and the pull of the entire mask was pretty much suspended on the bridge of my nose giving me a wicked sinus headache and raw bruised feeling across my nose by the end of the first night.

This was compounded by the fact that the mask fit the length of my face fine... as long as my mouth was closed. Any time I opened my mouth my chin hit the inner chin of the mask pulling it down tighter on my nose and I had to push it back up into place regularly.

For the second day I cut the upper lip out entirely and removed as much of the chin of the mask as I could. To add some padding for my nose and keep the mask off my face I sliced up several disposable squishy foam earplugs into approx. 1/4 inch thick pieces and glued them in a pattern I hoped would comfortably distribute the weight.
This worked really well, and in fact every single time I wear a mask for something I kick myself at some point in the evening for not doing this.
The staining on the forehead pads is blue hairdye.

What would I do different?
I think I cut a little more of the plastic out of this mask every single time I wear it.

Given my druthers I would completely rework the base structure of the mask leaving as little material touching my face as possible. Ideally I would have something suspended well off of my face like glasses with enough structure to attach the eye lights at the cheekbone level, the drape to cover the lower face, and some sort of superlight framework for the forehead area to attach the covering cloth.

Airspace and cheek area stability are the key elements. My current pie in the sky design would be an open-worked metal eye mask frame with a simple forehead cage.

The covering and attachments:

The black covering for the mask is a stretchy black velvet material which I attached with a hot glue gun. The upper part of the face down to the underside of the cheekbones was glued down to conform to the shape of the face. There are two draped pieces covering the mask, one from the cheekbones and one from the chin, which helped conceal the shape of my face and any part of my neck that might have been exposed by the hood. I think doing it draped from the bridge of the nose as I did probably made it a lot easier to breathe and meant that I could cut away a lot of the mask when I realized the problems of the first day.

Closeup of the eye covering and light and elastic attachment points

The mask eye holes were backed with a rubbery shelf liner material and glued on with white PVA glue. I was worried the glue would melt from my sweat but it has held up for several years now. In all but the most direct and brightly lit shots the eye camouflage worked shockingly well and often people looking directly into my face had to ask where I was looking out of. I learned to ignore the mesh pattern very quickly and had fantastic field of vision, probably the best I've ever had in a costume with a full face mask (the hood does disrupt that somewhat).

Holes for the eye lights and elastic strap to hold the mask on were drilled using a pin vice and drill (which went through everything extremely easily) and the attachments were wired down with anodized craft wire. Any small patches of white around any fabric edges were touched up using black acrylic paint, which I also used to cut some of the shine of the hot glue wherever it was visible.

What would I do different?
In a re-do I would probably switch to a glue with less shine and more working time, and would definitely use a more breathable material. I am not prone to overheating but this costume is VERY warm.
If using a mask I think I would attach the eye camouflage last instead of first to make it easier to cut the eye holes out of the fabric face covering. A better mask material would probably be silk noil as it has the right matte finish to absorb the light, it is light, airy, and drapes well, and it is shockingly cheap.

She chose down? - A thing I just learned about setting up new embroidery.

I've been dabbling with embroidery of various sorts since I was a kid but I recently got back into cross stitch after a looooong hiatus. I remembered most of the basics but I spent a lot of time poking around the internet to flesh out setup details and see how other people did things.

One of the things I specifically looked for was the best way to set up the fabric on a frame or hoop for stitching and in particular -

Why do some people set up their canvas "underneath" the frame/hoop - is there an advantage to this?

I couldn't find anything to suggest an advantage either way, and I found the most pics of people working "over" so I set up my recent pieces to match.

Now that I've found the answer to my question completely by random chance on a Facebook Cross Stiching page I'm switching up what I do with cross stitching and sharing the tip. Working underneath fixes a problem I find REALLY annoying and hopefully having this info handy will help others.

The main issue I find with working over the top is that when I get too close to the frame/hoop it's REALLY hard to maneuver the needle under threads horizontally. This isn't a problem for up and down stitching like in cross stitch, but it's a really big problem if you want to run the needle under previous stitches to finish off a thread and you are very close to the frame.

Ever hit up against this? Pulling that needle through would be SO ANNOYING!

You never work horizontally on the face of the embroidery when you are cross stitching so this will never be a problem if you work with the top of your piece in the ditch.
Y.M.M.V. if you're working a different style of needlework, but there are a couple of other advantages as well so unless I was doing a LOT of tight horizontal work (like in attaching Shisha mirrors for example) I would probably continue working this way.

The second BIG advantage is that the projecting frame will help keep your top hand up off of the face of canvas so it will help keep the top of the piece a lot cleaner. Also: if you drop your frame or your pet/spouse/child bumps against it - the fabric which is most exposed on the edge is the underside of your work instead of the top.

