MoD Gloves - The Planning.

Before the Masters of Defense were even a done deal, I knew that when Donovan got one I wanted to be able to make something for him. Of course the problem there is that I don't really sew - I embroider. And regalia kind of requires a combination of the two activities most of the time. And I knew the likely candidates for sewing for him were far away, so that would be difficult.

Once the new Peerage was definitely going to happen there was so much discussion about what sorts of traditions and regalia and such we would be using in the East. So. Much. It's like people really cared or something. One thing that got brought up by several different people and then stuck was the idea of "throwing the gauntlet". The Queen would literally toss a gauntlet, and retrieving it would be the symbolic acceptance of their new duties.

I thought it was a very cool and unique thing for the new Order to do without stepping on anyone's toes, and allowed for the Queen to be directly involved. It also meant that the regalia would have to include gloves. Embroidered gloves. My task was born!

I have never done a lot of historic research in my embroidery - I've done what strikes my fancy at the time, or projects given to me by other people. But I knew that the person (Alesone/Alysten over at Alysten's Blog) making his garb for ceremony was going full on fancy late period English, so I wanted to add to the outfit. Little did I know that most of the extant examples of late period English gloves are UTTERLY RIDICULOUS. But also, so cool.

I ended up with a Pinterest board of late 16th/early 17th century gloves, but I took particular inspiration from these.

Image from metmuseum.org

I liked them, and they weren't quiiite as complex as some of the others.
So there was much sketching. Here are some designs from before I settled on those gloves, in more "typical Elizabethan embroidery" style.

Unfortunate shadows are unfortunate!

Once I had the pattern I wanted, I enlarged it to full size for tracing purposes.
I went with the basic motifs in the inspiration gloves - the border and the flower-type things - but changed some of the flowers to be circles instead, to be filled with the three fencing award badges in the East. In this picture you can see rough sketches of the Golden Rapier, MoD, and Silver Rapier symbols.

Once I had a design I approached the problem of materials.
I knew that I wanted the base gloves to be the calfskin ones available from Darkwood Armory - they are soft and nice and I could figure out his size from his fencing gloves. And there was no way that I was going to add "glove making" to this project.
Unfortunately, the gloves that I've seen come in two types - embroidery directly on the leather, or embroidery on piece of stiffened fabric that is then attached as the cuff to the leather hand part of the glove. Neither of these were going to be feasible for this project. Embroidering directly on that leather was asking for tiny holes everywhere from mistakes, not to mention that most ideas I had needed properly stretched material to work on. Removing the perfectly nice leather cuff to attach a fully fabric one was taking a step closer to glove making than I was interested in going for this project.
The happy medium I decided on was embroidering on linen, and then attaching it (and a layer of stabilizer) to the leather cuff, making it look like it was a fully fabric cuff. This had its own difficulties, but I still think it was the right plan.

Stayed tunes for actual embroider pictures to come.