Tag: Silk thread
Aethelflaed’s Border – much to consider
Well now. There’s quite a lot going on here!
When I worked on William, I did large gouaches of the design elements and then printed them small and played around with them to make them fit in.
I’ve already done some gouache explorations of the design elements – I wrote about it last November – so I tried something different this time. I photocopied the embroidery, as best as I could, got my paints out, and played with border designs directly on the photocopy.
The first two designs are almost directly inspired by the design I did for William, but swap out the broom for the Plantagenets to put in the bee skeps and beer barrels associated with the defense of Chester. The crosses are still at the cardinal points – two different crosses, both inspired by my visit to the Staffordshire Hoard display – and there are still roses twining around and behind the other motifs.
Then I decided it would be interesting to see whether I could create variations that would still be successful, still create the sense of a Book of Hours, but maybe broaden the space I get to operate in when I move on to Mother Julian and Prior Rahere.
So, this time, bee skep top centre, three barrels at bottom centre, and the crosses only at east and west. I think I got a bit carried away with the roses here – it’s looking a bit cluttered!
Then, back to the bee skeps and barrels in the corners, this time the crosses only at north and south, and roses in between.
Clutter aside, I think what I have here is actually a choice not about detail, but about the entire Medieval Movers and Shakers. Do I keep Aethelflaed’s border looking a little more like William’s, or do I use it to broaden the design choices I can make later? Do I need to do that? Or do the choices remain for Mother Julian and Prior Rahere, regardless of what I do here?
After all, of my four Medieval Movers and Shakers, Aethelflaed and William were war leaders, diplomats, peace weavers. Mother Julian and Prior Rahere represent the clerics and the religious aspect of medieval life. So the pairings are obvious as they stand. None of the four were contemporaries, and the worlds in which they operated were really very different as well.
Trellis Couching Complete
I am going to have to develop more careful and crafty ways to keep my trellis couching even. I’ve enhanced the contrast in the picture at left so you can see that there’s a section where I had to insert extra couching lines, which ended up radiating from the inner corner of the border.
It will barely show by the time the embellishment motifs have been added in, and it at least makes certain that the lower layer – the “colouring in” layer – is kept well under control.
All that being said, if you look at the bottom left corner, I where I started the trellis, it’s much more even, although still wonky in places!
Never mind, it’s a background for something else – a Something Else I have yet to design, alas! – and as such I am happy that it produces that engaging “quilted” texture and allows me to move on to the next stage. You will see below the completed trellis couching.
Now I have to turn the tangle of roses, bees, skeps, barrels, crosses and numismatic motifs whirling in my head into something that looks pleasing within the border. Wish me luck!
Aethelflaed’s Border Progresses
The border for the Medieval Movers And Shakers takes quite a lot of doing. The first layer is the broad “colouring in” – surface satin stitch, using the three colours of silk straight from the reels. I don’t enjoy this very much, because every time I sit down to it, I have to get re-attuned to balancing threads at either end, and it’s just difficult.
I do, however, like the effect.
It’s not stable enough to be left like that, though, and it’s not stable enough to be stitched over, as it stands. This is why the next stage is to do trellis couching over the top. If you look at the rightmost image in the gallery below, you will see the bit that remains unstitched of the diagonal stitches, and how much the couching settles everything down by comparison.
The diagonals are not as regular as I might have liked, but I’ve discovered that I can ease everything slightly one way or another with the couching, so the finished Trellis Couching looks more regular than just the diagonals. And of course, this is an intermediate stage, because I have yet to finish planning the roses, the beer barrels, and the bee skeps. And with William Marshall, I had an easy choice, framing the border with his heraldic colours.
All my questions to medievalists I’ve met concerning heraldry or symbology in Mercia and Wessex have met with apologetic looks. There probably was some, but they didn’t record it for us. So I will probably go for garnet and gold, because I would like to continue the structure I used for William Marshall, and have a suitable cross at the cardinal points. The borders framing the border can echo the crosses, and that will tied everything together.
Progress on the Lady of the Mercians
I realise that you’ve not heard about Aethelflaed for a while. In fact the period of silence is partly misleading and partly calendar related.
In terms of the calendar – my Serious Embroidery Frame sits beside a table in the bay window in the living room, and that is the table that the Christmas tree goes on. We don’t put the tree up early (I usually scoot in at the last moment on Christmas Eve, as was the family tradition when I was a child), but I do start clearing that space and thinking of other things.
