gold thread embroidery sampler

I have been taking an online class on gold thread embroidery for the last couple years. Tonight I have finished the sampler that was the main part of the class. I will admit the class ended a few months ago, but I am pretty happy with getting it done this quickly.

There are about 26 different gold thread patterns in the sampler. The colored parts are mostly done in queen stitch.

I also finished another piece of lace for the Elizabethan smock. I have been on a kick for finishing up projects the last couple of weeks. Sometimes I get slightly overwhelmed by the sheer number of unfinished projects I have kicking around. There are so many other projects that I want to start, but I feel that I need to finish some once in a while. I am likely to start a project on the spur of the moment. I also am not afraid to start projects that I expect to take years to finish. So many people these days want something they can finish in one weekend. While that kind of project can be satisfying in a way, I really get a charge out of finishing something that has taken me months or years to complete.

Anyway to get back to the current state. The latest piece of lace is from Onder le Loep. I especially liked it because the pattern is very reminiscent of the kind used in the original smock.

So now I have to decide how close to finished I am. I could either do 3 more pieces like this one and then call the lace done, and start assembly, or I could do those 3 pieces and 3 more complex. The real question is how close to the original do I want to get. The collar of the 16th C smock is much more ornate than the lace I have made for it. My orginal plan was to make another piece and attach it to the points I alreay made. But... I will admit to getting a little tired of this project. I am getting to the point where I really want to be done with it. Adding those 3 more complex pieces with probably add another year to the project. I am going to make a small trial piece to see how difficult the new pieces would be. The have tallies in them. Up to this point I have been avoiding tallies. I have heard that they are the real test of a lace maker, and that makes me apprehensive. I will try the sample and then make a decision. This is piece number 34 for the A&S challenge.

Investiture Gown

I finished the investiture gown in Late May. I patterned the dress on a couple of gown shown in the book "The Picorial Arts of the West" by C.R Dodwell. There are a few pictures which show an over gown which has embroidery around the bottom hem which is protected by the undergown extending to the ground.

The embroidery around the collar, cuffs and bottom edge is mainly reverse chain stitch. the small diamonds are bayeoux stitch surrounded by outline stitch. The celtic dog on the front of the bottom is completely filled with chain stitch. The thread was wool and the dress is linen. It took a long time but I am very happy with the results.

Anglo dress embroidery

I have finished the embroidery for the hem of the 12th C dress that I am planning of wearing at my investiture. It is official now. I was called up in front of the current king to be told that I had won the election and will be invested as teh Baroness of Smoking rocks. therefore I have a few projects that need to be finished up before June. The event we hold then, Vinland Raids, will be our investiture. One of the things I want to finish is a 12th C gown in the style of one shown in the Prufening Miscellany or the stained glass Crucifixion window at Poitiers Cathedral. In both of these cases the outer gown is shorter than the under gown. This allows embroidery on the hem edge of the outer gown to be protected from the ground. In the picture the 2 pieces of embroidery are hanging donw the back of a door. The front piece has the celtic dog in the middle. The pictures show the neck opening to be surrounded by embroidery also. That is the next step.

The other main thing I need to get finished before June is the coronet. I have not done anything on it for quite a while.

I also have finished another piece of lace for the elizabethan smock. This is one of the pieces that line the edges of the cuff openings. There will be 4 of them all together. They are quite easy to make compared to some of the others I am making for this smock. With this one I have finished 5 of the 20 needed to complete the smock. That seems like it should be 1/4 of the way done, but I have been finishing the easier ones first. There are still some really long pieces for the top of the sleeves.

Embroidered Celtic Dog Panel

I Have been working fairly consistantly on the Celtic dog panel. I am hoping to have a gown finished by June with hand embroidered trim around the bottom edge, sleeve ends and collar. This was probably the hardest piece. The front bottom edge of the gown. This is going to be a 12th C gown done in a style popular in Western Europe from the 9th C to at least the 12th C. Examples of this style of gowns are shown in pictures from Germany and France. The outer gown is slightly shorter than the under gown. Therefore the edge of the out gown is protected from the dirt on the ground. This enabled the wearers to have a nicely embroidered pattern around the bottom edge without worry about it being ruined by coming in contact with the ground. The dog is a bit dark for the background. I attempted to alleviate some of that unbalanced look by adding the diamonds to add a little weight to the rest of the pattern. The main patterns I see in the 12th C pictures are geometric therefore I made the background part entirely geometric. The back panel of the bottom edge will have the geometric pattern without the dog as a central focus. Often the person shown in the pictures are wearing a mantle over their gown so it is hard to see the neck opening. On the few that you can see the pattern on the bottom edge and neck opening are not the same. In keeping with the style I will make the neck opening a different pattern. I have not yet designed that pattern. It seems to be going fairly quickly though and I have a fairly good chance to have this gown done by June.

