I’ve finished all the embroidery on the Gingerbread Church by Thea Dueck of Victoria Sampler. Now I’m at the point where I need to mount each piece onto thick mount board ready for assembly – it’s a time-consuming part, but necessary.
When I decided to make this building, I thought that there wasn’t much stitching to do on it (compared to the Gingerbread Stitching House, for instance). But looking at all these pieces spread out, I can see now that there’s actually quite a lot of stitching on it!
To make sure that the pieces of mount board are exactly the right size for each piece of fabric, I scanned in the stitched pieces, then printed them out at 100%, and cut out a template, just inside the back-stitched outlines. I then cut the mount board from these. For the triangular roof pieces, and the pointed wall pieces, I folded the paper in half and cut the paper doubled over to get exactly even shapes. The back-stitching has to sit right on the edge of each piece of card, or the pieces won’t fit together properly.
For the long sides, I laced the fabric to the mount board from top to bottom only, then mitred the corners (not as per the instructions, though – they say to use glue, but that’s a bit scary!).
For the large pieces, such as the base piece shown here, I laced in both directions.
For the pointed pieces, I laced as far as possible up the straight sides, then kind of made it up as I went along! You need to be careful that you don’t push the stitching down to the wide end as you lace the pointed part, as it tends to ‘squeeze’ the fabric off the mount board as you tighten the lacing.
Here are all the pieces mounted and ready to lace together. They’re looking good, aren’t they?
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Janet Granger's Blog 
They look extremely good, and I am always interested in your assembling of pieces. I have never done lacing, but will need to soon. How thick is your card in mm? Do you get it from a craft shop? Do you cut it with a craft knife or a cutting machine? When you lace, do you ever start lacing from the middle to each side, or do you always lace from one side to the other without any problems?
I use 2mm mount board (the usual thickness for mount board, for when you’re framing pictures). I used to get mine from the shop Chapter One in Leek, but the shop is closing down this week! Any art shop should have it. It comes in A3 and A2 sizes. You cut it with a craft knife (such as X- Acto), against a metal ruler. You need to start any lacing at a corner, so that the pulling together is even. It’s easier to do than to write about 🙂
Many thanks.
Just lovely!
They look really good. So many pieces 😮
They are simply gorgeous! You must love just to look at them – I know I would! Am so looking forward to seeing it all put together.
They look great!