Kennathimor's Knighting Cloak

At Birka this past year, Kennathimor Gierson was knighted. The Worshipful Company created a cloak for him with wool applique along the bottom. I did one of the simpler symbols - the Northern Army badge. Others included his device and the Lochleven badge. All of the appliques were done using wool felt and thick wool thread.

This post is much belated in the hopes that I would find a good picture of the finished cloak, but unfortunately that is not to be. Instead, have this glimpse of the embroidery in a photo of his buffet.
Duchess Thyra was nice enough to provide me with a good picture of the cloak, as displayed by Cassandra Grey!

Picture by Thyra Eiriksdotter

Queen's Order of Courtesy Glove

There was a call put out to the East Kingdom populace for more award medallions. Our royals have had a low stock on several awards for quite some time now.

One of the awards they needed more of was the Queen's Order of Courtesy. It happens to be particularly suited to embroidery, and so I set out to make one.

I embroidered the rose on linen using flat silk, mostly in satin stitch. I then appliqued the rose onto a white glove, and outlined it with silver passing thread.
I gave it to the Queen at K&S A&S and Bardic, and I think it went out in court that day!
More QoC gloves are in my future, I'm sure.

Malocchio's MoD Glove

This is the second set of MoD gloves that I'll have made. I was very proud of the first set, but this pair was going to be very different for three reasons:
 - Malocchio wanted gloves he could fight in, when the time was right. Goldwork and silk shading doesn't lend itself to that.
 - Malocchio's girlfriend Jen was helping me with this set. We live a couple hours apart and she isn't exactly full of free time.
 - I also didn't have the months of time to devote to the gloves before the elevation. Luckily reasons 1 and 2 align well with this problem!

Jen did the design work on the gloves. We went back and forth with several options before settling on this design, with the MoD symbol on the top of the cuff and the sleepy lion on the bottom:

Then, of course, this languished for a few weeks. As the days ticked by I slowly removed aspects of the design from my mental equation - goodbye, sun. Goodbye lion. Goodbye to the neat designs around the medallion.
Luckily, I had planned for this. Each major aspect was to be embroidered on gold linen and then appliqued onto the glove. Which meant that we could even add the lion and other decoration later if we wanted to.

Turns out I sure didn't take progress pictures of this one.
Anyway, Jen and I met over the Christmas break to exchange supplies and have a tracing party. That border is pretty great and also a pain to get onto fabric in any way.

She took the two borders away to embroider them. I took away the two medallions. What we didn't think of was that I would really need to applique the border on before doing the medallion part, so we didn't get to work in parallel quite as much as planned. Liadan made the cord used around the outside of the appliques. It is reminiscent of the cords the Handsome Boys use to denote their Handsome Boy status, and also does a fine job of covering up any sins in my applique.

Despite the assorted delays in the process I was only sewing for maybe an hour on the day of the elevation, so that's much improved from previous projects. The other glove has a long was to go, but we'll get there.

Mod Gloves - The Embroidering

This is part 2 of the glove extravaganza. Part 1 can be found here.

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.

Cassandra's Laurel Coat

Cassandra has been a leader and inspiration for the Worshipful Company for some time. She has guided many of us, and caused more than a few of our escapades, and I was overjoyed when I heard she was going to be receiving her Laurel.

Duchess Akaterine was in charge of her regalia - specifically, a coat. She handed out kits to all of the Company, and several more of Cassandra's friends.

It was a fun design, with a variety of techniques.

 I was initially happy with the metal work, but once it was on the coat things got a lot more wavy. That's a problem in the MoD gloves I made, too. I've since been told that Jap metal thread just likes to do that, and close, even stitches are the best way to stop it. I also learned that they usually used two strands of the metal thread side by side. Next time I will try it that way!

The coat was used to panel for Athena's Thimble for a number of people before it was handed off to Cassandra in court. The coat was very full. And Cassandra is not a short woman.

Me holding the coat for easy inspection.
Photo by Simona bat Leon

This was the first Athena's Thimble experience for many of the people who helped with this, and I'm glad they could get ushered in so easily.

I can't find a good photo of the coat in action, but will post one when it inevitably appears.

Rose Cloak I

For Thyra's second reign, after the worst weather I have ever seen at a Crown, we made her an exceptionally warm, heavy cloak.

Marietta designed it. I think it was the beginning of her ongoing foray into designing things for the Worshipful Company. I watched her color in many blue cloaks before the design was settled.

One thing she knew all along was that it needed to have roses on it (what Rose doesn't need a rose cloak?), and that she wanted them small enough that she could get people all over the East Kingdom to embroider them. She created kits, including with a self-addressed, stamped envelope to return the rose in. And it worked!

I didn't need to use my envelope, since she's my roommate. She just comes home from Worshipful Company meetings (I'm always fencing when they happen) and throws embroidery projects at me. Sometimes literally.

The only guidance we were given for these roses was that we should applique the small silk bit on top of the larger wool bit, do something in the center, and use only the gold thread provided for us.

I prefer to applique with blanket stitch - especially with silk, which will fray. So that part was a no brainer. I then filled in the center with laid work, which I enjoy and don't have many chances to use. The outside edge is chain stitch, and that bit at the bottom will bother me forever, even though I know that you can't tell on the cloak.

So we made her this wonderful cloak and where is the first time she wears it? Gulf Wars, in 80 degree weather. Because she is the kind of queen who will do that.

Oh also, on the back of a horse.

Picture by Cecily O'Donell of the Midrealm

She later got an opportunity to wear it at the more weather appropriate Mudthaw. Here there's a bit more of a view of the decoration, too.

Picture by Raziya Bint Rusa

Hedgehog Dress

Sometimes a king makes the mistake of disparaging the noble flamingo in front of his queen, and then decides to ask forgiveness in most epic fashion.

The Worshipful Company of Their Majesties Underwear was asked to create an apron dress with flamingos appliqued on the front, and a collection of hedgehogs around the hem, each representing a chivalric virtue.

My part in this was to create two of the hedgehogs: Wit and Wisdom.

I will be forever bothered that I forgot to put the ankle decoration on this one.

For Wit we have a hedgehog taking great joy in practical jokes.

For Wisdom we have Odin with his ravens.

The other virtues that were on display included knowledge, grace, generosity, and Nom. There were 9 in all, and you can find pictures of all of them on the website. 

Thyra Eriksdottir, picture taken by Camille des Jardins