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An Experiment For Aethelflaed
I’m beginning to realise that if I take into account at the beginning of a project the final destination of it or the way it’s going to be displayed, life might be a bit easier.
I think the Medieval Movers and Shakers may end up displayed on banners, but while the clerics Rahere and Dame Julian should probably be on a simple vertical drop, like a pulpit fall, I think William and Aethelflaed might want somethiing more ornate.
With that in mind, one idea I had for Aethelflaed was to ornament her banner with reproductions of Anglo Saxon jewels in trapunto quilting. Easier said than done, and I don’t imagine I’ll get it right first time, so I hope that this will give me some thoughts!
Trapunto involves creating channels and cells that can then be filled with coloured yarns or wool. This experiment is done using leftover gauze from the Amarna overlays, and the design was quite roughly hand-drawn to make a first approximation, but in due course I had all the lines done in split stitch.
Then it was time to fill in the channels and cells. Mindful of my recent experience with the Golden Accessories, when I found there was definitely a Right Order in which to fill in the strapwork, I did (believe it or not!) pause for thought before just barrelling in. I think I made the right choice – the channels are quite narrow, and it was definitely easier to fill them in first. I’ve used tapestry wool, and I’m not sure that’s necessarily the best choice, but it’s the right sort of colour, and with the narrow channels, it’s easier than fleece. Especially as I don’t have any to hand!
The final stage was to fill in the cells – this time with Paternayan. I think I would prefer to use fleece for cells, to avoid having shadow lines between the “stitches”, but as a first attempt, I think it’s worked well.
Two layers of gauze are a bit much, though, I think it would be easier to manage if the backing were in calico. So next time I have a moment for this sort of experimentation, I might start with that, and maybe a different shade of gauze.
Parterre – final stages
While I was stitching away at the limestone pavement, it occurred to me that I maybe needed to think of some way to “finish off” the edges. I’d left a corner space in the green border, being unwilling to go down to a straight stitch over a single thread, which rarely looks good.
I decided that the best way to to deal with the whole look would be to pull the inside and outside together, using the cream to run around the whole garden – limestone chippings to separate one garden room from another!
Using a double cross stitch boss in each corner seemed to work – just enough emphasis to put a full stop at the end of each run of the plait stitch.
The plait stitch also helped by tidying up the gap in the short sides. I left the gap because the “hedge” repeat didn’t fit into the short side neatly, and when I got to the edge with the limestone pavement, I wasn’t happy with the way it looked. I am now, though – I think the plait stitch worked well, stopping the pavement falling off into the view!
Once I’d got everything else done, I could start to work on the central boss. My book told me that Turkey Stitch, which I was intending to use, is Unsuitable For Mono Thread Canvas, which was a bit of a facer, but fortunately offered Surrey Stitch as an alternative.
So I got started on the Surrey Stitch – which turned out not to be as quick as I expected..
So, not quite the final stages!
Finishing the Golden Accessories
Since I made the mistake of losing the fabric and then picking a fabric of the wrong count, and what’s more, when I looked at the finished pieces they were none of them even the same proportion, I decided to abandon all thought of turning them into accessories for a workbox I don’t have, and just made little pads, backed with silk and edged with pretty braids from Thistle Threads. The two outer ones are Russian Braid, and the inner one – the last and largest – is in Silk Serpentine Gimp.
The pads are made using two heavy pieces of pelmet vilene, or something similar. I tacked the silk on as if it were English paper piecing, but the linen I sewed in place on the inside. Then caught back and front together with overstitching, and then went round again, attaching the braids. Someone on better terms with glue might have risked using it, but I am not that person!
They are now propped up inside the parlour dome with the other Online University pieces, and sit on a coffee table in the living room. I am slightly astonished that no one who’s visited us since I set it up has ever commented on the dazzling intricacies on display, but then, maybe they’re enjoying the conversation too much?
Parterre Progress
Interior design involves balancing places for the eye to rest with things for it to look at, but having that happen at different scales and different distances from the eye means that you can have just as much visual excitement as you want.
Once I put my “hero” stitches – the pinwheels – in the octagonal borders, I needed to find something to surround them. It needed to be much quieter, to allow the heroes to be truly heroic, but at the same time, I wanted something that would be visually interesting if you bothered to look.
