It’s a white powder made from cuttlefish bone. Light pounce is great for transferring patterns on dark fabric. … and the smaller circle on the other end for light pounce. I use the larger circle of felt for dark pounce… The pouncing tool I’m using is a wooden piece with thick carpet-like felt circles attached to each end. You can take a piece of felt and roll it up tight, secure it with a rubber band, and use that just as easily. There are tools for this, like the one pictured above, but you don’t really need a special tool. In addition to the powder, you’ll need something to pounce the powder onto the pattern with. (I’m going to try that one of these days!) But dark charcoal pounce is the traditional powder of choice for pouncing a design, and your best bet, if you’re looking for it, is to get it from Tanja Berlin, or get brave and make your own. You can also find pounce substitutes out there – especially in white, which I’ve seen at quilting stores.
Tanja Berlin sells charcoal pounce, which she makes herself. It used to be sold (for a fairly pretty penny, for this small amount!), but it’s hard to find these days. Pounce (dark pounce, like the stuff above) is simply powdered charcoal. Once you’ve pricked a pattern a few times, it becomes really easy to eyeball the spacing. You can always prick the ends of lines and the intersections first, then go back and pierce along the line between those points, spacing your holes to fit between the terminal points. Anywhere a line terminates or intersects with another line, make sure you have a hole. When I prick the pattern that I’m using, I always make sure that I end up with a hole at the beginning and end of every line and on every pointed part of the pattern. Using a very small needle (like a #10) makes this easy, and keeping the dots close together and small ensures that you can transfer even the most intricate details of your design. Prick the pattern, following all the lines and spacing your holes about 1/16″ apart.
If you don’t have these tools lying about, never fear! A #10 embroidery needle works just as well, and you can hold it in your fingers to prick the pattern, or you can push the eye end of the needle into a cork, which will give you something more substantial to hold onto. I printed my pattern straight from my computer onto the vellum.įor the pricking part of the pattern, I used the wooden shaft that holds a tambour needle, but instead of a tambour needle, I’ve got a tiny eyeless needle (a tattoo needle, to be precise) mounted at the tip.
A heavier tracing paper is easier to work with and will result in a pattern that lasts, whereas a lighter tissue-type paper won’t last as long. It’s best to have the pattern traced or printed on vellum or a heavier tracing paper, so that the paper doesn’t tear when you prick the smaller detailed parts of the pattern. Once the pattern is made, it’s really just a matter of a quick pouncing and tracing, and it’s done – it’s really not as time-consuming a process as it seems. On such a small project, I would normally trace the design, but using this method will give me a permanent pounce pattern that I can re-use as often as I need to. Now, this is a wee little embroidery project – the design is about 3″ high. And so, we don’t.īut this seldom-used method of transferring an embroidery design has been around for a long time, and it’s still used, for good reason: it’s reliable. If not that, it may simply seem too labor-intensive or too messy to bother with. Perhaps it’s because we have so many other design transfer methods available – from iron-ons to water-soluble transfer materials to “disappearing” pens – that we tend to think prick-and-pounce transferring is a bit passé. Nowadays, the prick-and-pounce method of embroidery design transfer gets very little attention in the everyday embroidery world. “Prick and Pounce” is a method of transferring an embroidery design by using a pattern that is pricked with tiny holes, placed on the fabric, and then pounced all over with a powder that filters into the tiny holes, leaving tiny dots on the fabric.
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