What is Tambour?

Tambour, also known as luneville, is a beading and embellishment technique which uses a hook/needle hybrid (rather like a very tiny, pointy crochet hook) on fabric stretched in a frame. Tambour differs from hand sewing beads individually, as the beads are pre-strung on the thread, and the beader only sees the reverse side of their fabric while working. This may sound counter-intuitive, but tambour is actually a much quicker way of embellishing fabric than hand sewing with a needle and thread, and it is the way many couture houses embellish their garments. The tambour technique can also be used without beads to create embroidered embellishments, from the restrained to the riotous. Some of the big names in tambour work are Lesage, based in France, and Hand & Lock, based in the UK. Both companies employ many skilled embroiderers who design and render the embellishments for a host of couture’s biggest labels.

 

Hooked on Tambour

I have been obsessed by the idea of learning this technique ever since I heard about it, and when the opportunity arose to collaborate on a 1930s wedding dress I all but jumped up and down like an excited school-child shouting ‘memememememe!’ The plan for the dress is to have heavily embellished chiffon sleeves, which are a perfect vehicle for tambour beading.

I ordered myself a set of Lacis tambour hooks and wooden handle attachment, which cost $15 through Amazon including postage to South Africa and arrived in record time. This set comes with hooks in three different sizes so that you can work with different gauges of thread. All of the work I did for this article was done using the smallest hook in my set.

 

I have spent hours trawling through blogs and YouTube channels looking for tambour tutorials, as the stitch can be quite hard to understand from written materials. The Lacis set comes with a little leaflet describing the basic stitch, but there is a lot of other information you need in order to start work. How to cast on and off, how to cleanly turn a corner, how to prep your fabric and transfer designs onto the fabric, etc. etc.

In the end I stumbled onto mastered.com and their online surface embellishment course which includes a module on tambour beading and embroidery. Mastered has a two-day free trial period, so I signed up and settled in to work my way through all the articles and videos on tambour. The mastered course is very well set out, with loads of clear videos explaining all of the basics. If you sign up and pay the fee, you get feedback on your work and individual Skype sessions with the tutors, but I just watched through the materials and muddled through on my own.

 

Trial… and Error

I bought this embroidery frame to work with. It was a rather odd piece for my local fabric shop to be stocking, but I found this website which sells embroidery frames on stands. You want a frame on a stand because you need both hands free for tambour.

 

The mastered tutorials recommend doing your first practice on silk organza, but I didn’t have any available and decided to try working with some cheap synthetic glass organza that I had in my stash. I’m sure the silk organza would have been easier to work with, but for this first test I was making a mess anyway, so I don’t think having silk is critical. I taped my organza to the dowels at either end of the frame and wound the excess fabric tightly onto the dowels, fixing them in place when the fabric was as taught as I could get it. I chose a contrasting colour cotton (just and ordinary polyester sew-all thread) and did a few test-runs of the basic tambour stitch. Those of you who are familiar with crochet or embroidery will likely recognize the stitch – it looks exactly like a hand embroidered ‘daisy chain’ or the first row of casting in crochet.

You cast on by doing four small stitches on top of each other and pulling the tail end of the thread through the fabric to the top, leaving the loose thread and the spool it is attached to underneath the frame. Remember that the top of your frame is actually the BACK of your piece, and the thread/beading and beads need to be applied to the bottom, with will be the FRONT of your work.

 

When you attach your chosen hook into your wooden handle, you must be careful to line the open side of the hook up with the little screw that holds the hook in place. This is important, because you will need to know where the open side of the hook is in order to pull the needle through the fabric without catching and pulling the fibres.

 

So now you poke the tambour hook through the fabric a few millimetres away from your knot, with the open side of the hook facing towards you. Wrap the hanging thread once around the hook, turn the hook 180 degrees (so that the open side of the hook is facing away from you) and pull the hook back up through the fabric, pulling the hook a little towards you as you go. This little bit of pressure holds the open end of the hook away from the fibres of the fabric so that the hook doesn’t get stuck. Your first stitch is finished! Now repeat, working towards yourself, for ten to twenty stitches, then you make four tiny stitches on top of each other, pulling the thread through to the top of your fabric, and snip it off. When you are working aim to keep the tambour hook perpendicular to the surface of your fabric.

I still have to find out what to do with the loose ends of thread. I tried snipping mine off as Mastered said they should ‘lock’, but I must have gotten something wrong because I had to hastily apply some fray-stop to prevent my stitches unravelling.

All this is impossible to document by myself (I’d need another four hands at least!) and is demonstrated very well in the mastered course videos – I recommend watching them as it is rather difficult to describe this process and you will get a clearer understanding from watching the videos.

 

I did several rows of this basic stitch to practice. Each row I tried to keep straight, and to keep the stitches evenly sized, and every row I made my stitches smaller.

