If you are interested in any of these designs for your next Irish Dance dress, please contact me at taoknitter@gmail.com.
Another new dress, this one made by Mary Jo Farr of Trefoil Designs.
I did the embroidery, fooling with the design to get what MJ wanted. This is one of my designs, a diagonal (obviously), based on TA-AD 1. I will get it up in the store soon, but as usual, if you want it sooner rather than later, email me.
I love doing these dress, MJ!! This is one of the prettiest we have done yet!
Also have the first ribbon bodice digitized. This can be either a stitch fill or an applique. I will get it in the store, but it is available sooner if you want it.
There are currently 2 design sets from Susan available on Taoknitter Arts: Irish Dance Dress Designs & Embroidery. Click anywhere below to get to a page of dress ideas. Please keep in mind that I am still available to help you create your dream dress in any way I can! More designs are on the way!
There are currently 2 design sets from Ann Donahue available on Taoknitter Arts: Irish Dance Dress Designs & Embroidery. Click anywhere below to get to a page of dress ideas. Please keep in mind that I am still available to help you create your dream dress in any way I can! More designs are on the way!
Slowly but surely, yes, new things are happening. I decided last year that I needed to make Taoknitter Arts designs available for automatic purchase and download…and the site is up! Little did I realize what an extreme undertaking this was going to be! The sheer time involved in just getting designs ready, converted and then uploaded has been staggering. So, the site does not have the full catalog of designs up yet, but we will get there.
You can see the new site here – Taoknitter Arts: Irish Dance Dress Designs & Embroidery
Photos of all the designs can still be seen on Flickr. If you want to see all of the design parts with dimensions and prices, just write to me at taoknitter@gmail.com and I will make it happen.
And I have recently updated my Customer Creations gallery with all of the fantastic work done by dressmakers using Taoknitter Arts designs. I am so impressed! Please visit Customer Creations to see all of the creativity! If you have a dress and a happy dancer to add to the gallery, please just let me know.
So, what is to become of this blog? I will use this one for Irish Dance dress embroidery information to separate it from the other Taoknitter blog about actually sewing Irish Dance dresses – Taoknitter: Sewing Irish Dance Dresses
I hope I can keep it all straight!
Here is the reproduction of a hand embroidered dress that I was privileged to work on with Colleen Murphy and Kristine Baker. Colleen makes the most wonderful American Girl Irish dance dresses, and she asked me to digitize the embroidery from photos of the original, human-sized dress. Kristine Baker crocheted the collar, which Colleen says is a beautiful, perfect replica of the original.
And here is the owner of the original dress IN the dress (I am SOOO impressed) with the doll dress. I cannot stop looking at this pic!!
I have been researching the Book of Kells lately, and having now seen the sources of the images on the dress, I am in awe of the work the original embroiderer did. Spectacular!
Thank you so very much for letting me be a part of this, Colleen!!!
You can read more about the adventure here: Newest Endeavor and Reproduction Dress Test as well as on Colleen’s site, Murphy Dresses.
A while back, dressmaker Colleen Murphy contacted me about collaborating on a very cool project: an ID dress reproduction of a full sized, hand embroidered velvet dress…for an American Girl doll! I was intrigued so, of course, said yes.
The original dress is unbelievable! Black velvet, orange crocheted collar, and some of the most interesting & beautiful Celtic/Irish hand embroidery I have ever seen. I will admit to being intimidated on SOOO many levels, but the challenge could not be ignored.
Colleen is game for me to write about this, and I will include pics of my work, but I will not post pics of the original dress until I am sure it is ok with the owners.
Photos arrive…and I sit there and stare…and stare…and stare some more. So many things are going through my head about colors, stitches, faithful reproduction, artistic license… have I bit off more than I can chew? I dreamed about this dress and how the gryphons and lions chased me while I was trying to thread a needle!
My biggest obstacle was dealing with my “feelings,” my philosophy on faithful reproduction. Besides the fact that neither my embroidery software nor machine can manage a chain stitch, there is the integrity of someone else’s artwork to consider. As you may know, I am a retired dance professor/dancer/choreographer/artistic director…the issues of artistic integrity are part and parcel of who I am on so many levels. My master’s degree encompassed directing and Labanotation/movement analysis, and it is this training in Labanotation in particular that honed my focus on/obsession with faithful reproduction.
Labanotation is dance notation, a logical though complex system of symbols and rules used to first record dance and then to reconstruct it again on new people, sometimes decades later. If you are interested, you can learn more here: Labanotation.