This is the first two stages of Palace Stitch, which was one of the stitches I interviewed for the limestone pavement. Heathering the yarns means that even close up you have something to look at, and it helps me eke out my stash of Paternayan, too. It’s too beautiful not to use, but doing a large project is becoming something of an exercise in invention!
The final stage of Palace Stitch involves small squares of diagonal stitches. Again I have heathered yarns, this time using lighter, yellowy greens.
The placement of all my colouring variations isn’t quite exact, but I like it that way. Plants don’t grow identically, and a lot of the charm of knot gardens and parterres lies in the crisp shapes with the subtly varying colours of the plants filling them. I’ve been trying to paint hillsides and forests of late, and I never thought I’d say this, but the canvaswork is easier!
I think this is a success. The slightly lighter centre, the darker edges, and the varying colours of the pinwheels (four different shades of Appletons Crewel Wool held together) all create a varying effect which is properly geometrical and definitely canvaswork while still managing to be vaguely horticultural.
I do like it when a Plan comes together!
Golden Accessories – Pansy
The Pansy continued apace, with only one alarming period when I thought the small amount on the card was all I had left to finish the dark green.
Then I found an entire full reel, gleaming at me from the bottom of the project box.
I was greatly relieved, to say the least!
Next, however, on to the gold and silver.
Some of this echoes the other two, and was fairly easy to put in place – reverse chain stitch in the narrow sections. I learnt from last time, however, and this time I put the silver strapwork panels in before the gold, which was again Ceylon Stitch.
The silver was reverse chain stitch with buttonhole edging – so it’s the stitch I used for the titles on the Map of Amarna and the View of the Excavation. Nicely familiar, and very satisfying – but also very much easier without the Ceylon Stitch in place. Next time I will try to think through the order of my stitching!
However….
It turns out that when I fished out a piece of linen to do the last of these pieces, I didn’t check it very well. The stitches are markedly bigger, and more spread out.
Next time, Rachel, take the time to count the threads!
Parterre – where had I got to again?
There was a lot of path to stitch, but that gave me plenty of thinking and experimenting time. I started playing with the Milanese Pinwheels when I wanted a break from the endless limestone pavement, and began by using them in the interlocking form shown in the book.
But I didn’t like the look of it, too congested, too solid in the wrong sort of way.
So then I tried a square.
It looked better with somue actual pinwheels, rather than the skeleton pinwheels I used to determine the placement, but again, I thought this was too congested, pulling away from the border a bit too anxiously.
Nope.
So I asked for comments, and my cousin said, have you tried the diagonal placement without the central one – four pinwheels, rather than five, more space for them to breathe.
I think this is going to work, in fact. There’s plenty of space for the heroic pinwheels to make themselves felt, and if I can find a stitch pattern for the background that runs all the way across, I think they will be nicely set off by it.
It’s good to have progress to report!
Starting the Pansy (Golden Accessories)
To begin with, the Pansy design of the Golden Accessories went much better than I feared.
In some lights the colours of the pansy are much closter than in others, making progress quite slow until I worked out which combination of lighting to use. But the petal shapes are simple enough, and although the weave is fine enough that I keep mistrusting my counting, I am also reminding myself that it doesn’t actually matter too much if the patterning on the petals aren’t exactly as charted. I shan’t be showing people the chart when I show them the pieces, and besides, if they go in the parlour dome, it’s fair to assume any onlookers will be too dazzled to pick up any oddities!
I’ve also learnt from last time.
Last time, I tried to outline the strapwork sections with tacking stitches, so that I could stitch without counting. That didn’t work – I actually misplaced the tacking stitches and had to count anyway. Grrr.
So, this time, I counted out from one point, and then followed the chart to outline, in one row of tent stitch, all the internal edges of the strapwork, and then went back to fill in the gap.
Well, that worked pretty well so it seemed reasonable to assume I could do something similar for the outside.
Which I could – except, do you see the card with the silk wrapped around it?
When I got to the point I pictured, I had got down to just that bit left, and was contemplating switching to half cross stitch, which has neither coverage nor any real cohesion, in a forlorn attempt not to run out.
Then I looked in the project box and discovered I have an entire reel as yet unstarted!
Phew.
Octagonal Borders Taking Some Time To Resolve!
