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. 

Jelling Wolves/Dogs

After I embroidered the Mammen face embroideries, I did embroidered decorations for ThorvaldR's and Tofa's coronation garb. The original idea was to have black dogs with grey details on Tofa's garb and grey wolves with black details on ThorvaldR's.

We decided to go with Jelling style and I took inspiration from the cup found in Jelling that gave the name to the art style. It can be dated to 958/59.

Here is a line drawing from the original cup:

I changed it a bit to fit the required shape and to make it more dog/wolf -like. I tried to make the dog's ears a tiny bit shorter and it's teeth smaller than the wolf's, but I'm not so sure that it will register, as the difference is only marginal. This is the result which was then transfered on the fabric by tracing it against the light from a window.

I embroidered the animals with spun silk thread on the silk fabric that was to be used to make the garb. I used stem stitch. First the dogs:

Then the Wolves:

And as I still had time, I simplified the dog a bit and mirrored it to form a decoration for Tofa's apron dress. The result:

I wish I had made the dogs bite each other's tails.

The garb was constructed and sewn by Lady Alyna. And here is the happy couple... errr... Their Majesties.

I'm in no mood to write more documentation details at the moment. If you want to know my sources, feel free to ask for them.

Finishing things that should have been finished long ago.

This project has been going on for some time, since I put it down many times to do something else. I had wanted to make a present for Freiherr Gottfried for his Baronial investiture, but I didn't have enough time to finish it before the said event. His Lady, Baroness Magdelena got her present at the investiture, but he got his quite a lot later...

So What to make for a landsknecht? Not much to embroider there. He had some time ago finally got his coat of arms registered, so I decided to make him a banner with his arms on it. I managed to do some research on the subject, with Gottfried's and Magdelena's friendly assistance (He did not yet know about the project at that time).

A heraldic banner:

Landsknecht banners were very big and they look to be very thin as well. I think silk painting would be a better way to make them, but there are examples of heraldic banners made with embroidery or applique, so I felt it safe to stitch it, and so I did. I was a little worried about the weight of the seams, though. Would they effect the way the banner flyes?

An embroidered and appliqued heraldic banner at the Museum of Miltenberg, Germany. More information to follow soon.

(Pictures by Annika Madejska, 2011)

An embroidered and appliqued heraldic textile at the German National Museum in Nuremberg, Germany. This is an example of a medieval original textile of unknown origin. It was regarded as Charlemagne's flag before it was sewn into a tabard during the 19th century

(Pictures by me, 2012)

On to the planning stage! So, how was his coat of arms? HOLY COW! Couldn't he pick any more unstitchable arms? Well, I can do this. I hope.

                   

So. I started with ordering some samples from Silkkikauppa.fi, since I don't know much about silk and needed to touch the fabric to decide what type would be best. (Nice service from them, by the way. Unfortunately their site is only in Finnish.) They didn't have the colors I needed of the fabric I picked (Crepe de China), so I ordered enough of white and dyed it myself. I used modern commercial dyes.

The grey was tricky, since I had to figure out how much of the black dye I should use to get a light grey, but I managed to do it, to my great surprize.

It was horrible to cut the silks into so many small pieces. I had no idea if it's going to work at all. I stitched the top part together with the halberd on it first, that wasn't too bad... I had drafted a paper pattern of the banner to know how the background should be constructed, and stitched black and yellow striped strips of required lenghts. The seams are sewn with back stitch and seam allowances layed flat with whip stitch. The sewing thread had to be switched from black to yellow everywhere where the fabric color changes, to have the right side of the banner neat. The seam allowances have to be folded on the black side of the seam, or it will show through the yellow.

The strips were then connected into a rectangle, the top part was added and the Griffin was sewn on. That was an adventure in itself, since tracing the animal on the very thin silk was not easy at all, and I almost run out of fabric since I wanted to cut him as one piece. (That is why his other leg is smaller than the other.) The Griffin was first sewn on with a running stitch, then the edge was sewn on the background with whip stitch, the running stitch was removed and the background cut out behind the Griffin. After that I secured the cut seams on the background fabric and sew the edges on the griffin again with whip stitch. The detail lines on the Griffin are painted. I had thought of stitching them with thin strips of the black silk I had saved from cutting the seam allowanses, but in the end I got lazy and ditched that idea. Then it was "only" cutting the edges streight and hemming them. Due to the strip construction, the edges are on bias, so this was not as easy as it sounds like. The final measurements: 2m x 2m.

