Historical Sampler – A SnowDrop to the Rescue

I needed to find a motif to cover over the waspish bee. It was a bit tough, because there was the main area of his body, then legs extending for quite a distance.

I found that my main influence was the bulk where the body was – I needed something to cover that entire.

Thanks to my trusty “The Medieval Flower Book”, Celia Fisher, (and a quick check that it was an English native species at The Checklist of English Native Plants), I decided upon a SnowDrop.

  (from Ms Fisher’s book)

I had needed to select a three petal-ed flower, because there wasn’t room for 4 petals – the gap in between the petals, if there were 4, would show some pen marks, unless the flower was absolutely huge.

I decided to pad the flower in felt for several reasons

• the ground was a bit stretched in places from unpicking and I didn’t want to embroider directly upon it
• ensure coverage of the black penmarks
• to improve the appearance of the satin stitching to come

(see “Some Notes on Satin Stitch” by Mary Corbet, http://www.needlenthread.com/2008/11/some-notes-on-satin-stitch.html)

- the “pattern” I needed to cut from felt. As the snowpea would be in white, I used silver felt (I didn’t have any white felt) :

- the felt sewn in place :

Now, I’ve never seen flowers actually encroaching upon each other in Elizabethan/Tudor embroidery – but this is a ‘fix’ and I’ll just have to go with it.

Fitting the felt around the Campanula was easier than I expected, thanks to the tiny amount of stretch that felt has.

For the petals, I am going to use a slightly (ever so slightly) green tinged cream in DMC, single strand, to satin stitch over the top. I did start stitching in Madeira Poly cream – but it was so shiny, it made the flower stand out too much.

I may decided to do those ‘hoods’ in a different stitch for emphasis.

I’m going to have to stamp on any inclinations to do needlepainting here. The embroidery of the period was 2 dimensional. The ‘hoods’ cry out to be needlepainted.

I may also layer the centre more. I outlined it in pen because the edges were a bit hard to see – the felt ‘met’ too well in places.

I’m not overall happy about this motif – but I think it’s the best I can do in the circumstances. The size of the flower is balanced by the Dusty Pink Rose on the other side of the sampler.

Ear infection update – oh, gods! I haven’t been commenting on people’s blogs much – sorry. I’m hoping to be well enough to go to Sally’s on Christmas Day.