I felt that the Octagonal borders needed to be less subdivided than the long borders, which in turn meant finding a large stitch pattern. After some to-ing and fro-ing, I decided that I like this one – Milanese Pinwheel (again from Jo Ippolito Christensen).
I’m not so keen on the fact that it doesn’t really tesselate neatly – there’s a peculiar shape left in the middle if you interlock the stitched in the obvious way, and it just didn’t look pleasing. So it was obvious to me that I had best space them out to create islands in an inner sea, as it were. Not like this, however – this was to be a set of five closely interlocked, leaving any partial pinwheels unstitched, to be replaced with some other stitch. But I think it’s already looking congested.
So, trying again.
This time, four, spaced out to form a square. I’m really not convinced by this, either. The slanting sides of the octagons push the pinwheels too close together, so again we have a slightly congested look. Furthermore, as I observed with the borders for William Marshall, the square form can look very static, and in this case, that’s not playing nicely with the swirling movement in the pinwheels.
I think this does, however.
Upending the square onto the diagonal makes it possible to push the pinwheels further away from one another, and while it may only be a couple of threads, I think it looks less congested. That leaves room for me to put another, smaller, pattern “behind” the pinwheels, as it were.
You may notice that while I was wrestling in thought with those pinwheels, I kept on at the path.. So, now I have to do the pinwheels in the other octagon, and decide what to run into the background…
Overlay experiments
You may recall that I spent some extra time trialling other methods for creating the overlays. My original screenprint idea had long since been abandoned, partly because the past five years when I’ve been painting as well has given me much more confidence in myself, and partly because finding somewhere to make such big silk screens – as a one-off, what’s more! – was proving impossible.
When I’d looked again at the first overlays I used in the first photoshoot, it was clear that they wouldn’t survive much longer, so I thought I would try with my acrylic inks. I cut stensils and dabbed, I used brushes and painted, I played with pre-wetted fabrics and with spraying the fabric with water afterwards.
In fact, I had several wonderful messy days.
And as you can see, some of them were really striking, and wonderfully vague, and set against a plain background the washed out and tendrilly ones do create the appearance of decay and dissolution which is appropriate. The Amarna period was washed out of history in ancient times, and while Akhenaten has had the last laugh, for centuries his name and that of his Great Royal Wife were never spoken.
However, set in front of the embroidery, they confused the eye too much. The one on the left is too detailed, the middle one is seeping away before our eyes, and the one on the left has acquired spotches I never intended.
And then there was this one. I had thought that using a brown or sandy colour would aid the “there and not there” appearance.
It certainly nailed “Not there” – it didn’t really show at all!
So in the end, as I described, I went back to the inktense blocks, but with the added support of some pastel fixative. Since I’ve used the fixative, and the overlays are now stretched over frames and not subject to abrasion in storage, I hope very much that I did indeed find the best solution.
But if anyone tries to tell you that artists and designers get it right first time – don’t believe them!
More on the Golden Accessories (honeysuckle)
So, where had we got to…?
Ah, yes. Spiral trellis stitch in silk for the centre of the honeysuckle flower, and then the outermost narrow band of the strapwork in gold reverse chain stitch. Straightforward enough, you’d say.
Well, yes, but I’m out of practice with gold threads and these sort of stitches, and the whole thing involved more contortions than I thought possible. There are also , I think, a few places where I had to undo and re-do the green background, where I haven’t tidied up the back or held fast the stitches quite as well as I should have done. We’ll see how the whole thing survives…!
The next was gold thread again, and Ceylon Stitch. There’s only space for two columns of the “chain stitch” effect in each strap, so everything is quite tight and compressed.
I’m struggling quite a bit with the Japanese needle and the fragile gold thread here. I’m sure I became more at ease with it when I was doing more of the Tudor and Stuart style, so I’m going to just continue. From any reasonable viewing distance, the breaks shouldn’t be obvious, and in truth, at this point, I just want these finished and added to the heap in the parlour dome!
Finally, the strapwork is completed with plaited braid stitch in silver. And if I’ve said the gold was fragile, the silver was even more so – as in fact I commented, a decade or so. As I said, my suspicion is that this relates to atmospheric conditions while the thread was being made. It’s not helped by the fact that, even after a few inches of revision stitching, Plaited Braid Stitch has left my muscle memory and every twist and turn was hard-won.
I still like the look of it, though!