c17th tablet weave – the butched up version

I’ve used two different silks this time, a very lustrous one for the edge, and a softer, duller one for the floofy middle.

 the terminator. To my mind a little bit too thick in the middle. I think this would handle badly once its sewn onto a costume.

 

 

 Still butch, probably on steroids, but the closest to the original, I think.

 

 

 The metrosexual. nice sixpack but probably a bit too wimpy.

C17th textured braid

 For Jenny

Second attempt at the seventeenth century textured braid.

I’ve finally got the correct structure on the central pouffy bit, but as you can see it needs significantly butching up. Will try again tomorrow  and let you know. Progress though!

antependium progress

 Panel five of the antependium, progress picture before all the twiddly fiddly bits go on.

I think this puts me officially halfway through this project, as there are nine panels in all, and I’m halfway through the halfway panel. EEK! I honestly didn’t think this thing was going to take so long!

Apologies also if I haven’t commented on people’s blogs this last week, but I can’t get the wordpress reader function to work at all. I’ve treid three different computers and two different browsers but nothing will let me look at updated blogs, its very frustrating. I really could kick myself for not implenting that backup google blog I meant to do. Am hoping wordpress fixes itself soon, and if it does I will copy all the blogs I follow to a backup blog. If not I have no idea what to do.

 

Laborious stuff.

 I’m almost finished September, in fact I think I’m quite likely to finish it by the end of next week because I hvae full days at work every day, so I thought I’d best spend the weekend drafting October, just in case. I laid them all out on the bed this morning to decide which colour to use next and realised several important points.

1) This thing is going to end up being effing HUGE.

2) I’ve cocked up whichever way I arrange it. If I go 3×4 I have two sage green bits next to each other, but if I go 4×3 the blue and orange circles will go stripey. So I’ve decided that two sage green next to each other is the lesser of two evils, specially since the white filler panels will obviate that quite a bit I think. That big bit of folded white tweed to the side is earmarked for the filler panels and I think it will work very well. I haven’t decided exactly which filler panel I’m going to go with yet, but rest assured – if you think I’ve bitched about the filler on the antependium, I will bitch more about these because there will be more of them.

3) there is a slight size variation between panels. It’s nothing so drastic I can’t alleviate it by deft manipulation of filler panels and some braid (Am going to bore myself silly by doing some lengths of unpatterned 8 card tablet weave to cover all the joins between the panels. I must be a masochist), so am not too worried. It could be partly due to variance between the different wools used as ground, but it could also be due to me not using the same circular template each time because my memory is appaling. Therfore I’ve decided that when I start the female labours of the months I will sit down and cut 12 panels, marking each one with the basic circle to keep them as consistent as possible.

I’m not going to use that very bright red for December, btw, it was just handy, I’m going to use the same red as June.

I’m also not doing the female labours straight after this, I’m doing a smaller zodiac piece inbetween the two – so thats my handbag embroidery all planned for at least the next seven years.

I didn’t do it!

No really, it wasn’t me. The work in this post is by my mum. I would love to be able to point you towards my mum’s website, but she doesn’t have one. I really should sort it out for her, but she gets sort of ranty about the computer and the fact that she can’t recieve any email. I have told her this is not my fault, and that its because her net provider is notoriously crap, but ranty mum is impossible to reason with, so I gave up trying decades ago. Lets just say she’s not one of the silver surfers.

Anyway, my mum has been researching and recreating british folk dress for years, and she’s very good at it. It started with a fascination with the Northumbrian bondagers – no, that’s not as pervy as it sounds – they were female bonded farm labourers, active up to the second world war, and had a very distinctive style of dress. I don’t reccomend that you try googling “bondager” though, not unless you enjoy bleaching your eyeballs.

Mum’s latest project is a cumbrian wrestling outfit for my long suffering stepdad. For those of you unaquainted with the, erm, artform, cumbrian and westmoreland wrestling is HUGE in the Lakes and surrounding areas. Men and boys of all ages gather at agricultural shows to grapple with each other and wear sparkly embroidered underpants over the top of thier long johns (there’s not much else to do in cumbria) whilst thier women folk cheer them on. Unlike the bondagers, its not an outfit in any danger of dying out, but mum does talks on costume all over the place so she decided to do her own version for demonstration purposes. She normally gets quite obsessive over details (don’t get me started on all the bits of fabric with incredibly specific patterns I’ve tried to track down for her) but she had a bit more fun with this one as there isn’t really a hard and fast style.

I think Peter is hoping he never has to stand around wearing his black velvet underpants over the top of his long johns whilst assorted members of the womens institute giggle in his general direction, and I doubt he’s about to take up wrestling (he’s 73), although he is cumbrian – he’s from Carlisle.

