Remy's Vigil Book - Finished Product

The long awaited (for no good reason) end to the saga of Remy's vigil book.

 I miscalculated on the width of the velvet, and so the edges that wrap around the book covers are a little shorter than is ideal. The cover is a bit prone to falling off. If it's annoying for him then I'll add some width to those. But hey, it also means that it's easy to take the cover off so he can use it like a normal book without worrying about being delicate with it, if he so chooses.

Remy's Vigil Book - The Embroidering Part 4

The center of the book cover! While I was working my way through all the goldwork on the main piece, I was also traveling around with this centerpiece. I did not take nearly as many progress shots of this, but it was pretty straightforward.

I started with silk backed with linen (you can see the basting stitches in the lower left corner of the pictures). Because this is white fabric, I could actually put the design directly on the fabric! I sketched the heraldry with a normal pencil, knowing that I would cover all the lines. I then used __________ silk thread in split stitches and filled everything in. The only part that was any more complicated than that was the wolf - in order to stop it from being a blog, I did a bit of silk shading. It's still mostly split stitches, but there are a few stitches that are "whatever fit and moved in the correct direction".

Once the silk portion was done I couched silver passing thread around all the shapes. I didn't want it to be the only non sparkling part of the book cover! This was easy enough to do for the straight lines, but the wolf and fleur-de-lis were rather more difficult. I used tweezers to make particularly sharp bends in the thread where it was needed. I also used a slightly less thick passing thread for those areas.

When the embroidery was done it was time to applique this piece onto the main piece. Pinning it in place didn't work very well - it was very thick - so it ended up slightly lopsided. I used white and blue thread to do the couching, so it wouldn't show. I then couched a looped wire around the outside of the shield. This was to finish covering the couching, as well as to even out the slightly off center shield. I specifically used the looped wire because it called to mind the thread used for the oval of the original piece.

You can also see the many spangles that were added to the piece now. I followed the basic positions of the original piece, but primarily used them in particularly open places in the design. I attached the spangles by used a piece of check purl as a bead to hold them on, which is how they were done on the original piece. Some of the areas around the shield ended up somewhat open, but not in a shape that would easily accept a spangle. In those places I used just a piece of the check purl to fill out the design.

A critique that I've heard of my previous goldwork pieces is that they aren't quite encrusted enough with metal to be properly period. This is a very valid comment - the goldwork that I'm trying to recreate goes far above and beyond what might be considered "tasteful" in our time. Generally I didn't go far enough in the past due to time constraints. This time I was bound and determined not to have any large open spaces! The last two bits of work I had to do before covering the book were also to fulfill that goal.

The space under the swords had been taunting me for some time. I didn't know what I wanted to do, but it certainly needed to be filled. I ended up with a basic design and some spangles there, which turned out fine, but it taught me that the parchment paper I use to transfer my design does more than give me lines to follow. It also keeps the passing thread up above the pile of the velvet, making the lines stand out much more. Now that I know that I'll try to avoid last minute line additions to future projects.

The other item I added was a border. The original piece almost completely filled the cover of the book, and had a border that was actually around the edge of the book cover. In this case the book was slightly larger than the design area, so I decided to put the border closer to the rest of the design and leave the very edge of the cover undecorated.

And now we're essentially done, but it still needs to be put on the actual book!

Remy's Vigil Book - The Embroidering Part 3

With the passing thread and eagle done, it was time to fill in all the empty spaces with bullion.
The gold is the same stuff I used to fill in the majority of the eagle, and the silver differs only in color.
In the original piece the filling was done at a variety of angles. Most often it was a 45 degree angle to the motif, but sometimes it was a straight line across. The most notable of the second type is the wide curling leaves near each corner.

There's not too much to actually say about this step in the process. I find it to be the most pleasant step, although is it repetitive: bring the thread up on one side of the shape, cut the bullion to the appropriate size (the hardest part by far), bring the thread down on the other side of the shape. Repeat ad nauseam. It's meditative, and is very good at flinging little bits of metal everywhere.



I filled in all the gold first, and then all the silver. Then it was onto spangles, which will be in the next post (but you can see they snuck unto the last picture!)

