Garden of Earthly Delights

Half april gingen Laura, Bertrik en ikzelf naar de Baronie van Knights Crossing om hun event Garden of Earthly Delights te bezoeken. De locatie -  kasteel Tannenberg - was schitterend, in een gedeeltelijk gerestaureerd kasteel, en we hebben ons prima vermaakt. De nachten brachten we door in een hotel onderaan de berg, en we hebben ons zeer gelukkig geprezen met die keuze. Terwijl de overige eventgangers op een toch wel erg koude, stoffige en tochtige (weliswaar extreem sfeervolle) kasteelvloer sliepen, genoten wij van centrale verwarming, een zacht matras en een eigen douche...

Vrijdagavond hadden we al wat gezien van het event, en ondervonden hoeveel stof er uit de vloer kwam als je er Petit Riens op danst. Zaterdagochtend begonnen we met een rondje rond het kasteel te lopen in de frisse lentezon, te dromen over het winnen van de loterij, en foto's te maken. De rest van de dag vermaakten we ons met alle prachtige arts and sciences die wijzelf en anderen hadden meegenomen om aan te werken, muziek maken en bijkletsen.

Hierbij wat foto's van Bertik.

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.

Tent decoration

We're discussing tents and decoration, so here are some pictures of painted tents. One day we'll get our act together and paint our pavillion so we can camp as kings...

More info on painted tents is found on the site of House Greydragon, here: http://www.greydragon.org/pavilions/othertents.html

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)

Fun stuff

I'm off to go to a concert of 14th century music by Ensemble Fortuna, which I'm looking forward to. It takes a while to get there on the train, so I'm taking Anne Hagens book on Anglo Saxon food with me to start preparing for our Anglo Saxon feast at the beginning of next year.

Tabletweaving

I'm learning double face tabletweaving, and am working out plans to make garters. In the pictures are the front and back view of the design.

I put the design in Guntram's Tabletweaving Thingy, which was surprisingly easy!

I'm using DMC Petra cotton no. 5. The band will be 14 tablets wide. Each garter will be made up as follows:

3 cm solid color for attaching the buckle

2 cm solid before the design starts

a set of 3 leaves

2 x 2 picks solid

1 castle

2 x 2 picks solid

a set of 3 leaves

solid color until the total length of the garter is 71 cm

I've calculated the length of the warp for weaving 4 garters at a time, since that lenght will hopefully be managable to set up.

4 x 71 = 284

20 % loss = 57

50 cm

Total lenght 391 cm

Hm, the total length on the sheet I worked it out on comes to 4.40 m, why?

We've decided to switch the weft color, to see the effect and to mark the beginning and end of each garter. If one color weft looks much better than the other we might change our minds about this.