The finished banner:

(Picture by me, 2012)

He finally got the banner over a year after his investiture, but I hope it was worth the wait. He seemd to like it. And the banner got it's first test the next day, when it was first used in a very windy weather and then someone had removed it from the tent where it was put to be safe in case of rain and it got drenched during the night. Well, no ripped seams or bleeding of colors as I had feared, so all is well.

Here you can find a picture of me with the banner.

Die Schultüte, the old German tradition

My daughter will go to school tomorrow. First day, first class. She is very excited, as you may well imagine. When we moved to Germany, I learned about an old German tradition of a big bag, cone shaped, that one gives to a child on their first school day - die Schultüte. It was traditionally filled with candy and toys to make the school taste sweet. Nowadays there is more school things and toys than candy, but the tradition lives well and good. So this immigrant mom made one for her own child. They are used only one day, so these bags are usually made of cardboard and paper. What do I do? Shall I cut and paste a DIY kit which are sold everywhere? Nope! I bought a brown cardboard cone, and embroidered a cover for it! Here are the pattern and the finished Schultüte.

Serious business, this photographing thing. (Picture taken with an empty schultüte, she'll get the filled one in the morning.)

I boldly ripped the pictures from free colouring page pictures that I found from the net. As the fabric I used an old baby bed linen, that gave me a ready made nice border on the open edge. The weave of the fabric was too tight for embroidery, so I had to fight to get the needle through with every stitch. Annoying. I used split stitch and running stitch with some old fake silk threads that I had once bought from a flea market. The unicorn and the fairy's tiaras are embroidered with fake gold surface couched with white sewing thread. Every fairy princess has her own colouring.

Fabric hoarding

I visited Vienna last weekend. Thank you Racaire! It was lovely to see you again. We also went to see marvelous paintings in the "Gemäldegalerie der bildenden Künste Wien". There are pictures in Racaire's blog.

I had heard about this fabric store outside of Vienna and Racaire took me there to look at what they have. Or had, since I was there with our car and could do some shopping. !!! OMG! I went nuts.

This is the whole pile. Linen, wool and some cotton. Together there is at least 140 meters of fabric. I think that I don't need all of it, so if someone is interested, I can sell some of it.

Here are all the wool fabrics. The quality is lovely. Most of this is very thin and soft and ah so pretty. A couple of rolls are for my friends, and the big roll (17m) of black wool is for my hubby.
Here are the linen fabrics. Mostly brown, but so thin and fine! I still need more white linen to do some shirts and under dresses though.
These two cotton fabrics I bought for the patterns. The blue one will make a beautiful doublet for my hubby and the green one will be an overdress for me.

Now Im a lot poorer and a lot happier. This week will also see a new sewing mashine. *Smile*

And I got a beautiful needle roll from Racaire! And very tasty jams and marmelades that she had made herself. *Hugs* *Pusi* Thank you, Sweetie!

More practising on miniatures.

I'm trying more miniatures. Here is one and a half socks. Embroidery needles with polymer clay handles did not work very well, so I ended up buying the finest knitting needles I could easily find (size 1,5). The knitting went quite well, but I still need finer needles. I'll use these untill I can find better ones.

The miniature needles are made of polymer clay in a hurry. They need sharper points. Now they just look like spaghetti. Actually spaghetti might be good for this, if it can be sharpened. Polymer clay does not break as easily though.

The unfinished sock is fixed with glue, so that the needles won't slip away. The fifth needle can be removed. The yard ball is fixed as well.

Now I need to get more colours. The yarn is ment to be used for fixing well worn old knitware. It was the only one I could find that's thin enough and still looks like knitting yarn. Unfortunately there is not much colour choises available.