Category: General Embroidery
Grandmama’s Embroidery – One
Grandmama embroidered this lovely lady on a nightdress case for my mother during the War, when they were evacuated to Westmorland. The colours have faded rather now, but it is still beautiful, and the long and short stitch puts me firmly in my place!
- The Front of “The Lady in the Garden”
The reason it is all so neat is that Grandmama had an embroidery teacher at the time, called Miss Hunter (I mentioned her in an early post). I’m sure Miss Hunter must have been trained at the Royal School of Needlework, because her standards were ferociously high. Grandmama once told me that one of the other ladies in the class at the time was working a Willow Pattern design in single strands of stranded cotton.
The back shows how the colours once appeared, and also how neatly Grandmama worked it all. With the exception of the centres of the hollyhocks, you really can’t be sure you aren’t looking at the front!
The Back of "The Lady In the Garden"
Miss Hunter’s influence still prevails. A few years ago I taught an engineering friend of mine to do counted cross stitch, and he rapidly picked up our habit of checking that the back was as neat as the front!
A closer look at Modern Goldwork – One
As it was such an interesting and useful two days, I thought I would write a bit more about my course with Tracy Franklin on Modern Goldwork. We worked samples of various techniques, each demonstrated by Tracy before we began. I don’t want to make the posts too long, so I will only put two techniques in each post.
Kid Leather Twists
The base for our Modern Goldwork sampler was a sturdy but loosely-woven cotton upholstery fabric. We began by pulling out evenly spaced threads to mark the fabric into squares. Then in each square we worked a different technique.
The first square had Kid leather strips edged with unstretched pearl purl and then twisted. The twists were then couched in place. It was surprisingly difficult to attach the pearl purl to the edge of the leather, but creates an interesting variation as by twisting the strips, a glimpse of the back of the leather is provided, matte in contrast to the shiny metallised surface that is intended to be seen.
This technique might provide me with the gold in some jewellery for the Amarna panels as a change from simply using gold embroidery thread.
Purl Rose
The second square shows a flower shape made of loops of purl which are threaded onto the needle like beads. There are three different colours of purl, using gradually longer lengths to make larger, slightly floppier petals. The small, closely packed loops in the centre show that this technique could be used to create a very solid, shiny, “curly” texture.
I find myself thinking maybe when I’ve got the Amarna panels done, I could work on a panel about the legend of the Golden Fleece. Just imagine a whole fleece shape covered in that dense, looped surface!
Look What I’ve Found!
First Stitches
A little while ago, Yvette at White Threads blog interviewed me for her blog. In the interview, we talked about how I started to embroider, and I described – and provided a picture of – a piece that I worked on with Grandmama when I was about eight or nine.
I went to visit my parents a few days ago and they fished this mat out of the archives. I made it at school, when I was about six – you can tell my family has a bit of a thing about making things, from the fact it was still in existence.
I remember almost nothing about making it, except that I got bored of running stitch very quickly, and I must have mentioned that to Grandmama; maybe she suggested the arrowhead stitches and the whipped running stitch. I am fairly sure that I was the only one in the class who did anything but running stitch in a square. Embroidery wasn’t fashionable at the time, so I suspect most of the other children’s parents and grandparents wouldn’t have taken much interest in what we were doing.
The back looks hair-raising – Miss Hunter would have had a fit! – but how many of us have our very first piece of stitching to bring us back to earth?
Anyone?
Floral Glove Needlecase – Month Three Finished!
Month Three Finished
So, making progress here. All the silkwork is outlined in Elizabethan Twist, carefully following the suggested paths so as to have the smallest possible number of ends to sink.
Then the calyxs of the two carnations are covered with Olive smooth purl, cut to size and treated like a bead. This was fairly tricky because it was easy for the end of the purl (which is a very fine wire, coiled up) to catch on the silk thread being used to sew it down. In fact for the second calyx, I waxed the thread, which made the whole experience less fraught! I notice I didn’t quite get all the lengths or maybe spacings right for the first calyx, but for now I shall leave it as it stands.
Then I couched the striped thread curlicues. Again it was tricky to place the black couching thread where it would disappear into the thread being couched, but I think a few tweaks with a needle will fix that!
Through A Glass Clearly
Finally, I thought I would show what a difference a magnifier makes. As I think I have said before, it is the change in size that terrifies. I began by stitching without a magnifier and was reasonably happy doing so. I just felt that it would be a useful additional tool, especially given some of the other projects I have in mind.
