In keeping with my new style of posting, I will give you a quick synopsis of the state of various embroidery projects at the moment. The glove project is not moving along very quickly. I started doing one of the flowers, but I am not totally thrilled with the way it is coming out so far, so I am thinking about it for a while before I move on.

Another embroidery project I have been working on for a while, but have not yet mentioned is an Elizabethan forehead cloth. Following my volunteer work on the Plimouth Plantation embroidered jacket project, I decided I needed to make something of my own with that style of embroidery. Thanks to a high resolution photo from the Victoria and Albert Museum, I have a nice set of close up photos of a man's sleeping cap. I designed a forehead cloth using a variety of the flowers from the cap. I am using the gilt sylke twist thread that Plimouth Plantation had commisioned from a source in England. After they were sure they had enough thread to finish their jacket, they put the extra up for sale. I now believe they even have colors for sale that were not used in the jacket. From which I assume the source in England has found production of a kind of thread that has not been available for decades to be lucrative. I love that kind of story. Anyway it has given me the opportunity to use materials which are closer to the original than has been previously available. The pattern is still pretty empty, but getting there slowly.

The picture to the right is a close up of the center flower. there are also 4 white strawberry flowers which are very hard to see in the large picture.

I have also been playing with the size of the thread in a lace pattern I have been working with. when I finished the table runner a couple of months ago, one of the things I was not very happy with was the size of the threads I had used in the bobbinlace inserts. I want to make a smock with lace inserts similar to one pictured in Janet Arnold's latest book. The smock contained multiple different bobbinlace patterns, one of which is quite similar in feel to the pattern I used in the table runner. I wanted to use the same pattern, but use a different size thread. The thread in the original was 60/2 linen. I made 2 samples with 80/2 and 90/2. The lace on the left has the smaller sized thread, and I find it to be a little too fine for the piece. It is not really that easy to see in the picture, but the plaits just feel too thin to me. For the 50 challenge these are lace pieces #20 & #21.