The past couple weeks I have spent a lot of time at the bunad shop. I finally decided which style of bunad to get, øst telemarks bunad. Since this is a dress I will wear the rest of my life I want it to be as perfect as possible. Luckily, I have had tons of help from one of their employees names Tove. She has been incredibly patient with me and has spent hours helping me pick out patterns, designs, colors, etc. I appreciate her more than she probably knows. I am always welcomed with a smile and hug from her.
Now that I have finished planning the dress, the only part left is the blouse. I picked out the two styles that I was drawn to first. The blouses all have a design on the collar, cuffs and on the front of the blouse about half way down. Sadly it Turns out I am like my mother and have expensive taste. The two I chose are the most expensive styles! The more expensive of the two is a geometric design with cross stitching and would cost almost $400 ( it's the same collar that the queen of Norway has) . The second is an embroidered and closer to around $260 extra. I still liked them both very much but figured I'd go for the cheaper of the two. Tove made me a couple black and white photocopies to take home and color in so I could figure which color order o wanted. So sweet of her!!!.
Still, I was a bit discouraged about the other design I liked best but when I got home I remembered she had mentioned that I could maybe make that collar myself. I went back two days later with the color s in copy and asked her about making the other collar myself. She gave me copies of the two collar patterns I liked best, the cotton embroidery thread that I had picked out and the two different gauges of cloth that the stitching is done on. Sorry I am so poor at explaining this, I am not fluent with this genre of lingo. Anyways, I rushed home and started practicing the stitching. The pattern I like the best is the one that is done on the very tiny woven cloth. You have to count the threads for each stitch so when it is smaller it is A LOT harder to be exact.
*I started writing this blog post last week and since then I have made some progress on the stitching. The last two days I've started on the harder pattern. All the work I've done so far has taken me probably a total of 6 hours to do, much longer than the other easier one.
*I started writing this blog post last week and since then I have made some progress on the stitching. The last two days I've started on the harder pattern. All the work I've done so far has taken me probably a total of 6 hours to do, much longer than the other easier one.
Here is the progress I made. You can see on the left where I miss counted and messed up a bit. Since this is just for practice I decided not to undo 20-some stitches and to just continue. Altogether this has maybe taken me about 4 or 5 hours to. Let me emphasize again how hard it is to be EXACT on the counting. Sometime the threads in the cloth appear almost invisible so it is easy to miss them.
Yup. So I will continue to practice and hopefully figure out soon which pattern and what colors I want to use. The colors I picked out look much different when actually stitched/embroidered.
Since the time I had started writing this blog entry I have gone back again to Alamankås (the bunad shop) to make the downpayment so they could start on my bunad. It takes a long time to make, but we are going to try and have it complete by time I leave in June. Tove had to ask me a couple of questions for color placement, since I had moved around and switched some of the colors in the embroidery on the bunad, so we went back to the work table to figure it out. During this time I expressed that I was not 100% stoked about the shades of the colors of the wool for the embroidery. The wool colors they use are the traditional colors, but I had seen other telemark bunads with brighter colors.
Since the time I had started writing this blog entry I have gone back again to Alamankås (the bunad shop) to make the downpayment so they could start on my bunad. It takes a long time to make, but we are going to try and have it complete by time I leave in June. Tove had to ask me a couple of questions for color placement, since I had moved around and switched some of the colors in the embroidery on the bunad, so we went back to the work table to figure it out. During this time I expressed that I was not 100% stoked about the shades of the colors of the wool for the embroidery. The wool colors they use are the traditional colors, but I had seen other telemark bunads with brighter colors.
I asked if I could maybe buy wool somewhere and bring it for them to use. After I asked about that she went and grabbed a box from the back full of miscellaneous wool yarn of all sorts of colors. This is how wonderful this woman is, she constantly goes out of her way for me. I feel so blessed. I am glad that I spoke up because in the box I found vibrant light and dark green wool that I loved! There was also some violet and i light robins egg blue/turquoise color. We reworked the color scheme of the pattern again. When I left the shop I felt relieved and this time truly excited about my bunad. I am excited to share my progress with everyone!