Levels of Insanity

Every so often, I have an insane costume idea (yes -- every so often) that involves a lot of work, but would be REALLY COOL if I could pull it off.

Now, it's nothing as insane as say, the recreated Worth Oak leaf dress that harmanhay recreated (sewing 4 hours a night!), nor as insane as the woman who made a dress from the sheep (as in spun the cotton, wove the fabric, THEN sewed her outfit), but it's on a MUCH MUCH MUCH smaller scale of insanity.

Basically, it started at Costume College at the 18th c. pocket's class, where the teacher passed around a merino/silk hand-embroidered pocket she had made. It was so soft and so pet-able. I was in love. Then in the Embroidery for Stomacher's class (with the same teacher), she was showing off some of the thread that you can use for embroidery, INCLUDING some thinner handspun yarn she had purchased. My mind kinda did a double-take.

After I started taking the crewel yarn apart, my mind kept thinking: What if?

What if I got some delicious merino/silk combo, or maybe just a tussah silk, and spun that to about the right thickness for crewel embroidery? I wouldn't need much, and if i was really insane, I could buy the natural stuff, and dye it myself.

I have plenty of the detailed costume books for the 18th century where I can thereby scan-in a given pattern, make that into a line drawing, etc. Then that just needs to be transferred to linen or a period muslin (lawn) fabric.

Then, I could do a basic embroidery stitches to create said pocket.

That is...if I were insane. I mean, it'd be very very small final project, except, obviously, for the steps along the way. I mean, a pocket's relatively small, right? *ahem*

OR I could be just a sane person, and scan in the pattern, have it digitized, and have the embroidery machine do it for me (although, it might take just as long a time to get the pattern digitized properly!)

Or be even more sane, and take my already existing embroidery patterns, put something 18th century like, and have the machine do all the work. (I plan on doing this one anyways.)

Whether or not I do this from scratch, is dependent on my level of sanity. Currently, I'm trying to judge where that level is currently at.... :-)