Not long after I got to grad school at Ohio State, I changed my concentration to include Labanotation. I was fascinated by and drawn to this extremely logical approach to dance. Now, I am sure my professors would tell you they shook their heads many, many times at my emo approach to dance in general, but I will never forget the day I let the logic take over…Vera Maletic gave me a very rare smile and nodded her head before turning away to bark at me to do it again! Not only did my symbols need to precisely record illogical movement, but when I read notated scores and performed them, it better look the way Doris Humphrey demanded decades before! It was a very intense LOVE/HATE relationship.
So, here I was 24 years later, looking at someone else’s beautiful art with the intention of reproducing it. I swear I felt Vera thwack the back of my skull.
The animals were glaring at me, so I chose a knotwork braid to start with. That I could handle easily.
Now, I have not ever done anything as small as was going to be required here, but I knew that I could not do this the way I would if it were going to remain full size. So, even though I did the original digitizing in a decent size, instead of outlining all of this with a satin stitch, I chose a backstitch to approximate both the look of the chain stitch outlines and to accommodate what I knew would end up being very narrow lines. But, after doing this design, I knew I was going to have to do a test dress to get a real feel for the size and to get a sense of stitch density for something as small as the designs on an AG dress.
Colleen sent me pics of her pattern pieces & dimensions so I could digitize the outlines to use as templates. I then used one of my designs. Even though I have not done mini-designs, I have enough experience by now to know that if I used the same stitch density that I use for the ID designs, I was going to be tunneling to China!! Too many stitches in such a small area was only going to pull in, and perhaps make holes in the fabric no matter the pull compensation, so I lightened the density a lot. Here’s the result:
And here is it finished…I am so tempted to buy an AG doll for the youngest Diva!
(I feel the need to say here that I so admire that Colleen likes doing these little dresses, and she does them so well! I have this psychotic aversion to sewing things with small pieces which is why I am not a quilter…these dresses qualify as beautiful small things that make me twitch! I know I do applique with small pieces, but like every other psycho, it is the context…it goes on a BIG dress.)
So, I learned I was right about stitch density. The test turned out well…and everyone in my family got a big kick out of this tiny little dress. Even the macho hubby talked to it like it was a gerbil…
The next design I tackled was what I call the Nessies:
This design took me days. Why? Because I kept finding myself mired in choices…colors (decided Colleen can match colors since she has the dress, but still wanted to match as closely as possible so the client could have a visual); stitches (leave plain or play with texture?); overs and unders (fix them so that they make sense or keep them as they were originally stitched?); symmetry (make things perfectly symmetrical as I imagine they were intended and as I can with the computer or stay true to the actual pics keeping in mind that over the years the fabric changes and hangs differently now?); handmade look versus computerized perfection…haven’t there been more than a few artists driven insane by the demands of their art?!? Ya know Van Gogh and that ear…???
I cannot count the number of times I would find myself just sitting in front of the computer contemplating the photos…I imagined how much of it was done in the company of other women doing exactly the same thing. I wondered how many mistakes occurred and were then simply incorporated because the embroiderer got caught up in a conversation with her fellow stitchers. I wondered how often the zen of the repetitive needlework sent the embroiderer on a quiet journey of her own…and then I would start.
I decided that if this were me doing the hand stitching, I would work for symmetry. I would work for the logical progression of the overs and unders, but I would get over myself when the logic failed. I decided I would follow the handmade lines but clean things up when unique moments took on the aura of a mistake. I decided I would try to keep the look of its handmade beauty while using my technology to enhance it where applicable. I decided less was more…and that was hard!!
And this is what I have so far:
And here are the dress pieces:
This weekend, I will do another test. I will post pics of it, succeed or fail.
There is a new thread on Celtic Flame about stealing designs. A dressmaking mom writes that another mom in her school told her she was wasting her time coming up with her own designs because there was so much to COPY on the internet. When she first wrote, she alluded to a website that sells embroidery, so I wondered if she might be talking about Taoknitter Arts.
An answer that she just posted to another reply makes me think she is talking about my website.
Big sigh.
Susan and I have hashed out the pitfalls of posting clear pics of the designs since I started. She has dealt with this issue far longer than I have, and I respect her viewpoint, her advice and her experience. I will not bore you, or myself, by re-visiting the mental gymnastics (complete with teeth gnashing) that helped me arrive at the current presentation of the designs on my website. If you look at it, I think you get it.