There are a couple of things which I have not recorded since I have not written in a while. First the Elizabethan smock I am making is based on one pictured in Janet Arnold's Pattern's of Fashion 4. There are 2 smocks, one with bobbinlace inserts and one with reticella inserts. I liked the pattern of the second smock, but prefer to make bobbinlace. Therefore, I combined the 2 and am making a smock with bobbinlace. To make a representation of the piece in the book I will have to make 19 separated pieces of lace. So far I have finished 2 and am partway through a third. The 2 finished ones are the same pattern, and I posted a picture of one on Sept 2. The latest piece is the first time I have tried lace with points. I still have 2 inches left to finish, then I will clip the threads. I am pleased with the way this piece is coming out.

From the other extreme end of the time frame of the SCA, I just finished a embroidered celtic dog. I have been working on this piece for years. It is not that it is difficult. It is more that I just found that this style is not my favorite, and I kept putting it down for years. This is going to be incorporated into an emboidered band on the bottom edge of a tunic gown. I will surround it with a geometric pattern which will work up quicker than this part did.

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.

Quilted wine bag

Not only do I want this blog to be a journal of my progress in the A&S 50 challenge, but I also want to keep track here of the other projects I am involved in. Recently I was volunteered to be part of a project to give other kingdoms in the SCA gifts from The East Kingdom. We made wine bags with the heraldry of the recipient kingdom on them.
I chose to do my design in padded work, or in this case quilting. I saw a series of pictures on line from the Victoria and Albert museum showing a quilted Sicilian bedspread from around 1400.

The pattern on that was The story of Tristan. The quilting was done on a plain colored background with colored thread outlining the figures. The background is then filled in with plain white thread random stitching. The stitching is not really all that random. It mainly appears to be in lines. http://www.flickr.com/photos/medievalandrenaissance/
This was my first attempt to quilt something like this, and I was fairly happy with the way it came out.
I am also working towards getting a competency ranking in all the categories in the Athena's Thimble, the embroidery guild for the East Kingdom. They have 12 categories for embroidery. At the time I took on the Wine bag project, I was missing a padded work piece. Therefore, I chose this style to both finish the project in an unusual manner and finish a piece for the Thimble. I would eventually like to make period competency in all the categories, but for now I just have to finish one piece in them all. http://www.athenasthimble.com/
At this point I only have to finish a pleated work, and a lacis piece. I have been having so much fun doing all the different kinds of embroidery. I am really excited by finding Athena's Thimble, and getting to participate. The handkerchief I posted a couple days ago qualified for drawn-work, and needle lace. I may post some pictures of some of the earlier projects which qualified for other categories assuming I still have the items.

Blackwork Hood

This is a project I have been working on for quite a while. It has taken my a couple years to finish the blackwork. The pattern around the front edge is my version of one of the patterns from a 16th century Italian sampler. It is done with backstitching. I used a smaller motif to cover the back because I wanted to do it in double running stitch, and I did not trust myself to do too complicated a pattern at first.

A close up of the front edge shows both the more complex pattern and the bobbin lace which I edged it with. Of course the only references I have for the blackwork hood say it was a little used fashion which was mainly worn by little old ladies, and indeed I have never seen a picture with someone wearing one. There are 2 examples of this kind of hood in the Victoria and Albert museum, which is where I got the idea.

So what would I do differently if I were to do this again? I would definately do the blackwork with silk thread, and the bobbin lace with linen. At that time I had only used cheap cotton thread for the bobbin lace because I was just starting, and I didn't want to waste the expensive linen. I have since done some linen bobbinlace, and I am amazed at how much better it handles. The linen has a crisp nature that makes the lace stand out better.

Thus ends the first installment of A&S projects.