Chinese Costume

This is a piccie from a wonderful book I picked up at a 2nd hand bookshop in Ballater, whilst on my Scottish adventures.  I have not had time to read it yet but I will and hopefully I can give you some insights into the world of 'nyonya kebaya' when I have.  Basically it is the Chinese blouse? I suppose you would call it worn in Malaysia and all of them are beautifully embroidered. Usually they are sewn in a hoop exactly like the piccie shown.  The reason I wanted the book was for inspiration for my own machine embroidery and because it was so full of gorgeous illustrations of machine embroidery but I stress again that these are done in a hoop on old machines so they are very special. 

This is a close up of one of the designs so you can see what I am describing above.

Sorry that the camera has created a small flash point on the leaf on the right, I will take more care next time.

If you click on the piccie you will see in close up what I mean by done in the hoop, no way do these designs look as if they were produced  on a commercial embroidery machine. I don't think my machine embroidery is good enough to compete with this quality but I want to learn new techniques and gain ideas so this book maybe good for me. However, I do not want to copy anything as I will not plagiarise any other work at all, I merely wish to admire and learn.

I also wanted to say that I am temporarily removing a few items from the layout of the blog whilst I work on some improvements, I especially want to sort out the labels which are annoying me as I had not organised them well enough at the beginning of my blogging experience. So please use the blog archive if you want to look anything up until I sort things out. Thanks for your comments by the way, I read them all and am always astonished to find such a lovely group of friendly ladies and of course I even receive comments from men on my other blog; keswick rambles.