Finishing Questions?
August 12, 2005 at 11:18 AM
by Ashleigh
I've been having a rather interesting discussion via email with Ellen Chester of With my Needle about finishing of smalls and other stitching articles. As you will know if you own or have stitched one of Ellen's charts her finishing directions are magnificent - very clear, very well thought out, exceptionally well explained. This is the result of the combination of Ellen's basic concepts and ideas and her husband's background in analytical chemistry. His work requires very precise directions and he is the technical writer over at With My Needle.
Once the stitching is complete, Ellen's concepts go to a finisher who then works with them and gives basic directions back to the With My Needle team who then embellish the directions as necessary to create the information that reaches you in the chartpack.
Recently there seems to be a progression amongst designers either to not provide finishing instructions at all, leaving it up to the stitcher to work out how to make the complicated little items pictured on the front cover of the chart or to provide finishing instructions at an extra cost - meaning around $20 for the chart and an additional $20 for the instructions.
Then there are the professional finishers who charge to finish your work for you. You stitch up your item, send it to them, pay them (as you would a framer) and they return it to you fully finished up into whatever item you requested. The cost of this kind of finishing is still less than the cost of framing, but add on $50 or $75 to the cost of your supplies and you're mounting up the 100's of dollars already.
I feel strongly that if I have stitched a piece myself the instructions should be adequate enough to enable me to reproduce the item that the stitching is portrayed in.
You can draw a comparison to a clothing pattern - imagine buying the pattern for a blouse and skirt, making the blouse and then finding out that you needed to buy an extra pattern to make the skirt? Or, to put it closer to our own field of needlework - you buy the pattern for a suit, and then find it doesn't include the pattern pieces needed to line the suit? Would you be content with that kind of practise? I wonder how many patterns Vogue would sell if this were the case?
It has become clear that there are some finishers who will assemble a piece for a designer but do not want to write even the most basic instructions which may or may not be rewritten (and expanded upon) by the person putting out the chart. They want the chart to go out there without any assembly directions. Is this the wave of the future?
- As a stitcher, what do you think of buying a chart for which there are no assembly directions?
- What do you as a stitcher think of having to pay extra for finishing instructions?
- Would you send your items off to a finisher for making up?
- Does a chart which requires a lot of finishing work attract you or put you off?
- Do you think you should be able to post photos of your completed stitching or finishing work, or pictures of how you put together a piece to help other stitchers?