Y’know, I was all ready to post a couple blog posts with other things I’d been working on, in some sort of delusion that I was going to have tons of time to work on things other than the 12 months of embroidery project. Hunh. Apparently I am bad at ‘quick’, and life doesn’t pause just because I have a desire to do more projects. So this might be a blog that’s got a whole helluva lot of embroidery for the next while. I promise that I do other things, but they aren’t terribly interesting (or finished enough for photos).

Image from: http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O364618/coif-unknown/

Alright, so February is Blackwork, and when last we chatted about it, I’d chosen my inspiration piece. After some fiddling with the photocopier to get it to a nice size on my 6″ square of linen (nothing fancy, retrieved out of the scrap bin probably from a chemise), the lightbox came into play to trace it onto my fabric. I am not a fancy tracer (and somehow I always manage to screw it up), but micron pen is my godsend here. It’s much easier to do little dots than drag the tiny tip along the fabric, but whatever works for you. (Dot tip acquired from a teacher whose name I’ve forgotten at Known World Fibre in Calontir a few years back. Shout out, thank you!) (While I’m asiding here.. y’know, it’s often the tiny offhanded comments that stick with me long after a class, not necessarily anything about the class material itself. Hanging out with other artistans who do what you do is VITAL.. but I’ve commented on that before.)

No matter that I’m tracing from a very clear image, eternally my roses are special snowflakes, but still, time pressure is a thing, and so I press on. They are clearly just heritage breed, non GMO roses. Clearly. I decided to do the outline in backstitch, just to be different from the split stitch I did my coif in. The thread is a 60/2 weaving silk that I dyed with cochineal a while back, and after a tight race of votes at an event, the pink won. It is really nice to embroider with, tightly spun and smooth, but not stiff and unyielding. I haven’t embroidered with it before, but I will again (and again, and again I expect in this year).

Outlines done, now it’s time to fill in some bits. There’s three main styles of fill in coif blackwork. There’s the little seed stitch highlights, there’s the dense geometric fill (The same fills that the modern world claims is the ONLY blackwork, but I rant about that a lot.), and the last fill style is to leave it blank. I decided to do my leaves in seed stitch, and my trio of roses in three different fills, and then leave my little leaves blank. Full spectrum of examples! Most coifs pick one and use it for the whole thing, rather than combining, but I’m leaning into this example thing, so we’re getting the buffet plate.

When choosing my fills, I knew exactly where I was headed. Over to Countess Ianthé’s book of fills, mostly historical, but beautifully charted and where I knew exactly where to find them. She’s got two volumes out, and all three of mine came from Volume One. I’ve used them before, I have favourites and I got to plunk a few into this sample. I did do them as counted work, over 2 threads of linen, using my shiny new magnifier. By this point, it was only mid-February and things were going great guns, I started having visions of being done in a day or two and getting a couple week’s ahead on canvas work! Life had other plans. I’ll show you braid work next week.

First off, what is it? It’s the name of a style of embroidery that has a few forms, historically and tends to mean just one of those forms modernly.

Reversible edging

It is stitched with black thread, except when it is not. It’s counted work, except when it’s not. It is reversible, except when it’s not. It is only done with double running stitches, except when it is not. You get the picture here.

Peppermint Purple SAL Week 5

The first style, and the one that is almost exclusively used modernly, is counted blackwork. This can be reversible, or not. (Modernly, usually not). It is very linear, made up of repeated motifs on evenweave fabric. It is what one thinks of in Tudor collars and cuffs. It can be stitched with backstitch, or double running stitch (also called holbein stitch). Backstitch is not generally reversible, double running stitch generally is. The best resource I’ve ever found for the nitty gritty of double running stitch can be found on Kim Brody Salazar’s blog (Countess Ianthé, d’Averoigne): String or Nothing. Blackwork (the counted fill variety) seems to be coming into a current spate of modern popularity, if some current stitch alongs are anything to go by.

