How to trace a neck design for a kurti to do embroidery?

 Hi all 

Hope all are doing well and hope all are staying safe.  

Today I am happy to share with you the method I used to trace the neck designs before doing embroidery for my kurtis.  This method is useful when the design is symmetrical on both sides. The advantage is that it reduces the tracing time into half.   The same method can be used for the sleeves also. 

First of all trace the design for the right hand side in a tracing paper.  For my kurti I usually take 2 and a half metres of fabric.  Front and back pieces measures 42"  x 26 ".  

Before start tracing iron the fabric without any creases.   You need two carbon papers along with the tracing paper.  For dark colour fabrics take white or yellow colour carbon paper.  For light colour fabric take blue or red carbon paper.  I am using cream colour fabric.  So I have taken red colour carbon paper.  

Let us see the steps to trace the design.

1)  Fold the front fabric into half.  The folded side should face you.  

2)  Now keep this fabric aside.  Place a carbon paper upside down i.e) right side facing down.

3) Now place the folded fabric on top of the carbon paper.with the folded side facing you.

4) Next place the other carbon paper with right side facing up.  I used to leave half an inch from the top.  In the picture the top part is in the left side.  

5)  Now place the tracing paper on top of the carbon paper.  The carbon papers and the tracing paper should be aligned properly to the folded edge of the fabric.  

6)  Now pin all the four layers together so that the tracing paper doesn't

 move while tracing. 

7)  Now trace the design.  After completing remove the pins and the tracing paper.  In the picture below I have rotated the fabric to show from the top.

 

8)  Now remove the tracing paper below the fabric and unfold the fabric and you can see the design got traced on the other side also.

This surface of the fabric is not smooth as it is semi raw silk.  If we do it in cotton or silk cotton we will get a clear trace.  But this is enough for me to do embroidery as  the trace is in red colour. 

On the folded line adjust the design by drawing with pencil.  

Hope all of you find this tutorial useful.  I will show the progress in doing the embroidery for this kurti in my coming posts.