Tag: Silk thread
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!
Another Decision To Make
I can’t imagine how people can have a design planned down to the smallest detail before they begin. Even when I’m more organised than usual – William is a prime example – there are always details that either escape me, or that I hadn’t even considered at the start.
I should say, this isn’t a complaint. I don’t think I would find it remotely interesting to have planned everything out and have nothing to discover. These days, when I follow someone else’s design, it is to learn what they can teach me, so even though the design is planned, there is nothing sterile about the experience.
However, the fact remains that I am, yet again, wondering what to choose.
When I twisted together the fawn and the brown silk to stitch the stem of the dog rose, it was partly because I wasn’t happy with the colour and wanted to modify it slightly. When it was done, however, I felt that maybe I hadn’t, in fact, modified it enough. It seemed too close in tone to the background, so I worked the stem in the top right in just the light fawn.
And all the time I was working it, I felt twitchy. It seemed too bright, too bald, too obvious.
Now I have the top two corners done, and I have a decision to make – two colour stem, or single colour stem?
It doesn’t seem quite as glaring from a respectable distance. Note to self: for goodness sake, never decide anything from ten inches away, that’s not how anyone else is likely to see it, and if they do, you’ve already won them over anyway!
There is, of course, a middle ground. I could do the two colour stem on one diagonal and the fawn the another, echoing the angle of the castle walls and the trajectory of William’s career.
However, one decision has already been made – remember I wasn’t sure whether to fill in the crosses or not? I am now, and they will be filled.
Beginning The Border
Once I took the tissue paper away, I discovered that in fact my running stitch transfer wasn’t very clear. So I’m going to start by split stitch outlining each element before I fill it in.
You can see in this photo that I still hadn’t quite got all the tissue paper that had the design on it out from under the stitches, and I’m only part of the way through outlining this corner.
I did think I might try to outline everything first, and then I thought about what happens when I have something like that to do, and decided that each corner would be worked to a finish separately!
It is probably at this point that I start to wander from the path of classical Opus Anglicanum. I’m using fishbone stitch for the rose leaves and satin stitch for the broom. But after all, this is a modern work, by a modern embroiderer, not a reconstruction of an existing, or imagined, medieval work.
The wanderings continue with the dog roses – long and short stitch in the petals, over two rows of split stitch outline to help define the edges, and a tiny French knot for the dark centre.
I’m using two differnt dark greens for the rose leaves and the broom, to help the design make sense, and I worked the rose stem in split stitch using two shades of brown. I am not entirely sure about that, so I think the next corner around I will use one, maybe the darker one, and see whether that is an improvement. If it is, bringing this one into line might be a bit hair raising, considering how small all of this is!
Border Transfer
It may not be very obvious in the line drawing, but although the two sides of the corner sprig are very similar, they aren’t quite identical. I wanted to keep a sense of movement and flow, without the chaos of having every little bit different, so in the end I chose to create my corner sprigs based on two slightly different straight sprigs. In this photo you can see that the rose leaves are pointing in different directions, and the broom flowers are arranged differently.
When I did the line drawing, I took my guiding sprig and turned it through ninety degrees for each corner. By doing that, there’s a sense of continuity, whereas I think if I had reflected the design in a mirror line through either the vertical or horizontal crosses, it would have created a rather stop-start effect. I was much impressed, years ago, by a programme about the carver and sculptor Grinling Gibbons, which said that he always aimed for balance rather than symmetry. I like that, it feels more human somehow, so that’s what I try to do too.
Now, however, I have to transfer the design to the border. Clearly that’s not going to be possible using prick and pounce or a drawing method, so I have chosen to create a drawing on tissue paper of the main elements, and running stitch along the design lines. I am hoping that this will be sufficient!
In any case, it allows time for the extra thread I had to order from Devere Yarns to arrive..