My eyes become accustomed to regarding the magnified view as normal, then when I stop for a cup of tea, I push the magnifier to one side to have a “proper” view. At which point there’s a small squawk and my husband asks what’s wrong. “It’s gone all tiny”, I say, “Don’t tell me I stitched that!”. After the said cup of tea, ordinary views reassert themselves and it doesn’t seem quite so astonishing.
Which is really just as well. We don’t embroider to scare ourselves, after all!
Starting Another Course
Tudor And Stuart Goldwork Kit
I decided to follow another Thistle Threads Online University course. This time it is the Tudor and Stuart Gold Master Class, and my first materials kit arrived today. There is more of that lovely Au Ver A Soie, and a lot of gold thread for practising with, as well as for working on the spot sampler.
The real attraction of this course to me is that Tricia has worked out how some of the ornate and now mysterious stitches of the period would have been worked. The stitches shown on the video look fascinating, and as well as providing instructions, she is providing animations to help her students learn how to work them. First, however, there is the silkwork to do, largely in Queen Stitch, Rice Stitch (a cross stitch variation), and Roman Stitch.
As with the Floral Glove Needlecase, there was a larger number of students enrolling than Tricia expected, and between us we appear to have wiped out the worldwide stocks of some colours in the silk thread. As with all specialist enterprises, the manufacturers tend to expect small orders, and it may take years for a dye lot to be used up. However, we can hope that more people will be introduced to these threads and will begin to use them more. Potentially this will lead to more shops stocking the more unusual materials, and make it easier for us to buy them.
As Shakespeare would have said, “A consummation devoutly to be wished!”
Floral Glove Needlecase Course – Starting the Goldwork
The Rose Outlined
The embroidery on the Floral Glove Needlecase is based around the tabbed cuffs of gloves which were often presented as gifts during the Elizabethan era. We’re only doing one side of one cuff, of course, but the additional historical material we get each month, with high-resolution pictures of some of the original gloves which remain in existence, give us a very fair idea of what Thistle Threads were aiming for!
There are several useful diagrams in the instructions showing where to start and end the gold thread, which is couched down with silk. Furthermore – brave lady indeed! – Tricia has even provided us with a view of the back of the embroidery. Miss Hunter would have looked at the back to check that it met her high standards – as students we are studying that photograph to try to garner more clues to how the work fits together. It gives a better idea of stitch lengths, for instance, because the eye isn’t dazzled by the goldwork and can study the couching.
It is very detailed, rather tiring work, so even with a good light (by the way – bright sunlight is not, in this context, a good light – it bounces off the gold thread and the magnifier and tires the eyes even more quickly) and a magnifier, I can’t do much at once. What you see here is two or three sessions’ work.
I’m pleased, though. There are several new techniques and materials still to try in this month’s session, and I think I am learning a great deal – not least, working at this scale turns out to be less hair-raising than I feared!
The Elephant Of Considerable Charm
The Elephant Footstool in canvaswork
I don’t confine myself entirely to surface embroidery. I’ll give most things a try, and needlepoint is fairly high on the list of things I enjoy.
This is the second footstool I made. The first one, which I made for Grandmama, was an adaptation of a design from the Reader’s Digest Complete Guide to Needlework, but I designed this footstool for my mother after we had Grandmama’s in the house for a while, and she decided that she really liked Putting Her Feet Up Properly.
An Elephant Of No Distinction But Infinite Charm
There are several elephant ornaments in my parents’ living room, but the inspiration in this case was a glazed terracotta elephant which we call the Elephant Of No Distinction But Infinite Charm (to distinguish him from the Elephant of Considerable Distinction, who joined the family much earlier, when I was still a child!). I thought his decorated saddle cloth and harness simply cried out to be rendered in canvaswork of some description, and thought it would be fun to try.
The Elephant In Canvaswork
I used two strands of Paternayan Persian wool for the whole piece. The background is worked in Leaf Stitch Filling in two shades of green. This is partly for a stylised jungle-like effect, and partly to echo the green damask fabric covering the furniture.
The reds, oranges, and browns pick up the curtain colours, and echo the Elephant Of No Distinction himself. The harness uses cashmere stitch variations, the saddle cloth is upright double cross stitch, and for some reason I can’t now recall I chose to use Byzantine stitch on the elephant’s ear.
The sides were worked with a Bargello rope pattern, but I had to fudge the final piece because I discovered the pattern wasn’t going to meet up – I hadn’t thought that far ahead when I planned it (if you can call it planning!). Almost everything I do has a slightly improvisatory element to it and in this case, I left enough space to put my mother’s name around the corner that wasn’t going to match. It almost looks deliberate!
