Knife Sheath - The Embroidering Part 1

 The first order of business is to outline all of the parts that are going to have silk shading. This involves a lot of flipping the frame over to make sure I'm on the lines, but it means I can ignore the back for the actual shading part.
In this picture to the right you can see that I chose the colors for the flowers to match the original piece without taking into account that the background purple is very different. I'll be making some adjustments when I move onto the shading. But in person these lines show up plenty to give me guidance.

Here you can see the back of the piece and how I tacked the linen with the pattern on it to the back of the silk. There's actually another piece of linen in between, because the linen was so thin. You can also see that in the end I changed the pattern at the point of the sheath. I was having a hard time fitting all the motifs, so I dropped the tulips from the design. I'll need to decide on something small to put there later.

Once everything was outlined it was time to start my favorite kind of embroidery - silk shading! I used a few different similarly sized silks (primarily Splendor, though) because that's what I had in the colors I needed. I closely followed the original coloring, but I think either the threads I'm using are slightly finer, or the images are larger. It's difficult to know scale from the pictures that are available, unfortunately.





Here the left flower (minus stem) and laurel leaves are finished, and the peacock is well on his way.
I was originally going to put more shading into the laurel leaves, but people seem to like them a lot as is, so I've decided not to mess with success in this instance.

Next I'll be finishing the peacock and the right flower, before moving on to birds and stems.

Knife Sheath - The Planning

When my good friend Elaina was given her write for the Laurel, I realized that I was pretty Booked Out. I still definitely wanted to make something to celebrate her accomplishments, though. I figured she would be very supportive of me using her as an excuse to start my next real A&S project. And so!

https://collection.cooperhewitt.org/objects/18705973/

I'd been looking at the concept of Wedding Knives for some time. Pretty embroidery and sharp objects all at the same time? Sign me up! It was an Elizabethan era tradition to give a newly married couple (or seemingly, just the new wife) a pair of table knives in a fancy case. Also during this period people had cutlery cases that were similarly decorative.

Cutlery from Queen Elizabeth

British Museum

Elaina had decreed that she wanted her vigil to be based on a 17th century Italian wedding reception. It just so happened that while I mostly have evidence of the English doing this particular tradition, I also have one knife sheath that is from Venice. And it also just so happened that is was my favorite.

https://www.photo.rmn.fr/archive/99-016973-2C6NU0X7YT91.html

Just look at the gorgeous silk shading and gold work throughout. It's like it was made for me to make.

The pictures don't have closeups of every part of the sheath, so I've done some guesswork and some adjustments, but I tried to stay true to the original.

One of the motifs on the cover is a pelican in its piety (which I'll definitely have to remember for a future pelican) so I've replaced that with a laurel wreath.

Now, the hardest part of this for me was how to go about getting a sheath to cover. And knives. 

I decided for this timeline to cheat on those particular aspects, and instead create something that might get some more day to day use. I took a large wooden needlecase and used wood epoxy to expand it into a sheath shape, and then used that as the base for the embroidery. 

 To the right you can see the original needlecase, the expanded sheath, as well as the pattern I created. The molded sheath was far from symmetrical, so I draped some cheap cotton over it to make sure everything would fit ok. (Here's hoping that actually works in the end...)

The next step was to get the actual pattern. I sketched out the base pattern without using the weird shapes made from my drape first (on the right) and then I transferred that to the correct shape. I the traced it all onto some thin linen.

And then, because that linen would be backing the silk, I flipped the linen over and traced again, in order to get the design facing the right way. Now, with the linen basted to the silk, I could use the lines on the linen to determine my stitches, and hopefully never have to mar the silk at all. Unfortunately I did the final basting backwards and things are facing the other way anyway, but oh well!

All in all, I think I drew this pattern 5 times, though. So glad it's small.