Remy's Vigil Book - The Embroidering Part 2

Once all of the passing thread was couched down it was time for the worst task: removing the paper used to transfer the design.

I have it down to a bit of a science at this point, but that doesn't make it terribly enjoyable. Using a chenille needle, scratch the paper to rip it. I start with the large open sections, and tear up whatever I can with my fingers once the needle starts the process. If you tear smoothly and slowly a lot of the lines will act as perforations and large chunks will easily be removed. (That part, at least, is satisfying). Next, I drag the needle along the lines in where the pieces are smaller, so they can be removed from the stitches without pulling on the threads too roughly. Once we get down to truly small pieces, tweezers are the way to go. I have some that are bent at the end have a thing and rounded end, so I can use them to poke and grab all sorts of things without damaging the stitches.
But oh, does it take awhile.
It's amazing the difference in how the piece looks once the metal threads are allowed to stand out on the velvet, rather than fading into the white paper, though.

The next item I tackled was the experimental portion of the project. I wanted to pad the Caliver's eagle with felt, which is far more complex a shape than any I've done before.
I experimented on some linen, trying different amounts of padding (all with gold colored felt) and different ways of laying the bullion down to get the right feather effect.

I ended up going with a method that had only the middle parts of the shape padded, with lots of unenclosed areas for feathering. This got a more curved effect than if I had tried to fill the entire shape with felt, and it also gave me some leeway on the edges where I couldn't completely fill the area.
Even with the reduced padding, I found it very difficult to fill the area. The curves were the hardest part - it was simply difficult to change the angles that way I needed to while still covering everything. And so, close up you can see that the bullion is cut quite irregularly, but I think the effect is fine when looking at it from a normal distance. It helps that the bird is maybe an inch and a half tall.
I do particularly like how the ends of the wings and tail worked. I like the little bits of a different bullion for interest, and that they really do end up looking feathery. The tail is also where the padding is most easily seen, unfortunately. I would reshape that if I were to do this again.

Remy's Vigil Book - The Embroidering Part 1

After finishing the design of the goldwork cover, it was time to start with couching down the lines. The lines were couched using #368 matte gold wyre from Thistle Threads and #5 silver passing thread from Hedgehog Handworks (now out of business). I happened to have both of these threads already, and chose them based on size and quantity, and the fact that I had bullion that matched their color. They were slightly different to work with. The silver was slightly thicker and acted more like metal wire would.

Sometimes I don't take the best pictures of my work, but hopefully you get the idea here.

The lines were somewhat complex to work with. In the original piece, there are two threads that are paired, but often have split apart to go create sub designs, to return to each other. Often they cross over themselves. In order to get all of that straight I printed out a very high resolution corner of the design, and drew arrows on it to follow. Even with one corner blown up to a full 8x11 page there were some more densely crossing areas that ended up being mostly guesswork.

Gold passing thread so close to completed

Because the lines were so complex I wasn't able to actual couch down both threads at once, when they were next to each other. I didn't have two spools of the thread, and couldn't begin to guess how long a second piece would need to be. Instead when separated thread returned to each other I tried to couch the second in the same places as the first, often going over both threads to give the illusion that they were couched at the same time.

Once I had completed all the gold portions - which amounted to four large motifs in the corners, and two smaller ones on each long side - I moved onto the silver. There was much less passing thread to worry about this time, and none of the motifs were particularly complicated. The flower petals were a bit of a pain due to the small loops crossing over each other and generally not wanting to go where I told them to, but it was still nothing compared to the gold motifs.

After the silver was done I outlined the last few objects with sewing thread, just so that I could find them once the paper was removed. This included the eagle, the central shield, and hilts of the swords. All of these were going to be more complicated that just outlined in passing thread, so couldn't be done over the paper.

