Back again

Yikes! It has been already over a year since I updated this last time. Luckily I have now material for few updates, so yeah....

I moved to Germany about 16 months ago and I have not been as active here as I was in Finland. But I have managed to finish something. Yay!

I have been mostly embroidering and doing paper-crafts, like cards an decos. I have forgotten to take photos of most, but here is few pics about the things I made...

4ath Birthday card for a friend. DMWC cardstock with sky pattern with hand-drawn deco from Pergamanata

I have also been painting miniatures for my partner. These are not finished yet, but they already look better than his attempts to paint Mechs ;)

 

Golden purse for Queen

This summer (2014) I was volunteer working at turku's medieval market. Mainly I was making/fixing costumes, but somethimes I did other things (like painting signs etc). My biggest project was to make fancy purse for the Queen. I decided to use 2 different shades of gold embroidery yarn and golden yellow satin. First plan was to make fancy metallic frame for the removable purse, but things changed and I made non metallic purse.

  

All started from deciding the model and materials. Here is 1st plan with wannabe-frame for the metalwork. Embroidery took far more time than I had anticipated, so I needed to make fast changes to the design on the last day.

 

Here is the finished purse from back. Golden tassel was added on 1st medieval matrket day.

 This is closeup from the embroidery. Colors in this pic are quite off, but you still see, that I used 2 different shades of gold. Althou the other gold looks like silver in this.

 

This is the purse with belt. Purse is slightly bigger than normal female hand/palm. So the actor of the Queen could put her hand inside easily. The embroidery design is from late 15th century (taken from Tailor's assistant book, if i remember correctly) and I changed every other leaf with acorn.

  

These two pics are detailsfrom the finished bag. That black bead thing is rosary. For lining I used one fabric scrap I found. One of the finest male tunics is made from the same fabric. I hope no-one notised that queen and highest commander were wearing same fabric.  You  never know what kind of romance rumors it could have started ;-)

Silky celtic embroideries

Few years ago my SCA friend ordered 2 tunics from me. I made the tunics then and promised to embroider them, when I have more time. 1st embroidery I made over a years ago and I have shown you pictures too. This one was the second, and it took freaking long time to finish. It was my 1st time do embroider on silk, with silk. It took me over a year to make, as I got so frustrated all the time and I had to have a break from embroidering quite often.

I had to darken the background ARMANI silk and I did it using very strong tea and salt. It was real experiment, but the color stuck pretty well.

 

The 'board' was combination of 2 round images, 2 square ones and 4 tiny triskels between the bigger images. Both big images are from my iron-on book ( found at Amazon.com ), and as my customer wanted doglike creatures, these 2 images were selected. Triskel image was my old rubberstamp, so I just stamped the right places and embroidered top of the mark.

Materials:
Background: natural white ARMANI silk
Round image: really thin floss silk from Piper Silk
Square image and triskels: silk from The Silk Mill

I just need to finish the outlines... The man, who ordered this from me, was really excited when I showed this one. All I need to do is black outlines and then it's ready to be attached to his light blue tunic.

Celtic pattern, silk on linen
Dark pink and pink: www.pipers-silks.com
Yellow orange: Bought brom my local SCA-friend
yellow: www.thesilkmill.com
Black outlines: www.pipers-silks.com and www.thesilkmill.com
Linen : Piece grantmother's dowrylinen (from late 30's)

Comission progress

I have namaged to done quite a lot of this celtic embroidery. I also started my other commission work, but it's a bit frustrating atm. I have never done silk on silk and that's a bit problematic. Idon't like the outcome at all and I may even undo the embroidery and start again. I'll post pictures as soon as I managed to do something decent.