In fact, however, before I put Aethelflaed away for that period, I had made considerable progress. Even with the pause for resupply, I had managed to finish the first layer of her border. It’s harder than it looks, because I couch the coloured silk at either end, straight off the reels, to avoid having too much wastage from starting up and ending off and misjudging lengths. I find every section I do requires me to rediscover my rhythm, and until I do, I feel clumsy and tied in knots. I think the result is worth it, however.
Comparing Aethelflaed thus far with William completed, you will see that I have to do the Trellis Couching (which goes alarmingly quickly once I get a run at it) and then finalise the design for, and then work, the embellishments.
Bee Skeps, Beer Barrels, and Roses, oh my!
Mus’ Renard, Mus’ Renard…
This getting started on the animal vignettes seems to be working, for the moment.
I found a lovely picture of a fox staring straight out of the picture, so I’ve gathered russets and browns for this one. He’s awkwardly sized – maybe too big, when I finally get to the assembly of the panel – and I kept changing from one to two strands of stranded cotton and not being happy with either.
The half stage shows – rather blurrily, unfortunately – that I’ve used blue for the white-in-shadow. It’s amazing how often white does, genuinely, look blue or purple, but in any case, it helps to “lift” the general effect. When you’re mixing colours in painting, you can get lovely blacks and greys which have shades of other colours in them, and aren’t as deadening as straight lamp black would be. In embroidery, as I’ve said before, flat black has a tendency to unbalance a design, and in truth a lot of the greys aren’t much better. You might recall I turned Akhenaten’s black wig blue...!
Well, the gauze really does vanish under light, doesn’t it!
Some of the stitches had to be woven into to shorten the length of the colour on display, and I’m not as happy with Mus’ Renard as I was with the Brockis. But he looks much better from the distance that he’ll be viewed from than he does in analytical close up, and I have to regard at least some of these as studies for the final piece, rather than necessarily parts of that finished piece.
We’ll just have to wait and see…
Working on the Brockis
You may or may not be able to see that there’s a drop-shadow effect in these photos – I learned from the mistake of the hawk, as I mentioned, and mounted the green gauze on a frame before I started. I rather like the result when I set it down for photography, and it gives you a much better sense of the view I got as I stitched.
Ordinarily, I would be very concerned about working on gauze – the hawk is virtually satin stitch to ensure there’s nothing grinning through the gaps – but I have a feeling that this is going to evolve as I work on it. Regular readers will know by now that if I’ve convinced myself that something is necessary for the effect I want to achieve, I grit my teeth and do it, even if I don’t think I’ll enjoy it – although by the alchemy of Achieving What I Aimed For, it’s amazing how often I do in fact enjoy it!
My brockis is going to be peering out at the main scene from behind a tree, so he’s going to be on the ground, in amongst the undergrowth, and probably backed by darkish fabric and stitch. That being the case, gaps in the stitching might in fact enhance the sense of depth in the whole assembly. I want him to have rather rough fur, so he’s not going to be satin stitch, is he?
So my brockis is made, again, purely freehand, referring to the photo for guidance, but simply in layers of stitching. I’ve used silk, cotton, and linen threads, and a tangle of Vandyke stitch, Cretan Stitch, feather stitch and alternating twisted chain stitch. The silk came from the same stash as the silk I used for the hawk, the linen is a Stef Francis yarn I bought for the Dreams of Amarna that never quite worked in any of the projects, and the cotton is ordinary stranded cotton, but only single strands.
I’m rather pleased with him.
Another observing animal for Placidus
Elizabeth Goudge’s book “The Herb of Grace”, which gave me the idea for Placidus, is set in a pilgrim inn near to some ancient woodland, and in her writing she regards the trees and animals of that woodland as very much part of the world the family inhabits. She wouldn’t, I’m sure, have considered herself an environmentalist, but only because she probably couldn’t imagine considering herself as other than part of the natural world. Certainly the fictional fresco maker she imagines would have done so.
My reboot over the period between Christmas and Epiphany has suggested that since I want to have a welter of animals observing the scene, maybe I should just start on them. Once I have enough to make a start, that might help me with the trees, the rocks, and the stream. Then Placidus with his horse and hounds, and the stag will have somewhere for their drama to take place.
