Background

Here's a picture of the back of the embroidery, and the pictures I based the design on.

Pelican embroidery

Here's some pictures of the pelican in progress and just before I finished it in January. I'm quite pleased with it, the gold rapidly improved from after the first corner where it was a little uneven. I especially like the way the direction of the stitches gives shape and a kind of feathery look to the birds.

The gold couching was very, very, very slow, and pulled the original circular shape into an oval. The brick pattern was a little hard to keep up consistently. In the end I drew lines every 5 mm and skipped one to get 1 cm bricks. Then I looked and skipped 5 mm to the side depending on how the pattern fit the shape. You can see the lines on the bottom picture.

I made a few felt tip drawings to work out the shading (how much blue where). On a next bird I'd like to use a bit more blue.

The first picture with the black outline was the trial piece, and very useful, since I learned to omit the black outline... I also decided not to use a stem stitch, but split stitch on the outside of the design, and practiced the gold couching.

Embroidery!

I started a roundel with pelican to go on a cloak - to be used in November, which means that I have a serious deadline, and that I won't be able to post this for a while... Possibly this will turn out to be a practice piece if we come to different decisions on the size of the roundel and material to use.

It's been a long time since I did any embroidery, and I've never gotten much beyond small and half researched projects, so I'm a bit daunted. I expect to learn much, and sincerely hope the result will be worthy of its recipient...

For the design of the pelican we looked at the Luttrel psalter and the Pienza cope. All 14th ct Pelicans look like generic birds, with nests on trees...

This site has lots of pictures of medieval pelicans.

Based on these pictures I drew a design. I took two layers of white cotton/linnen mix and stuck them together with vliesofix (iron on fabric glue on a role) and put it in a frame.

I'm not entirely sure yet of the technique to fill in the shapes; some variation of . I'm starting with the outlines in black stem stitch (a double strand of dmc floss).

Questions/learning points I've run into so far:

-what base fabric should I use? If a strengthening layer of fabric is used, how should the layers be attached?

-a stem stitch should go in the right direction through a curve; from left to right along the inside of the curve.

-it's quite hard to do stem stitch on the frame (and I lose the tension); am I doing something wrong?

-looking at outlines; which part of the design should have a black outline and which bits shouldn't.

-should the outlines be done first (like I'm doing now, or is afterwards actually better (this is what Racaire seems te be doing on the wallhanging project)