My 14th century XL hood sample – playing with my new gold threads :)

Just as I finished sewing my 14th century XL hood sample I received a wonderful gift from my mommy Sandra in the mail: awesome silver and gold threads!

Well, you can imagine what that means – play time and a lot fun for me! There was absolutely no doubt that I had to try out this lovely threads immediately so I could report back about the threads to my mom.

I didn’t want to work the gold thread as it was, therefore I went searching through my embroidery accessories. Finally I found a nice big wooden spool with some wool on it. I took the wool off so I could apply the gold thread to the wooden spool to make the further embroidery work much easier – I am really not a fan of unraveling thread! 😉

Well, just take a look at this lovely gold thread – I think that this thread is definitely worth the extra work, isn’t it!

…and guess what! I also found a part of an old embroidery frame which I haven’t used for years. Normally this part is used to attach an embroidery frame to a table while working at the embroidery but it also seemed ideal to hold the wooden spool with my gold thread. And what shall I say – it worked great and is still attached to my small side table…

But enough about this small work details, let’s take a look at the new embroidery progress so far – enjoy! 😀

As you can see on the picture above, I already added two lines of this lovely gold thread by surface couching along the border of the hood. It took me about two evenings to apply this two lines of the gold thread to the fabric – about one evening per line. Yes, this is a quite long border which needs many many small stitches. 🙂

…and here a close up picture of the surface couching and the gold thread to give you a better idea of the work so far:

I used some of my lovely yellow silk from the Handweaver Studio from London/UK for the surface couching stitches.

…and here a close up picture of the backside of the embroidery to show you how close I worked this two rows of surface couching stitches:

…and last but not least I also have a close up picture of the ending/starting point of the two embroidered lines to give you an idea of how I worked this part:

The small white stitches are part of my seam treatment of the grey wool fabric on the inside. Whenever I decide to emphasize that the sewing was done by hand, I use a different colored wool for the sewing.

This does not only underline the hand-sewing, it also makes a quite nice pattern on the outside as soon as you have enough practise in hand-sewing and your stitches are very similar in their size and placing. 😀

I am quite busy working at my next project but I just couldn’t resist to show you my new lovely silver and gold thread. 😀

…and now back to hand-sewing the white 14th century XL hood for my friends Pelican elevation – so little time to the event and so much to do…