Finally, two Announcements:
- The eagle eyed among you may have noticed that the Ko-fi link went away and is now back (plug-ins not playing nicely!). I’m still hoping to put together an exhibition and a book about Dreams of Amarna, and any support, whether financial, moral, or material (suggesting venues, publishers, copy-editors) would be gratefully received!
- You may also noticed the lack of a link to Twitter. I’m mostly on Mastodon now, as @virtuosew@mathstodon.xyz, for reasons that anyone else who’s been on Twitter lately will probably understand very well!
Border Design Finally Nailed!
Once I had the border trim in place, I felt I really had to get the details sorted out – but having that trim in place seemed to help. The dark green, red, and yellow on the inside, mirrored by the yellow, red, and dark green on the outside seem to bracket the blue just exactly as I planned, and I began to feel that all that painting and puzzling might have been worthwhile.
So I tried photocopying the full piece to see whether playing with my cut out sprigs on a flat surface I wasn’t worried about snagging might be useful.
In actual fact, the photocopying wasn’t a great success, but it was close enough that when I overlaid an old acetate and experimented with the border sprig I’d finally, tentatively, settled on, I suddenly became a lot happier. The paint is gouache, and it really doesn’t get along well with the acetate, but I felt that it gave me just enough of the sense of the design that I could be confident it would evoke an illuminated manuscript – which is what I was hoping it would do.
It’s always so pleasing when a plan comes together!
The next stage was to produce a line drawing of the planned design, and use that to transfer the final design to the piece itself.
And this was the point at which all that painting and drawing and redrawing began to show real benefits, because even though the photocopied sprig design I was using as a guide was distinctly muddy, I found myself drawing the lines I needed with a freedom from care I rarely experience with pencil in hand.
Well now, who’d ha’ thunk – more practice does produce better effects!
Still working on that border!
I continue to wrestle with the arrangement of broom and dog roses – my goodness, am I ever glad I’ve been working on planning with paint over the last two years or so! I do some exploration with digital images, but as it often results in a sore arm from mouse and trackpad manipulation, painting is a much better option. This selection of straight sprigs could be assembled into corner decorations, and potentially tweaked in size to fill a side or leave space for the Templar crosses.
Indeed, I have painted so many straight sprigs and corner designs – so large, to make it easier to paint – that I’ve become quite blind and jaded with them, and can’t decide which I like. I did realise that I needed to put them against William and the chateau de Tancaville, so I photographed them and printed them out. And then told the printer to try something smaller and go again.
And that showed that those sprigs would have to be, if anything, even smaller than I had anticipated.
This tells me that I will have to be very much more careful about the colours I use, and the number of strands. I can’t afford to produce a border that looks muddy or confused, but equally, it mustn’t fight with William or his underside couched golden sky.
Tricky. Very tricky.
William’s Border – the background..
As you can imagine, it took me some time to decide on the way I was going to tackle the border. Since the “sky” is going to be underside couched in gold, it needed something to contain it, and I felt that it had to be a colour which wasn’t already dominant in the design – so not grey, and not brown.
Blue somehow became the obvious choice, and then I had to decide how to do it. I wanted the colour to have a bit of variation to make it less stark, but at the same time, calm enough to settle into the background. So I have three different shades of blue in the needle at once, and the base layer is surface satin stitch.
That isn’t at all stable, so it is going to have trellis couching over the top.
The first layer has a slightly watery look to it, not at all unsuitable for someone who travelled as much as William, but I wanted to calm it down some more, because, remember, it’s merely the background for broom and dog roses! So the hatching (the trellis part) uses the two darker shades of the three.
The final stage is tieing stitches, in the lightest blue. I’m really pleased with this, as it has produced the right control of the threads, and the light blue glints like a gem at the crossing points.
The outer edge will have the same as the inner edge, but in the reverse order. Soon I will have to finalise the ideas for the broom and dog roses, and when I’ve done that there will be no excuse to avoid the underside couching, the prospect of which is slightly unnerving me..