 

Next I decided it was time to try some beads. You thread the beads onto the thread without cutting it off the spool. You never cut your thread to a length before you start beading, and you should be sure to thread enough beads to finish the line you are about to work on. With certain types of beads, like bugle beads, you may need to measure carefully and work out how many beads you can fit into your design – you don’t want to have big gaps at the end of your rows because the bugles didn’t add up to the length of the line!
Now, when you are working with beads you start off just the same way you did before, but at the beginning of every stitch you push one bead up the thread and hold it in place while you hook the thread and pull it through the fabric. Each stitch now holds a single bead in place.

For practice, I drew some curved and some angular lines onto my fabric, and tried to follow them exactly. Note – when you turn a sharp corner you do an extra tiny stitch without a bead on it before continuing in the new direction!

 

Coming up with a design was lots of fun. I am working towards a specific project (those lovely beaded sleeves) so I kept my practice design in line with that goal.

 

I will be able to show the sample to my bride along with my sketches. Here are a few pics of my design, from a rough sketch to the neat final version. For the final project I will draw half of one of these repeating sections really perfectly and scan it so that I can generate the mirrored repetition even more accurately.

 

Once I had my design worked out I was ready to prep more fabric to practice on. The sleeves I am working towards will be made from silk chiffon, so I found a remnant of light-weight silk in my cupboard in order to practice on as similar material as possible.

 

One of the things that I didn’t manage to find in the mastered tutorials is how to properly stretch fabric on a bigger frame like the one I have. The tutorials use small embroidery hoops, but I am wanting to embellish a much larger piece of cloth so I needed to find a way… I had seen a few pictures of big tambour frames, and watched a few behind-the-scenes videos of couture ateliers that showed tambour in process, so I put those fragments together as follows:

 

I sewed wide cotton tape to the short edges of my silk, and narrower tape to the long edges. I then secured the short edges to the dowels of my frame with thumb-tacks (I had to tap some of them in with a hammer) and rolled the fabric taught like I did with my first piece of organza.

 

However, the fabric needs to be held tight in a cross-wise as well as an up-and-down direction, so I threaded up a double strand of cotton and stitched through the narrow tape and around the side of the frame. This was actually pretty quick to do, and held the fabric beautifully smooth. I had some childish fun dropping my thimble on the silk to watch it bounce ;)

 

The next thing to do was to transfer my design onto the fabric, using the ‘prick and pounce’ method. For some reason I was deeply sceptical about this technique working and I procrastinated for two days, putting off what I thought would be a painful experience. But it actually worked like a dream and was surprisingly quick. What luck!

First I traced my design onto tracing paper (you might even be able to run tracing paper through your printer, which gives you even more options), then use a pin to prick holes along the lines of my design. I glued a pin to the handle of an old paintbrush using a two part epoxy glue and placed my tracing paper on an old camping mattress whilst pricking. I tried working on my ironing board at first, but I found that it wasn’t firm enough and made it difficult to be accurate with my pin-pricks. You could use a yoga mat, or look out for the sheets of thin craft foam that are available in scrapbook supply stores.

 

Once I had pricked all along the lines of my design I moved onto the ‘pounce’, which is either talcum powder or charcoal, or a mixture of both, and is applied with a rolled up piece of felt. I used talcum powder. I cut a 7cm x 20cm strip of felt, rolled it into a tight sausage and secured it with a bit of masking tape.

 

I laid my fabric on a flat surface (with the BACK of the fabric facing up) and placed my tracing paper on it with the rough side (from all the pin-pricks) facing up. I weighted it down so it didn’t move around while I was working. I shook a little pounce into a dish and dipped my felt roll in it, then rubbed the pounce gently over the pin-prick holes with small circular motions.

 

Once I had gone over all my pin-pricks, I carefully removed my weights and tracing paper and marvelled at my design, prettily laid out in a series of little white dots. These dots of powder are obviously going to get wiped away pretty easily, so I used a gold ball-point pen (you could also use a silver pen, depending on the colour of your base fabric) to draw carefully over the dots of pounce.

 

I popped the frame back onto my stand, and beaded along my lines. Here are some pics of the beading process:

 

And here is my finished sample, still stretched on the frame. If you look carefully you can see I have made a few runs in the fabric where I didn’t pull my hook through cleanly, even though I did find it much easier to work on the more firmly stretched silk.

 

But about that ‘firmly stretched’ part… look what happened when I took my sample off my frame:

 

So frustrating! All my nice neat lines of bugle beads have gone skew! Even some of the seed beads are looking a little crowded. I think that I might be able to avoid this in future by allowing a little more space between each bead, to compensate for the fabric shrinking a little when it is removed from the frame.

 

Despite my little tension issues I’m still wildly enthusiastic about this technique – I think the potential corsetry applications are so exciting! It is also rather fun. The speed at which those lines of beading grow is so satisfying, especially if you have experience of beading with a needle and thread. I’m looking forward to working on my 1930s dress commission – after a bit more practice!

I hope some of you decide to give tambour a go. You could bead your own lace, or create beaded appliqués to apply to your corsets. And I’m sure there are a whole host of other applications just waiting to be explored…

 

 

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