All the passing thread

Remy's Vigil Book - The Planning

Remy Delemontagne de Gascogne has a very late period, very French persona. When I was asked to embroider a vigil book for him I went on a quest for items that fit those two requirements.
I found that the Library of France had some gorgeous book covers in EXTREMELY high resolutions.
Seriously, go visit. I'll wait.
The three embroidered covers that they had were all appropriate to the Cavalier period that Remy prefers. They're a little late for more common SCA A&S, but the style and materials were not appreciably different.

http://reliures.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cdt9x1j51/?en

http://reliures.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cdt9xvg4/?en

http://reliures.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cdt9x1jmm/?er=2

The purple one to the left is from 1637 ended up being the main source of inspiration. The original design was something that I knew I could add personalization to without too much effort, and without losing the original feel of the piece.

I knew that I needed to add the Order of Defense symbol. I also knew that I wanted to replace the religious imagery in the center with Remy's device. Other ideas that I floated around included the Musketeer symbol, the Carolingian heraldry, and the Carolingian Caliver's eagle. In the end, only the eagle made it into the design.


Both Carolingia and Remy have blue as their primary heraldic color, so I went on a search for blue velvet. I managed to get my hands on some amazing velvet scraps from fabric that had been used to create coronation garb for Thyra II and Edward III.
Similarly to previous velvet based projects, I stretched linen onto my frame and then basted the velvet on top of that so it could be stretched without being crushed. Then I traced the design onto parchment paper and basted that onto the velvet. I knew this would eventually result in the painful process of removing the paper, but it is so much easier to get the initial design down this way.
I tried to place the design so that I could use the selvage edge to make the covering process easier. This mostly worked, but I ended up with a book slightly larger than expected, so the end cover is just a smidge too small, and has a tendency to fall off. This is, luckily, a thing that can be fixed.

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.

Malocchio's Order of Defense Elevation

At the East Kingdom A&S and Bardic Champions event an elevation that was near and dear to my heart occurred.
Lottieri Malocchio is my for-reals brother, and also was my cadet brother. And I was extremely excited for his elevation to the Order of Defense.

I had a lot of awesome people help me out on the planning and execution of the vigil and regalia.
The outfit, the cloak, the collar, the vigil book. So many banners. It was amazing.

Closeup of black and goldworked cuffs

Unfortunately, I didn't think to take a picture of his actual vigil room, festooned with banners.

                                Closeup of the collar





I made the glove, and so you'll have to wait for another post on that particular piece of regalia.

Thank you to everyone who helped by making things or running errands or bringing food. Thanks especially to Remy Delemontagne de Gascogne, Llewellyn Walsh, Catalina de Valencia, Liadan ingen Chineada, Sorcha Dhocair, Isabel del Okes, Katerina Folconer de Lanark, and Cecily O'Donell for their skills, time, and effort making the whole day come together.

Photo by Akamatsu Katsumoto

Peerage Cloak - Finished

It only took a few months.Well. At least it didn't take a full year.
Back in February I started planning a piece that would go on a peerage cloak. The recipient already had the peerage (and two more!), he just wanted to add the Order of Defense symbol to the cloak that displayed his Pelican and Knighthood. He also wanted it to be shiny.
I'd gotten somewhere in April, but as so often happens things came up, and I had taken on a project a bit more time consuming than I expected ( I would never.)

So we swing around the fall, and I decide that this cloak is getting done in time for the Rapier K&Q tournament, which lights a fire under me.

In the last post, so long ago, I had decided how I was going to create the chain. I was still a little worried that the wool would look unfinished next to the gold thread, but once I had the outline in place I think things really came together. And if I had tried to do the whole thing gold I think I would still be cursing about this project sometime next year.

Next I sketched in the swords. Even though my plan was to applique the swords on separately, I wanted to make sure they were the right size, so I just embroidered them directly inside the chain. I left off the extra fiddly details - the cross guards and swept hilts. There was no way I was going to be able to applique something that thin, so those were going on afterwards.
In hindsight, I think I should have just done the swords entirely on the cloak. I was trying to avoid pokey bits on the inside of the cloak as much as possible, and also trying to not carry around 20 lbs of fabric when I could help it, but I don't think it saved me any real time.

At this point I cut everything out with tiny scissors, leaving about a quarter inch of fabric around the edges. Then I spent so much time fray checking the back and tucking in all those edges. (So Period!) Because the edges were so narrow and the linen so fray-y, in that way only linen can be, I didn't trust things to not unravel if only the applique were holding it together.
I think this made the actual applique easier, but I'm not really sure.
The swords were thin enough that they were a real pain, and there wasn't enough embroidered material to fully cover the white on the edges. So in addition to adding the small details, I went around all the borders in a matching red wool. From a distance I don't think you can tell it's there, other than that the lines look much cleaner.