A third potential advantage is that the well created by the frame projecting upward could be handy to keep working items nearby. You can rest items like scissors or a pattern right on the piece with you, though I *personally* would be really careful with this. Given *my* luck my scissors would open up and cut threads, or the ink from the pattern would transfer onto the fabric, or something similarly Murphy's Law-ish. Even if I don't make active use of it I can't even express the number of times this could have saved me from stopping everything to move my work off of my lap so I could pick up a a needle or threader which just joyfully rolled off the working surface and on to the floor.

I have a large-ish piece (around 11x15 inches) I've been working on for a bit that I have on stretcher bars and after finding out about this I'm SERIOUSLY considering un-mounting the whole thing and re-mounting it underneath the bars.

(2 am edit: I did it after I got back from dinner and I regret nothing!)

Anyway, I hope having this info out and about helps someone because I know I'm TOTALLY taking advantage of it.

Bonus thing - How to tell the front from the back on a piece of woven fabric:
(as much for my future reference as for yours)
"Hold the fabric by opposite corners and pull gently. If the fabric forms a "valley" between two "hills", that is the right or front side. If it forms a single "hill", that is the back. The front side is smoother than the back. However, it really makes no difference which side you stitch on unless it is a printed fabric."

Improve your designs with Science! PLEASE!!!

Science! has indicated that symmetry is both more attractive and easier to process by the human brain.

With this in mind, why do pattern designers helpfully designate the center of the design and add a handy darker line for every ten stitches on the grid on to the pattern to make it easier to count but NOT LINE UP THESE GUIDELINES WITH THE CENTER OF THE PATTERN?!?!?!

I assure you it will be just as neat and satisfying IF NOT MORE SO to have even margins around the edge of the pattern as it is to start with a full ten by ten grid on the top left.

Your design could reap the benefits of sweet creamery cognitive neuroscience!

It's not even like you even start the design in square zero most of the time. If it really freaks you to not have a full grid on the edge just extend the empty part of the graph a little bit! Is it going to mess things up that much to start stitching on column six instead of column two?

I can't show you the grid for this because it is a copyrighted design from BlackBird Designs, but this is the first prep stuff I do for any new piece. I blanket stitch the edges for stability and lay out my pattern space using a counted running stitch every five stitches (aka ten threads since this is a 28ct linen and the design calls for over two stitching, like THAT won't make it more likely for me to mess up).

The white thread designates the dead center of the design while the blue thread designates the graph guidelines already laid over the design to help you count and they are WILDLY out of alignment to each other. The vertical line is off by six stitches (or four depending on your starting point, I guess) and the horizontal is off by five.

I can assure you (*cough* having done it before *cough*) that if I do not clearly mark the orientation of my fabric and separately designate both grids I WILL shift my design over at one point or another, typically early and devastatingly. Taking out an entire day or so of stitching is no fun.

I'm actually considering taking the center markers out entirely on this as soon as I get it on the stretchers to avoid any potential confusion.

I see your true colours shining through...

Jo-Anns Craft's 20% off coupon + 30% off sewing baskets + cute black cat pattern means of course that Papa's got a brand new ba... sket.

I've really needed something I could use as a project basket; I have a giant utility basket for materials/tools storage and a smaller essentials/travel kit in a Cadbury tin, but nothing I could functionally work a PROJECT out of while sitting on the couch or hanging at a Stitch and Bitch. It has a nice big open bottom and a plastic top tray with a little pincushion and pocket attached to the lid.
Also Black Cat, which is very important as I have one, and I luuuuuuuurve him.
Not that I don't also love my other two cats, but he's my heartcat.

*cough*and.i.also.got.some.aida.cloth.and.a.bunch.of.DMC.floss.and.a.halloween.patterns.magazine*cough*

Speaking of DMC floss, I got a practical lesson in dye lots today!
Thankfully one that didn't come to light in the middle of a piece as that's usually how it goes for me.

I went looking for a pale silvery-grey colour to do a sort of tone on tone piece and grabbed a handful of this DMC 3024 Very Light Brown Gray (which is totally NOT what I'd name the colour).

I thought at first that someone had mixed colours together as one half of the skeins had a cooler shift and the other had a slightly greener shift but the skeins all had the same code on them. THEN I thought I was being kind of crazy about it until I checked the dye lots.

I separated them by the apparent colour and sure enough every single one of the cooler skeins had the # 6609036Q on it, while the rest of them were split between about three other numbers - leading me to believe that that Q lot was the off one.

Hopefully you can see the difference in the pics above. It was pretty subtle so I don't think it would be an issue on a multi-colour piece, but I wanted these specifically to do an all one colour piece so I'm REALLY glad I checked.

I also picked up some brass stretching tacks and an octopus needle minder at a local Needlepoint shop called Ladybug Stitches, so I'm all set to get a planned project going. I was hoping to find fabric but the shop isn't really stocked for cross stitch stuff. Jane the owner(? I think?) was however super nice and actually remembered me from the last time I was in, which had to have been at least six years prior.

I now have more needle minders than I could possibly ever use in my life (with one more on the way) and I'm perfectly okay with that because octopus and pumpkin and spider (and mystery thing TBA because I know some seriously cool crafters).