It was the Herb of Grace that told me of the word “brockis” as an old name for a badger, and over on Patreon, the writer Anne Louise Avery has a character she calls “Grey Brock”, whose adventures are often illustrated with a photo of a badger paying very close attention. I’ve used that photo as my starting point, and sketched my brockis on some green gauze (on a frame, this time!) using a white gel pen.
And can we just pause there to celebrate the fact that I sketched this, freehand, on a difficult surface with an indelible pen, and ended up with a recognisable badger? Even last year, I don’t think I’d have managed it!
The animals are going to be quite experimental, I think. Certainly there won’t be a lot of long and short stitch. I want a lot of rough and ready texture and an excuse to experiment.
So the first layer of my brockis is actually vandyke stitch in a middling creamy beige that will help, I hope, to create some depth in his fur.
Hawk in a clear blue sky…
A good, optimistic start to the creative year, here, with my first bit of stitching for Placidus – who’s only been in the planning stage for a decade or so!
You will see from the progress pictures that I was absolutely rocketing along the edge of catastrophe curve here, very little planning, and just alternating staring at my source and stitching. This is the way I tackled Ankhsenspaaten, and a few other pieces, and it’s very much the way I prefer to paint. But it’s highly uncertain as to success, and I may come back in a few years and try again.
Clicking through will show you how little guidance I’d put on the gauze, and how little it showed once there. Furthermore, I was in such a fever of impatience to start that I used neither frame nor hoop, working in the hand instead. I won’t do that again.
(Until next time I do it..)
I’ve mostly used silk perle, which is lovely, and the particular bundles I’m using I’ve had in my stash for decades. I use it, but it’s quite fine, and until recently I’ve preferred to work with rather more solid materials. We also discovered, when my grandfather’s carer boil washed a tray cloth I’d embroidered for him, that the colours aren’t washfast. Not a problem in this case: a panel hanging on the wall, using a wild mix of materials, is unlikely to be boil washed unless by someone deliberately seeking to destroy it.
In the meantime, if it is to work in the eventual piece, it will need to be savagely blocked or pressed to get the crinkles out of it – not because my tension was tight, but because the stitching is filling up the spaces between the fabric threads and making them move and misbehave.
I don’t mind – I’ve already pinned it out, and I’m just so pleased to have made a start on the Vision of Placidus at last!
Update: I showed this to The Australian, who immediately started singing the Hawthorn team song (Australian rules football). Go, Hawks!
William, as far as he’s gone
I realised when I came to write about beginning to practice underside couching, that you’ve not seen William for a while, so here is a a quick update on progress.
I got all the broom and dog roses done on the border, and then sat back to look at it. You may recall that I said last time that I thought that I would be filling the crosses, but I wanted to sit back and stare again, just to be sure.
That staring didn’t take long. The crosses, as outlines, don’t really have the authority they need, so it soon became clear I needed to fill them all in. I doubled the outline, as a single line, and then filled in each triangle separately in split stitch. I did consider using satin stitch, or some sort of couching stitch, but I felt that with the dog roses bracketing the crosses, a different texture was required, and I am content with the result, I think.
One of the delights of working with floss silk is to see how it responds to the light, so here are some more pictures to enjoy.
Medieval Movers and Shakers
While I was working on William, my Mam passed to me her copy of Current Archaelogy, which included an article about the church founded by Rahere, jester to Henry I, then pilgrim and monk, founder of of St Bartholomew’s Hospital. Now, Rahere is a major character in one of the tales in Kipling’s “Rewards and Fairies”, which as a child I loved, and suddenly I found myself with an idea for some companions for William Marshall.
William Marshall, 1st Earl of Pembroke, jouster, statesman, guardian of kings, re-issuer of Magna Carta, subject of the first biography in English not concerning royalty or sainthood.
Athelflaed, daugther of Wessex, Lady of the Mercians, war leader and peaceweaver, guardian of Athelstan, she refortified Chester, and refounded the Minster which became, in due course, Chester Cathedral.
Rahere, jester, minstrel, courtier, pilgrim and monk, founder of St Bartholomew’s Hospital, which exists to this day.
Dame Julian Of Norwich, anchoress, mystic, author of the the first book in English known to be written by a woman.
In all these cases, some vestige of their activities still echoes down the ages, and between them they cover both the political and religious life of medieval period. Their activities are scattered across the country, providing some excuse for some visits and much reading.
I wonder what images I could put in their borders?
I think this could be interesting!