Another relic of the Stitch Off

My first outing with my lorgnettes told me that the canvaswork case was wonderfully protective, but not terribly practical for those occasions when I wanted to fish them out and put them back, so I am trying again. This time I’m aiming for a little drawstring bag. When I was casting around for an idea for the design, among other things I leafed through my copy of “Jane Austen Embroidery”. I traced one of the more complicated designs, and then realised that I wanted to use that for something else, and thought again.

I went back to some of the thoughts I had when we were doing the Great Lady’s Magazine StitchOff, and decided that since it is a small and limited project, it seemed to me that freestyling the embroidery would be fairly low risk.

I tacked out the outlines of the bag, weighted the book open so I could see the drawing of one of the sprig patterns, and went rummaging among my threads.

I’ve made use of some linen threads from Stef Francis, and some silk threads from I-know-not-where, and the stitches are mostly very simple: chain stitch, stem stitch, fishbone stitch.

When it came to the bell-shaped flowers at the bottom, I didn’t want to use satin stitch, and I spent some time racking my brains to come up with an alternative. Finally, inspiration came from two long-ago projects, Kai Lung and the Persian Fantasy Screen, and it occurred to me to use nested fly stitches. Then I only had to decide whether to use a double thread or a single thread, but as soon as I tried one of each, it became pretty clear which to choose!