The is the exciting part! To me, anyway.
The inspiration gloves were white leather, with red silk and gold thread. It looks like there could maybe be some silver in there too, but it's hard to tell whether that just because it's old or not.
I knew that Donovan wanted black gloves, preferred silver to gold, and that his outfit would be green. So I adjusted the colors to reflect that.
I started with a nice thick piece of black linen, big enough to work on both cuffs at once. I knew that if I did them one at a time then he would only ever get one glove. The large scroll frame I have was just big enough to work.
Transferring the pattern to the fabric was a project in itself. I didn't feel comfortable freehanding the pattern, and thick black fabric and light boxes don't really get along. And besides all of that, any normal pen wasn't going to show up anyway. I ended up using a combination of chalk and carbon transfer sheets to get the pattern on there, and then stitched around eeeeverything with running stitch, because the chalk was never going to stay long enough.
Then began the silk embroidery. This, at least, was nothing particularly new. I chose green instead of red to go with his outfit, and because he's a fan of the color. I also decided to have the larger motifs needle painted...mostly because I really like how needle painting looks.
I used Eterna flat silk, which is a pain to work with but so very shiny. I outlines each flower-thing with split stitch with the darker green, and the filled it in with long and short stitches. For the needle painted ones, I did last row or two in a light green, still with long and short stitch.
For the OGR and OSR symbols I decided to applique felt for the blue areas instead of trying to fill it in with stitches. This was mostly because filling in the entire circle for the OSR seemed like a bad idea, and I wanted to make sure they matched. So I cut out circles and tiger heads, two of each, and appliqued them down with tiny stitches.
Now for some goldwork.
Due to the time contraints I had, and the fact that I felt like I could have ruined this at any time, I did not splurge on new materials for the goldwork. I had some jap gold (and jap silver) in a somewhat thick size (check for the size?), and did all of the goldwork using those threads. These threads were perfectly fine for the lines - maybe a little bit too bold, and difficult for turning corners, but perfectly serviceable. Where the threads fell down was on all of the filled areas. I'm pretty sure that the original gloves used chips of check purl to do the filling, but the Japanese thread of course needed to be plunged..and plunging centimeter long bits of metallic thread is not a thing I suggest to anyone. Especially a wrapped thread that will start to fall apart.
I realized quickly that due to time and the previously mentioned corner turning problems, that doing all the little leaves the design wasn't going to work. So most of those got dropped early on.
One problem that I didn't foresee was that the thick thread absolutely could not be plunged through the dense felt I used for the badges.This was mostly a problem on the Silver Rapier badge, and resulted in a lot of creative bending and end covering. I think it worked out ok, but I will never make that particular mistake again.
I am very happy with some of the couching work I did and very unhappy with other parts. Things that looked ok on the frame got wobbly once the tension was off. A lot of the problems came from rushing - I didn't put my stitches close enough together, I didn't always secure the stitches as tightly at the ends as I should have.
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