Finally getting the border settled!

Aethelflaed’s border has been quite a trial, what with one thing and another. I became distracted from her by an assortment of non-embroidery things, which of course didn’t help, so having had that wonderful orgy of painting on printouts that resulted in a whole stack of variations, I found myself once more facing an undesired hiatus.

Still, I got back to it eventually. En avant!

I’m very aware that the stitched version will project Personality in a way that paintings don’t (not even my paintings, which tend to be on the striking side). It’s one of the things that I mention in “Dreams of Amarna” because it was then that I became aware of it. So I felt that when I was developing the Aethelflaed design I was going to have to take that into account, and maybe give the elements of the design a bit of air around them, so as not to look too cluttered.

In the end, I did a bit of jiggery-pokery, and didn’t exactly translate any of the designs I originally came up with.

I drafted the design on a piece of tracing paper that I’d laid over the embroidery to get the dimensions of the actual border, and then put a bit of colour on the underside, rubbed out all the pencil lines on the top and reinstated them in pen so I could find them when I traced them onto tissue paper to get the lines in the right place on the actual piece.

And yes, it’s an almighty fuss and bother, going round and round and over the same ground over and over again. But it helps me to think through my plans, and gives me opportunities, sometimes, to come up with something entirely new and better.