The sword blades are wobblier than I would like, but straighter than some other straight lines I've done in goldwork. Overall, once it's worn, I'm happy with the effect. Trying to take a nice picture of a pile of wool turns out to be kind of difficult.

Of course, I don't have a picture of it being worn, so you'll have to take my word for it for now.

I'm super excited to have this done and in the hands of its owner, and I learned a lot for next time.

Peerage Cloak - The Embroidery Part I

I may have bit off more than I could chew, but luckily I haven't had an angry triple peer come busting down my door yet.
Partially it is time consuming - lots of plunging gold ends and such - but mostly I got all procrastinatey on it. But no more! I have projects coming down the pipeline, and I'd love to have this done before I need to worry about them (note that seems quite unlikely, but a girl can dream).

So, the padded links on the chain are done, and I am looking into ways to make the other links work without having to completely fill them in with gold. It looks nice to have it fully gold, but I don't think I have it in me to do.



So I tried some things out, and decided that I liked the look of satin stitch. I am using wool because all of the rest of the cloak is in wool.


I'm working with every other link at the moment in case I decide to mix things up or run low on thread. Better to make it look planned!
Eventually everything will be outlined in gold, but that is the last step - if I play my cards right, I can do it in one piece!

Peerage Cloak - The Planning

I've been asked to add the Order of Defense symbol to the peerage cloak of one of the East's premiers of the order. He just so happens to already be a Knight and a Pelican, and have a lovely wool cloak with those two symbols appliqued on the back. He wants to have a 6 inch MoD symbol added to the front of the cloak. And he wants it to be shiny!

Working on an already existing item of clothing is a new challenge for me. All the more so because it's giant and heavy and already has gorgeous embroidery on it. I had choices before me - work directly on the cloak, work on another piece of wool and applique it down, or work on another piece of linen and applique it down. I knew that the owner wanted the background of the symbol to be the base cloak, so with the applique options I would be mostly just be appliqueing the border - the swords for the actual symbol would be a different story.





I had sketched a wide variety of potential designs for the border, and a chain was chosen. This was one of the less complex designs, so that was nice. I didn't think about how much geometry would be going into drawing it to scale. I also got to draw it twice, because the first time the chains were too thick and completely overwhelmed the swords.

The swords in this picture are just a sketch to get an idea of the balance - they will end up thicker in the final version. The chain, however, is exactly what I will be tracing onto linen.

I drew a truncated chain first in order to test my goldwork plans. The solid link is padded by a piece of felt, because I thought that bit of dimension would look neat, and because it was an excuse to work on padding. I may regret this when I have to cut out 16 tiny pieces of felt, but we'll see.
One thing I learned from this practice piece is that I should plunge the ends after each line instead of when a space in entirely filled. It's hard to plunge where you intend with all the extra threads in the way.

MoD Gloves - Finished Product

After a many month saga - starting to plan the things in March of 2015, and then embroidering like mad until Donovan was given his peerage on May 2. Including doing nothing on the day of except sit in front of his vigil tent attaching the cuff to the glove.

Note it was singular. As the day drew close I started concentrating on only one glove, since only one was needed.

When that glove went out and was thrown down (onto a pillow, thanks your majesty) it still wasn't done. But it was done enough. But definitely not enough spangles.

And then I took a break. I was maybe, just maybe, a little tired of looking at these.

But little by little over the intervening months I have finished up the second glove's embroidery, attached it to its cuff, and then filled out the spangles on both of them.

The last spangle was sewn on on 1/16/16 on the way to 12th Night! I entered them into the populace A&S competition, and got a fair number of votes (although nowhere near the people who tied for first - and they totally deserved it!)

Of course, as I was sewing on that last spangle I noticed that I had completely missed outlining one of the small leaves. It was suggested that I come up with a Deep Reason for it.

I definitely need to stop looking at these. All I see is faults!

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.

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.