Start your sewing adventure with us.    Join Seamwork

Articles on this site were all published prior to 2017 and this site is no longer updated. Please visit our current Articles, Patterns, and Classes for the most up-to-date content and products.

Vintage Details: Stitched Bow

I found this dress at one of my favorite vintage shops, Dear Golden. I’ll admit that the color isn’t for me (and I adore pink), but those pockets!

I’m completely enamored with the stitched bows. I captured a close up shot for you. I’m not an embroidery expert, but it looks to me like some kind of heavy coarse thread. I suppose you’d stitch the outline of the bow, then fill it in with the loops. Very very pretty.

Sarai Mitnick

Founder

Sarai started Colette back in 2009. She believes the primary role of a business should be to help people. She loves good books, sewing with wool, her charming cats, working in her garden, and eating salsa.

Comments

M

January 28, 2010 #

This would be a fun dress to recreate…I might do the bow one of two ways:

1. find an applique just like it.
2. make a bow applique. Glue cording to wash-away fusible. Get it in the shape I want..plop another piece of wash-away on top for a wash-away fusible “sandwich.” Free-form stitch over the whole thing. Once I’m sure the whole thing won’t fall apart once the interfacing is gone, I wash away the fusible interfacing. Bada-bing! Insty bow.

Sarai

January 28, 2010 #

That is an excellent idea! I really like the idea of using the wash-away interfacing to make appliques, I may have to give that a try sometime.

Katherine

May 16, 2012 #

Ok. So it might be a fair while since you posted this, but after seeing that close-up of the bow patch (which is perfectly adorable!), I think that it might have been made using couching – that is, the shape of the bow and it’s fill stiches are laid onto the fabric using a heavier weight thread which is then sewn to the fabric using small stitches (in a much finer weight thread) here and there (as invisibly as is desired). I can’t tell if I’m right, as I don’t have the dress in front of me, but that might be the way that effect was acheived.

Thought I’d put my two cents in. . .