Lutrell beasts – the little fiddler

Excuse the huge expanse of white background wool, but I can’t get wordpress edit to crop for me on ipad. I keep meaning to get an app to make wordpress work better on this device, but there are so many and I get confused.

I tend to think of three creatures as cow-footed whatevers, but I think they’re meant to be satyrs. It’s just that after years of looking at Ancient Greek vase paintings I find it hard to think of anything wearing a shirt as a satyr, especially given the lack of, erm…certain satyric attributes.

He’s smaller than his predecessors, only about five inches tall whereas catslug is about twice the size. I think I prefer working slightly larger, to be honest. I found the hands quite difficult and copied the original illustration very closely as I’m no musician, I’m still certain I got the fingering a bit off though.

Woad, madder, cochineal (the sixth wash is a brilliant flesh tone) weld, cutch, logwood and compound dark brown.

lutrell catslug

I’ve signed him as I’m thinking of doing two or three small pieces and framing them, because at certain shows it might be worth having something for sale. Not that I’m putting etsy type halfwitted, cost of the materials times two prices, I’ll be pricing them at a fair hourly rate and anyone who deosn’t appreciate what they’re worth doesn’t deserve one. I’m not what you’d call a motivated seller, it’s more a disinterested experiment. Obviously I’ll be getting him nicely framed.

I was a little worried at first that the two shades of madder on his stripeswere a bit too bright and contrasty, but the couching lines really helped to blend them

Furry houseguest

Gratuitous kitty spam

Hobbes is staying with us this week. I think he and Branny are best mates.

collar again

I think the secret to getting pictures of this thing might well be to get Gareth to take them!

This was taken in daylight in the conservatory, and its by far the best so far. I didn’t work on this very much last week because I was running round sorting lots of stuff out for the workshop, but I put in an hour or so a day to take my mind off other things.

I got the border around Granny,

and did a green man as well. Greenie isn’t from Adel church but from a few miles down the road in Ripon (sink hole capital of the UK, by all accounts. See, you learn stuff on this blog).

I had my doubts about the grotesque collar at first, as I’m sure I mentioned at Christmas, but I’m liking it more and more as I go along. I love the way the colours are working, and the charachter of it.

I’m mean, it’s still not going to end up on the silk dress – the palette is all wrong and I’ve used far too thick a silk for it to work with that particular fabric – but it will look lovely if I can only find the right wool to put it onto. It needs something pretty soft, I think, both in colour and drape. I’m hoping I can find something before too long.

the workshop

Yes, I know, it’s Wednesday and I’m only just getting round to posting.

The Ashmolean workshop went well. Gareth and I got there on FRiday afternoon and after struggling to find a parking space on StGiles, we finally met Jude, who was lovely. Setting up Friday afternoon and laying the room out ready for the next day made for so much less stress.

Also, Jude put Gareth straight. He’d been telling me all week that because I was working at the Ashmolean I would have to make an effort to dress like a grown up and categorically not wear my tapemeasure skirt or flowery socks. Jude laughed at him and told him all about how Grayson Perry had been there recently to lecture, and had worn a rather fetching little bo peep ensemble. On saturday I wore my tape measure skirt and flowery socks.

Gareth did help a lot though, he printed out all the handouts and made the frames for class.

It turned out that the fact we couldn’t have the big room was a good thing, as I could hang things up on the coathooks. I thought my basket of veg dyed wools looked yummy

There were seven students in all, including the lovely Ann Rippin, who brought me a lovely little set of cards with medeival textile patterns on it (luckily I had a big bag of broken jewelery for her to play with).

I had packed a tin of homemade macaroons, I always figure people are more likely to forgive the odd mistake if I feed them.

I kept the initial talk to a minimum, figuring people are there to sew. And then we split off into groups, with some people going to see the amazing Kevin Coates exhibition which the workshop was tied too, and others sitting round the big frame with me and going over the basic stitches

I cut the waste canvas up at the end of the day so everyone could take thier practice home (note to self – get everyone to write thier names next time so I can work out whose is whose)

Ann was inspired by the amazing unicorn jewel Kevin had made for his wife, Nell(her sketchbook puts me to shame) she posted some progress when she got home

There were dragons and Griffins and a turtle, and a lovely wierd little thing, some great work. I’m hoping everyone sends me picture or links once they finish.

And I started a Lutrell cat-slug, chosen because several people had problems getting thier heads round the idea of curving laid and couched work, so I sat and did the curve of his spine

The curvy spine is easy once you know how, but I’m learning with this one as well. I’ve never tried striped laidwork before, and it’s forcing me to do some fiddly curved couching.

Not sure what I did wrong/right

It’s sort if one of the accepted truths of early medieval reenactment that a true black is impossible until the introduction of logwood ( a new world dye). This has always bothered me a bit because there are some very obvious blacks on several pieces of embroidery that predate logwood, most notably the Bayeux.

I almost got black without logwood when I was dyeing for the antependium, but my blue vat ran out and what I was convinced it needed was another couple of blue dips.

Then last week, this happened, and I’m not entirely sure how…

Three skeins came out mottled browner green, and three are definitely black black Blacketty black- that’s my commercially dyed black linen bag in the corner for comparison.

See, everyone makes mistakes, and a few months ago I made one. I set up an indigo bath wanting blues and greens to go with the dyeing I did last year. (Indigo and woad, btw, contain the same dye chemical, indigotin, but indigo is the commercially exploited dye because it contains more of the compound, so for authenticity purposes it’s fine to use indigo if you can’t get your hands on woad).

I did the bath the usual way, and it looked fine, except that as soon as I started dipping wool in it was obviously not right at all. Even after a single dip- and it often takes four or five to get decent colour- everything came out deep navy blue. The blue was so deep it obliterated the underlying yellows.

I tried to correct it, left it for a bit, added more spectralite, but nothing worked and in the end I reluctantly abandoned the bath.

After thorough washing and drying the skeins I had were not only too dark but the blue was very fugitive and came off over everything it came into contact with.

Now I could have just chalked it up to experience, but wasting wool bothered me. So on Monday I threw the six skeins into a dye bath with some odds and sods of leftover dyes- a handful of madder, a bit of walnut, and couple of oak galls I found when we went out for a walk- I thought that if was lucky I’d get a dark brown. Browns good, it’s almost as hard to dye a decent brown as it is to get black, but instead I got black.

And I’m not really sure how to repeat the experiment. I am, however, tempted to keep a skein on my person at events just to wave under the noses of the nay-Sayers.

Lutrell psalter sampler again

He’s a sort of leaf tailed cat man doing yoga.

Leaf tailed cat man doing yoga

I’ve really enjoyed doing these, and will probably do a couple of small ones whilst I plan the big sampler- at the moment my main stumbling block is that I can’t decide whether I want to keep it small enough to use the standard stretchers on my frame or use the big ones.

And here’s the whole thing. I’m definitely keeping the negative space top left

Marginalia from the Lutrell psalter

Naturally dyed wool threads on wool canvas. Laid and couched work, split stitch.