Embroidery

I am an avid embroiderer and enjoy many different styles of embroidery. For some categories I have enough individual completed works to justify a separate page for them (see my pages Blackwork, Lacis, Open Work, Lace, and Raised Embroidery (Brazilian)) but here are some of my miscellaneous or more interesting experiments with embroidery.

In the SCA I am a member of the embroidery guild, The Keepers of Athena's Thimble, which is an excellent resource for information on various period and modern embroidery techniques.

This is a technique called German Brick Stitch which was popular in the 14th and 15th centuries. The pattern is from Richard Wymarc's website, which is an amazing resource for anyone interested in this style of embroidery. This piece is worked on 28-count even-weave linen and three strands of DMC cotton floss. This turned out to be not quite enough strands, as when I folded it to make it into the needlecase small dots of the white background appeared. I would recommend more strands of floss if using 28 count linen.

I turned the piece into a needle case so that I would (hopefully) not forever be loosing my pins and needles all the time when I am working on smaller projects. So far it has been surprisingly effective (as I am normally very good at loosing things). I also am very happy with how it looks in my embroidery bag, very cute.

This is my favor for my embroidery guild mentioned above, The Keepers of Athena's Thimble. It is DMC floss on some remnants of white 32ish count linen. It contains outline/stem, cross, satin, surface satin, and couching stitches. I chose cross-stitch as a fill because I wanted a slightly speckled look to the owl, with satin stitch for the longer feathers.

(photo courtesy of Angel Ortiz/Lavina Attewode)

This was my first real experiment with pleatwork embroidery. The piece was made based on instructions from the amazing PleatworkEmbroidery.com The materials are linen fabric and cotton sewing thread, with the pleating done using no. 12 perle cotton.

This is the result of a lovely class I took at Pennsic on Elizabethan embroidered slips. Slips are small pieces of fabric that are embroidered and then appliqued onto something else. The needlepoint is tent stitch (a type of half cross stitch described here) done on canvas, then cut out and appliqued onto the purple velvet using a whipstitch. It is then outlined and the inner blank places filled in with surface couched gold metallic threads, as was often done in period. The supplies are modern though, krenik synthetic gold thread and six strands of DMC floss.

This is a metal-thread embroidery done with krenik silver and cotton sewing thread. The design is my coat of arms in the SCA (the little dashes are needles). This was one of my earlier attempts at couching metal threads and in retrospect I probably should have uses multiple strands of floss instead of only one. However, it is very shiny and fun to look at, so at some point I should applique it onto something of mine.

This is also done in krenik gold, but I cannot seem to capture it well in photos. It has a great sheen and reflects light wonderfully. I had an idea that I would turn it into a favor or badge of some sort but I am still debating what to do with it.