 This is the chest of the top that matches the long johns. Mum chose scarlet pimpernels  – they seek him here, they seek him there – because she can never find Peter when she want’s him.

I don’t know why she can never find him, it isn’t difficult, he’s nearly always down the pub, sometimes behind the bar, often underneath it.

I think the thistles are for his scottish heritage, not cos he’s a prickly old sod, which he isn’t.

 

 

 And this is the backside of his natty black velvet underpants. Laurels for him to rest upon, and I think the wheatsheaf is for beer – Peter likes beer.

 

I promise that next time I post it will be something I did do, but I admit I’ve been a bit rubbish this last week as I’ve got a minor cold and feel a bit tired and grumpy.

centennial bloggiversary thingy.

I seem to have been working too hard. I started this blog telling myself that I would post once a week, yet here I am, fast approaching the first anniversary of said blog, and making my hundredth post already. So, unless someone sneaked an extra fifty weeks or or into the year(and oh, that would be lovely if I could have fifty weeks of irresponsible mucking about/sewing) I must have been posting about twice a week.

Although I am usually far too absorbed in my own happy little world, watching the pixies and flutterbies dancing round inside my head, to pick up on social observances, it has actually sunk into the dense pit that is my brain that folks in these parts like to commemorate these things with giveaways and such.

So I decided to try to fit in with the cool kids and do a giveaway. The cool kids will probably sneer and whisper that I’m wearing the wrong shoes, but I’m too busy dancing to the little mariachi band in my head to notice (come to think of it, that might be why they think I’m weird)

Anyone who comments between now and the actual bloggiversary (Bloggiversary is now officially a word, so there, nyah, nyah, nyah, mr spellcheck) will get their name put into an ACTUAL HAT (because I really love hats) and our official blogkitty, Branston, will choose the winners,

 Branny says that he is flagrantly open to bribery in the following forms – prawns, raw fillet steak, and belly rubs from laydeez.*

There are two prizes

1 – a kit to make the embroidery shown in my little faces tutorial – linen with the pattern marked out, silk and gold threads, beeswax, needle – you can follow the tutorial online to complete.

A piece of purple silk pile velvet, approx A4 ish size.

Both are light, so I am happy to send them overseas.

 

 

*Anyone rubbing the branny belly does so at their own risk. The management accepts no responsibility for lost fingers, lacerations, excessive bloodloss or other attendant conditions

A skeleton from my closet.

And it isn’t even halloween!

Long, long ago, when the world was young and people went about their daily business riding dinosaurs, before t’internet were even invented.

In other words, when I was in sixth form (thats seventeen or so, for those of you either not from round these parts or too young to remember what proper school was like), I first got into medieval re enactment. Except really, it was barely re enactment at all in the proper sense of the words, it was all nylon tunics and aluminium swords – we hadn’t even learnt to spell authenticity cos no one had heard of it back then. Being the smart arsed little snot I was (and some would argue still am) I think I was the only one in my group who even treid to use wool (and by wool a mean woolly looking mixed fibres) and I did my best to use something vaguely medieval looking for my embroidery.

 AS you can see, I had heard of goldwork, and translated this into SHINY!!!! SHINY!!!SHINY!!! I think it’s all satin and back stitches.

Obviously “vaguely medieval” meant celtic, I think all these patterns were taken from a book of celtic knotwork I stole from the art department at school.

My stepdad says that I should be fair to myself and point out that no one, not even my mum, ever taught me sewing, let alone embroidery, so he thinks I did pretty well.

 

 Anyway, a few years later, after the momentous discovery of authenticity, I found myself with a small mountain of pretty, but useless, frocks. Mum kept a couple (I am kicking myself not not getting pics of them too when I was over there this morning) and the rest I ripped the embroidery off and clagged them onto a green wool tunic for my stepdad, Peter, figuring that since they do the odd village fete, etc, where some kind of half hearted attempt at costume is required, he could make use of it. Someone might as well.

Mum was telling me that they took a day out to the Yorvik viking festival not so long ago, and it was much admired by some Regia Anglorum types in the pub, at which I was slightly bemused, as I’d have thought pointing and laughing would have been a more appropriate response.

Feel free to point at laugh at will, btw, thats why I’m posting them. I made some proper shite 25 years ago, I really did!

And now, if you will excuse me, I need to go and have a word with my idiot cat and try and persuade him that cats don’t growl at postmen. He’s been doing that a lot lately. If I wanted someone to growl at the postman, I would get a dog.