But, I do want to say that I know I take the risk of people copying things. I have this tendency to believe that all folks are inherently honest and honorable. I do, routinely, get blind-sided by self-serving idiots with an overdeveloped sense of entitlement, and I sometimes finally get really irked by stupidity and mean-spiritedness, but I have yet to see a change in my basic trust. I now know what it sounds like when Susan shakes her head at me over the phone.
It would make me crazy to try to police things or try to find a more complicated way of managing the designs. But let me be clear, copying a design is stealing and I am not shy about approaching the thief and making it public if I have to. I did, by accident, see an exact copy of a dress I made for my daughter. Susan designed it for us. The design was never made available, but there it was, perfectly copied on someone else’s dress. When I contacted the overseas dressmaker, she was great about it, very sorry, and told me that the design had been given to her by the dancer.
I get contacted rather often by dancers who send me pics of designs from other dresses, even BN dresses, wanting THAT design digitized. Sometimes I get a design “created by the dancer” only to be led by the dressmaking gods to pics of the EXACT design on a finished dress…that blows my mind. Once I explain that I will not copy because it is both unethical and illegal, they usually calmly explain that they did not know that and we go forward. Only once did I not hear back after my refusal…I think that was embarrassment.
I do think most folks either do not know or really do not think about it. One poster on CF wrote: ” I think the problem is that most people don’t equate “appropriating” someone’s design as stealing because they don’t physically take something. It isn’t like shoplifting where you actually take something in your hand.
It’s more like cheating on a test.
Ask your friend if she encourages her dd to copy her neighbor’s answers on exams in school. Why not? It is just what she did. She used someone else’s work and passed it off as her own.
Ask her if she’s going to brag about how she aquired her designs – Wow look what I copied off of the internet and I didn’t have to pay for it! If someone asks her where the design came from, is she going to say “Oh I digitized it myself” or something equally evasive. If she’s so proud of her cleverness, why not tell all?
Ask her if she thinks the TC will be happy if she finds out the design was lifted. Is she OK with her school being known as the one where it is OK to rip off other people’s dresses?”
Interesting viewpoint.
Susan made me laugh when she pointed out that truly, the only thing I should worry about is if someone else’s poorly digitized “copy” was thought to be mine! Now that would be a drag!
There was also a point made by someone about using designs from a site on the internet. She wrote: “While there are a couple of sites out there that have drawn up several dress designs specifically for irish dancing use, you have to remember then, that your dress won’t be an original. Chances of running into another dancer with the same pattern are slim but just something to keep in mind. ”
That mind set has never occurred to me!! Yes, yes, I know that the conversation about whether or not a BN dress is really custom when they re-use designs in part or in whole pops up routinely. But, it has always been my assumption that each dressmaker brings a totally different perspective to making a dress and so it will be rare that 2 dressmakers will use the same design the same way let alone the same fabrics. In fact, what I love about my clients is that they always do something I did not envision. Very often, they ask me to modify the designs by taking something out, putting something else in, taking it apart or trying something new with a piece of something else! I love it.
Still, I guess that is a concern for some people. I appreciate that. And I also thoroughly appreciate my creative dressmaking clients. Thank you for spurring me on!
I thought that the above might have been a rant…I guess it was just a bit of mental popcorn…
There are a couple of links in this brief post about Copyright Law: Substantial Similarity.
Big, big, multiples sighs…the Sneetches are at it once more. Dressmakers are being accused of “highway robbery” again. So that I can maintain a detached, calm stance, I am going to assume that is mainly directed at the BNs (big names).
It has not yet been said in the voy board post to which I am referring that “it is only embroidery for pete’s sake, not the artistic applique of not-so-long-ago!” Let me be clear here that I am in awe of the MANY appliqued works of art that were done without the benefit of digitizing. Susan Gowin’s work stuns me every time, and I drool over The Silverlode dresses. Amazing. I completely appreciate the time and artistic talent.
By the same token, all the embroidery that we are seeing on the dresses these days is equal in the amount of time and even talent that it takes to create the designs, digitize them well, and then stitch them out (ok, maybe there is no artistry in using a computerized machine, but it is still time intensive and takes mechanical understanding and skill). The look is different now, yes, but no less costly than the applique wonders of before. In fact, in terms of the embroidery itself, I would guess that there is in fact more embroidery on dresses now than ever before!
And that is not cheap. Why? Because good digitizing takes lots of time. But, unless you are a digitizer, how and why would you know that?