 My coif and spangles

This is not what I’m using for my February’s blackwork piece for the Athena’s thimble sampler. I’ve done blackwork before in my coif, (which apparently I never blogged about, but there’s a shot of it in progress there, and pictured above.) and I’m going with another motif from a different inspiration coif. The free stitch blackwork on coifs is generally done with your favourite outline stitch: backstitch, split stitch, stem stitch, plaited braid stitches are the usual ones, and then the centres are either filled in with either small counted motifs, or shaded with just little seed stitches. Sometimes there are pearls, sometimes spangles. Usually it’s monochrome, sometimes it’s not. 

Image from: http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O364618/coif-unknown/

This coif is from the V&A, it’s listed in Digby’s Elizabethan Embroidery as being plaited stitch, stem stitch and back stitch and entirely done in black silk. I’m aiming to use some bits of dye experiments, so cochineal dyed silk on a scrap of linen fabric, and the current plan is plaited braid for the outline, and then split stitch interior outlines (maybe backstitch, we’ll see how the spirit moves me), with 3 leaves getting fills and 2 leaves getting seed stitch shading. Now we’ll see how much of this cunning plan survives contact with reality of stitching!

January has come to an end, and with it the first month of my Athena’s Thimble sample of the month grand plan. I wrote about the inspiration and getting started a few weeks ago here on the blog. I really had to get my skates on to get it finished by the end of the month, but Jan 30th the final stitch went in.

Derpy deer in his final glory.

The basic details: Wool cloth (one colour dyed by me), linen thread, linen cord and silk thread. I am really pleased with how he turned out. A few modifications from the original, and some thoughts on the technique and challenges I bumped into. (aka ways I screwed it up.)

There was a lot of debate at the event I was showing it at about why on earth anyone would do this, when it’s a whole lot easier to just set the appliqué on top like a normal person. It does keep it from being overly thick, it helps maintain the hand of the fabric, both of which seem frankly irrelevant in a wall hanging. It is very fabric conservative, there’s next to no waste, but that also feels pretty irrelevant in a piece that feels gilded leather is a reasonable outlining cord. Ultimately, I think we came down to ‘someone realized they could, so they did’. If you have better reasons, although that’s a good one, feel free to share!

The most obvious change is size. This is about half the size of the original, and as such made from some extremely tiny (and fragile) spots. Everything was tiny, and while I am quite happy to work at tiny scale (Quote from the spouse: You do bonsai textiles.), this got so tiny, my cloth was losing structural integrity and I had to take off my glasses and squint to see the backstitches. (I am profoundly and outrageously nearsighted. I almost stabbed myself in the nose with the needle, it was that close.)

Speaking of my cloth, I should have felted it even more than I did. I would have sworn that the cloth was well fulled when I started, but tiny little curves and tiny little tacking stitches to hold it to another tiny bit of wool, and I found all the places the the threads just pulled away from the rest of the fabric and I had to pray for structure and for something to grip. It was maddening. The dyed wool was better, I’d been rather <cough> aggressive in my dye work and felted it a bit more, and that was a feature.

Green sharpie to the rescue

Accept that you are not going to cut both versions identically, and know that you are about to do some trimming. Be grateful that wool has some stretch and give to it, so the wee gaps just sort of snuggle in together. Trying to mark my template onto wool was miserable. I used a sharpie on the lighter colour (that worked fairly well), but on the dark colour? Nothing showed. I didn’t have a white gel pen (on the shopping list for next time), so I literally used the template like a stencil and rubbed chalk all over. I cut it out and hoped for the best. It worked better than I feared, but there was a lot of trimming up of details. It is for jobs like this that the Cricut was invented.

The original used gilded leather cut in approx 1 mm strips to outline it. I considered learning how to gild leather, then I considered painting leather with gold paint, and then I remembered half scale and I was not going to cut anything to 0.5 mm reliably. I used linen cord in a bright gold colour. Perfect. A really fuzzy linen cord in the perfect colour. Alright, beeswax will fix that.. and it sure did, and was perfect. It also shed so badly, my little chunk of beeswax looks like it needs a shave. Worth it.

Fuzzy beeswax

I would absolutely do this again, preferably at a more sane size, once I got past my ‘omg, I am gonna break it!’ brain, it was pretty fun to do.