I’m not displeased with him, but I would do something entirely different now, I think!
Extending the Persian Fantasy – More Cacti
Cactus Extension Design 1
By this time I had run out of the fabric I used for the screen, and I was beginning to realize that if I wanted to continue to embroider in this sort of style I would need to find another suitable fabric. I’d enjoyed the Persian Fantasy so much that I didn’t want to do that…
So I designed two clusters of cacti, to use in experiments. The designs were inspired by the cacti in the Persian Fantasy, but not actually like them, and I worked them on a plain 28count linen intended for counted cross stitch.
I used chain and feather stitches, ornamental blanket stitches, and some isolated stitches as well, all to create variety and and texture. The designs themselves are very minimal, so all the interest in them lies in the combinations of the threads and the stitches.
Cactus Extension Design 2
It wasn’t easy – I wanted to use some of the ornamental stitches I had used in the original piece, but the fabric/thread combinations were very frustrating to work with. The linen threads were too closely set and rigidly finished to respond forgivingly to some of the heavier threads, but they did at least provide me with more opportunity for experimentation. Even if my conclusion had to be that I had to find another sort of fabric for this sort of embroidery!
The rocks in the second design were worked using wool as that provides a different quality of matte effect to the effect of a matte cotton.
The Persian Fantasy – extending the idea
"Thou" completed around 2000, inspired by the Persian Fantasy
The Persian Fantasy Screen was such fun that I wanted to do some more embroidery in the same style. First of all, it was clear from the original colours that the Prince on Panel One was the same on Panel Four, so I had to create a companion for him, the “Thou” of the text:
A loaf of bread, a flask of wine,
And thou beside me
Singing in the wilderness
And wilderness were paradise enow
I had some help from my mother on this one.. We used the illustrations in her copy of the Rubaiyat to help us with the lady’s costume and to find a different sort of tree for her to sit under. The pictures were from ancient Persian silk paintings, so I hoped that our prince and his partner would recognise one another. I used the same technique for the tree – couched chenille, boucle and loop yarns, and simple shapes for the leaves, although in this case the leaves also used a variegated yarn. I also used a similar idea for the lady’s outfit as I had for the prince, choosing an openwork filling stitch (in this case, Cloud Filling Stitch) for the tunic, and something more solid for the headcovering.
Her Picnic
Again, the dishes for the picnic included lustreware, this time a bowl full of bread. This time the lustreware was worked in overdyed stranded cotton. There was also a flask using similar colours to the prince’s lustreware, but worked this time in variegated cottons. The little table (or rug – I never quite decided what it was!) that the picnic is placed on was edged with a complicated couched braid, using an even more complicated textural thread. I can’t for the life of me recall where I bought it, but I do recall that the only possible way to use it was by couching it!
The Lady's Head
A loose rayon, worked in a sort of halfway stitch between Bokhara couching and Romanian couching, created the lady’s glowing veil, and her headband was worked in braid stitch to give a suitable ornate and luxurious appearance.
I’m not sure that I would use these stitches or threads now. I remember the untwisted rayon was difficult to stitch, very flyaway and prone to catching on my hoop, my fingers, my nails (even though I keep them short) and anything else within range. It looks lovely now it’s done, of course. . .
Trying Stumpwork
Kiwi In Stumpwork
As I’ve already mentioned, almost every embroidery technique I have done has been learnt from a book, or just developed by guesswork based upon something I have read.
In this case, I had been reading about 17th Century stumpwork, and had just returned from a half-business trip, half-holiday in New Zealand. And I had some rather gorgeous overdyed silk threads and wanted to experiment with them!
The body is worked in layers of straight stitches, using several different colours of the overdyed silks. I worked a slip, slightly smaller than the body, on a separate piece of fabric, then applied that piece over some padding, and used more straight stitches to cover the join – very thoroughly!
The legs and the beak are both worked by stitching very closely over a trailing thread of soft cotton. The background fabric is a sturdy cotton damask upholstery fabric, so the close stitchery did no harm. The ground is worked using still more straight stitches, with scroll stitch, coral stitch and fern stitch to create the fragmentary undergrowth.
This was intended just as a piece of fun, but I was happy enough with the outcome to mount it in a flexihoop frame. I’ve bought a couple of books on Stumpwork since I stitched this, but I don’t know that I would have thought of doing the Kiwi this way if I had read the books first.