What you can find on a flea market?

Lovely things, these flea markets. Some of the nice things I have found on them are a bag full of linen sewing thread and a huge book, The Museums in Germany. The book changed owner for a good price of 0,50€. Inside it was a treasure! A colour photograf of an embroidered pouch I've been looking for for a little while. I have a picture of the same pouch in another book, but this time it was a photo of the other side of it! I've made a replica of the other side, and now I can do the same of the other, and combine them to a complete pouch! Wehee! Joy!

The Book:

Here's the picture inside the book (scanned with a good resolution for details):

Here's the picture I already had:

Here's my version of it:

The first one took about 240 hours of work, so I'm not counting of this being ready soon. I hope I have some of the same fabric still left somewhere, not to mention the same threads and gold!

What made me start doing hand crafts again after two years of doing nothing?

SCA group Aarnimetsä's embrodery quild introduced it's first challenge! Thank you ladies! I have had many very incoherent years in my life when I have become a mother twice, moved to the other side of Europe, learned new languages and customs and been alltogether not very relaxed at all.

And suddenly there it was! A challenge I could not pass. We were supposed to embroider small pouches to be given as gifts to SCA queens in Pensic. Dear me! I could think nothing more than embroidery for a whole week! I even skipped school to sit at home embroidering those pouches. A monster had been unleashed! Here is a picture of my four pouches. Detailed pictures of each can be found here and here.

They are made of linen fabric with cotton and faux-silk threads using split and back stitches. As my old skills came back with every new pouch, I kind of got hooked to it and now I'm seeking more opportunities to use Opus Anglicanum. Though it is very beautiful when done with care, it is not particulary useful style of embroidery when you would like to do something bigger. Anything bigger with that style would take years to make and be too expencive to do with authentic materials, meaning silk and gold.