Silence doesn't always mean that there is nothing.

Excluding the Or Nué post, I have been silent for a long time now, but I have not been idle. I have made a pouch for a friend and some smaller works, but mainly I have been concentrating on my family, studies and one bigger project. I have read and researched and read and researched for my dream project for a couple of years now. I have slowly been collecting the materials for it and early this year I finally decided to climb the mountain and started the stitching project.

I don't have much to show you at the moment, since there has (again) risen a need for a couple of smaller projects that will disturb the bigger one, but there has been some progress. I don't expect this work to be in a wearable condition for at least a couple of years, so there will not be much to share yet, but eventually there will. And what am I making? A Byzantine Garb.

Here is a sneak peek of the first stages of the first embroidery, first of the two clavii on the shoulders. Silk on silk, the pattern was first traced on the silk with a charcoal stick and then stitched with red thread for durability during transport. The pattern is based on an excisting Byzantine silk brocade fragment in the Vatican (Museo Sacro: Hunters on foot silk, M40).

A pouch in Or Nué technique

This post is also the documentation I wrote for this piece of embroidery.

A pouch in Or Nué technique

I decided to embroider this pouch because I wanted to show the orders in which I am a member of in a fitting way. I decided on Or Nué, because it was a technique that I hadn’t tried before. Or Nué has always seemed too complicated and hard to learn, but I wanted to try it. I decided to make a pouch because it would be a useful piece where one can showcase embroidery. The two sides of the pouch would give a perfect reason to make two different patterns on one piece. The most important reason is of course the fact that a pouch is not a big item and can be finished in a reasonable time, even when the technique used is time consuming.

The Panache pattern was pretty straight forward, I only used the prettiest heraldic feathers I could find. As the embroidery technique is fairly late period, I could take later period heraldry to take the feathers from. The Lindquistringe dragon is a bit more complicated. I took inspiration from the existing embroidered badge of the Order of the Dragon, now on display in the Bavarian National Museum in Munich, to make my own dragon pattern.