Historical Sampler – A Butterfly

Before embarking on a trellis stitch frenzy, I wanted to do a motif that would take a little bit of time, as a change from doing lots of little motifs with different stitches (ie the strawberries)

Although this is a good candidate for semi-detached work, I’m working the wings simply in satin stitch, because there are plenty of other semi-detached motifs to come.

Edit : The shape of the butterfly was taken from http://www.artsmia.org/viewer/detail.php?v=12&id=4797
(on the left front 'door' of the box)

The colours for the wings are taken from a butterfly in Plate 6 from Muriel Baker’s “The Art of Raised Embroidery”

The body is taken from plate 156 (page 110) of Jane Lemon’s “Metal Thread Embroidery” – a stumpwork piece from the V&A Museum.

The stripe down his nose, and the line under the body are in gold thread.

I think the body ‘compartments’ are in trellis stitch, but I’m going to do them in detached buttonhole stitch. Each one needs to be done separately with it’s own reverse chain stitch outline.

I’ll do the buttonhole stitch with a tight tension, to get good ground coverage.

I don’t know what stitch the gold threads are done in. I’ll have to sit down and compare some stitch diagrams to the picture. (unless someone could tell me?)

Here he is, so far. with a few adjustments in the outline of the body to match Lemon’s outline:

I had a look through pictures of various insects last night, and decided that appropriate colours for the body would be the dark copper I’ve already used (in the stripes for the wings) and an oxide green. I’m thinking about maybe doing the head in red, but we’ll see.

The dark copper I’ve used is more of an old gold. The snail isn’t too far away, with it’s dark copper body in raised stem stitch, and I didn’t want them to match.