Han Solo Costume: Embroidering Bloodstripes (Pants 2)

Before family & friends arrived, I started working on the bloodstripes for my Han Solo outfit. As I mentioned before in a previous post, Amiee Major had kindly put up the embroidery file under a Creative Commons License in her blog post.

I downloaded the file, and marked out the areas to put down the stripes.

I made a couple of test pieces, just to check the thread tension, and placement, etc. Then I set up my machine to do the full thing. I used:

• Guterman thread in their 410 red colorway. It's a bright red that contrasted well with the blue denim that I had chosen. 
• Tear-away stabilizer suitable for denim. (Make sure to get the RIGHT type of stabilizer otherwise, you will have problems!)

The front & back of the bloodstripes.

It took almost two hours to embroidery one panel for one leg. I did one panel one evening and another panel on a separate evening. (While babysitting the first panel to ensure that nothing went horribly wrong, I got a lot of knitting done!)

Because the file is made for a 250 x 150 mm hoop, you can only do a certain number of stripes at a time and have to move the hoop down after each section was completed. Once a section completed, I had to carefully line up all of my marks to do the next part of the panel. I would have modified the file to do a larger hoop size, but unfortunately, I hadn't installed the embroidery software on my (newish) computer and I didn't feel like dragging out the disks to install it.

It took 1.75 spools and nearly 4 bobbins of thread to complete both stripes. (I'm really glad that I bought three new spools of thread just for this project!) The stripes came out very nicely with only minor issues, which I can fix by hand.

After each panel was completed, I had to take my small sharp scissors and a pair of tweezers to snip all of the connecting threads. (It was a lot of snipping.)

I snipped threads on one panel while the machine worked on another.

Now, I can start sewing the rest of the pants.