Mounting miniature embroidery

Another post in the Rose Broach saga...

The story so far.  Several weeks ago I bought a pretty little broach from a market of unknown age.  However it had unfortunate ugly staining on the side, probably old glue going icky.  When cleaning proved unsuccessful I pulled it apart to see if more drastic action would improve things.  With the embroidery removed from it's mounting I could also see what the original pattern colours looked like so made two cross stitch chart variants which you can find here. In this episode, I take the original embroidery and give it a new life...

Here's what I had at the start of today's post- the embroidery that I had cut from the mount and lightly trimmed the worst of the discolouration off. But I could not remount it in the original broach due to the size of the work now being much smaller- there needs to be enough fabric in the mount above to fit around the front of the mount (the domed round metal piece) with edges long enough to be able to tuck underneath and be held by the backing plate.

Solution?  I popped out to my local sewing supply shop and I bought some self covering fabric buttons.  These come in a range of sizes but for this work I used the 28 mm diameter button.  You can see that the materials for these have not exactly changed a lot.  Aside from size the domed pieces look near identical.  Only the backs are different materials.  The red and the yellow things are to help you mount your fabric in place- you'll see more on this later.

Because I wanted to have the embroidery centred on the button I first stitched a running stitch around the edge.  This meant that I could check the pattern was where I wanted it to be as you can see below.

Then it was into the handy red thing designed to hold everything in place (after making this button all I can say is DON'T LOOSE THIS or the rest of your button blanks (they come in a pack of 5) will be next to useless.  The red thing is made of a soft rubber that holds the material snuggly.

Those gathering stitches were handy though as they helped pull the material in from the edge.  I would suggest you do the same even if you have more edge material than I do.

Next step is adding the back- the yellow thing is the handy back holder that lets you press evenly to push the plastic back into the metal front, hopefully catching all the edges of the fabric at the same time.

Back view- sorry about the thread.  I was about to go to the next step before I remembered I hadn't taken photos yet!

Now this could be the finish point if you wish- all I did above was cut the shank of the button off with a craft knife so there would be room to glue a broach pin on.  This step is best done before you start but since I didn't think of it I just improvised and tried not to cut the material.  But the pin looks a little plain...

Front view

My solution?  I stitched seed beads around the edge of the button to frame it.  The great advantage of this method is that you don't have to try and find something the right shape and you can use whatever colours you like!  I choose a silver and black alternative frame as it reminded me of the original old silver backing, but this could look lovely if you picked colours from the roses or leaves or perhaps used pearl coloured beads.  The choice is yours.

Overall verdict?  Well it isn't perfect.  The design goes over the edges a bit so it doesn't have the white border to edge it to really make it pop the way the original had.  However, now you can't see yuck staining either.  The seed beads will also hopefully protect the edges of the pin from wear.  Since the edges are where the fabric will first rip and wear away due to rubbing it will give the embroidery a much longer life (the original pin had places where the fabric beginning to fray in addition to the staining).  And the backing piece will be used as soon as I can decide on what to stitch for it (hmm, same pattern or something else?)   Let's call it a good B+ which can become an A when I utilise the original broach backing.

What do you think?  Find these instructions useful?  Drop me a comment or an email- I would be THRILLED to know others are reading this blog and using the material!