My sister-in-law is a crafter. She came to me to ask if she could use the embroidery machine. When she saw my confusion because I know she does not know how to use one, she said, “It’s easy, isn’t it? Don’t I just feed in a picture of what I want?” She is a smart person so she quickly understood it was not simple when I explained a bit, but it dawned on me that perhaps many folks assume that we ID dressmakers and embroiderers do just feed in the pictures and sit back. My favorite board comment has always been the one that stated dressmakers should not make so much money because all of their machines are computerized now…the implication being that we just throw all of the ingredients at the machines and they suck it up and spit a complete dress out the other end?!?!?! I wish!!!
Now, there is something called the “auto-digitize” function in many, if not all, of the digitizing software packages. However, this is rarely a successful way to create good embroidery files. Auto-digitizing leaves tell-tale signs that affect the integrity of the embroidery. Good digitizers use it rarely if at all. (I did a post about auto-digitizing here.)
When I first started my digitizing education, I looked carefully at the designs I had bought for myself. I deconstructed them and learned mainly what not to do…don’t use auto-digitize! Many (most?) of the celtic knot design sets out there are created using that auto button. How can I tell? Because the knot file itself is full of strange thread detours, junctions, shapes & lines, and the embroidery is just as asymmetrical and mis-shapen as the original hand drawn sources found in the clip-art sources…yep, clip art. But, the open secret in embroidery of using clip art as a starting point is a post for a different day.
I know that the economy is bad. I have so many clients buying digitized designs so that they can make their own dresses. Some of them have me do the embroidery for them because they do not have the equipment or big enough hoops. My Taoknitter Arts email box is hopping with correspondence with people of all experience levels wanting to do for themselves. It’s great!
But there have been several exchanges, a few of them very lengthy, with people who have asked for estimates based on some pretty intensive design re-working. They also wanted me to stitch them out. When I gave them the estimates, however, these people disappeared. I have been mulling this over…why would folks assume a full dress of dense stitching would only cost $20?
I asked one of my outspoken dressmaker friends (she is also my embroidery tester) what she thought about this. I have edited a bit to protect the innocent, but this is what she had to say:
When I was looking at your site the other day, I made note of the prices. I thought, $30 for this bodice design, $20 for the matching panel and probably another $20 for whatever I decided to put on the sleeve. Total: $70.00. When I bought just the drawing for a design from a well-known ID designer a while back, I paid $50 for just the rights to use the design and then knew I would have to have it digitized. Lucky me was in the position of being your official tester already, so I was testing it for you anyway, but if I had to send that off to 24-hour digitizing.com, or some other digitizing company, can you imagine what I would have paid to have JUST the front panel done?? I figure $75-100 and that doesn’t count the front bodice or shawl clip.
The industry standard for stitching out a design is $1 per 1000 stitches. Folks who know that using metallic thread can be tricky charge $1.50 per 1000 stitches when using metallic threads. This includes the cost of the hoop stabilizers and machine use. Some people charge a set-up fee which can encompass the digitizing or just doing the test stitch outs before the actual run. I do not charge a set-up fee…if there is a digitizing fee I say so up front and that is usually only when it is an exclusive custom design.
Digitizing fees are more which makes sense because bad digitizing gives you a bad product! I have seen fees as low as $2 per 1000 stitches but those also seem to ask for perfect vector art work which leads me to believe they try to use auto-digitize as much as possible…or they have slave labor! My fees run $3-4.50 depending on the artwork (hand-drawn takes more time to deal with). $4 is about standard while I have seen some places that charge as much as $7.50 per 1000 stitches.
Someone just wrote this past week to get an estimate, and because of my friend, I was able to point out that while the stitch-out of an entire stitch-dense design from my site might run $350 to $450, if I had to digitize the entire design for her, it would cost at least twice that and therein lies the expense for solo dresses! It takes TIME to create, digitize, manipulate, re-size, test, revise, test again, revise again, and then finally stitch out the design onto the dress pieces. Believe me, if I could get Dr. Suess to make me a perfect embroidery contraption into which I could feed all of the elements and then sit back as it whirred and chugged and then belched out a finished product with the current necessary bling on its belly button, I would!
I do realize that this is a scary time. It is for all of us. I just wish the Sneetches would ask for info before labeling ID dressmakers as thieves. I can guarantee that it is a rare non-BN dressmaker who makes even sufficient money doing this. I certainly hope they exist.
Taoknitter Arts 