White 14th century XL hood for a friends Pelican elevation – embroidery .3 – how I created the embroidered knight belt patches .1

I hope you enjoyed yesterdays short calligraphy sidestep as I am now moving on to the next step of the embroidery for the 14th century XL hood project for my friends Pelican elevation at the Meridian Grand Tournament:

How I created the
embroidered knight belt patches

Though the embroidered knight belts might look rather simple, as you can see them at the picture on the left, they still demanded a lot of thought, time and stitches. But well, you know, I like challenges and this combined Order of the Chivalry and Pelican patches were definitely a very interesting personal challenge for me as I normally rarely do appliqué embroidery.

I admit it – I actually hesitated to start this part of the project for a quite long time before I decided to finally give it a try. But I was already short of time for the final embroidery part and therefore had to make a final decision and start the embroidery without any further delay. I definitely wanted to deliver the hood in time – at any cost.

Though I already had a quite detailed idea about the embroidery itself on my mind, I was not really sure if it would work out the way I pictured it. But sometimes, when you are running out of time, you just have to give it a try and face every problem which might appear along the way…

And now let’s take a look at the first steps on my way to finish the embroidered knight belts – enjoy! 😀

The very first step for this part of the project – the embroidered knight belts – was actually a very simple one – I mounted my beloved “rolling frame” with some very fine cotton fabric.

This fine cotton fabric in “shirt quality”, as they called it at the fabric store in Vienna where I got it, has certain really great qualities which I like for projects like this – first: it doesn’t stretch and second: it has a very fine weave which doesn’t fray a lot. The very fine weave of the fabric also allows very fine stitches next to the future edge of the fabric – even if you place them very close to each other, they are still divided by several lines of thread in every direction due to the fine weave of the cotton fabric…

After mounting the cotton fabric to the embroidery frame, I created a paper model of the knight belt and used it, with the help of some pins, to cut out five basic knight belts. Good short embroidery scissors come in very handy for this step. After cutting out the five knight belt patches, I pinned the patches to the cotton fabric mounted on my embroidery frame.

…and now let’s take a closer look at the very first stitches along the outer border of the knight belt patches:

I was concerned that the silver thread alone would be too thin for the border embellishment – therefore I decided to also add some purple wool/silk thread to it. This combination not only gives a little bit more body to the silver thread – it also creates a lovely nice pattern along the edge.

And here a closer look at how I created the border embellishment along the knight belt patch:

This kind of border embellishment is actually quite easy to make – I already showed you a basic version of it here:

Surface couching embroidery –
how I made the 12th century Agincourt Heart for Bella’s elevation garment

For Bella’s 12th century Agincourt Heart I only worked with one gold thread consisting of two twisted threads – for the version I am showing you today I just added another third thread which I laid into the natural twist of the silver thread.

Now, instead of just couching every twist of the silver thread down, I couch down one part of the silver thread followed by couching down the purple wool/silk thread and then again the silver thread… And this creates the lovely purple silver effect you can see at the picture underneath:

Btw. do you see how close I work to the edge of the wool fabric? Well, the couching stitches shouldn’t be wider than the thread you are actually couching down with it or the couching thread would be too visible and might add an unattractive distraction along the edge.

…and I continued this border embellishment until I reached the bottom corner of my patch:

…and stopped! Well, I had a plan to add a little bit more body to my appliqué embroidery for a slight “3D effect” by adding a little bit of stuffing to the bottom part of the belt:

When it comes to stuffing for embroidery – please use the good stuff available at the craft store as cotton batting really doesn’t cut it. As soon as cotton batting gets wet, it forms a small ball and looks awful. You really want to use stuffing that is washable when it comes to the worst case and you have to wash your embroidery…

After stuffing the bottom part of the knight belt patch, I finished the border embellishment and continued the bottom line of the main belt part till I reached the other side above the bottom belt end. Then I cut off both threads and threaded one thread into a suitable needle. With this needle I pulled one thread after another to the backside of the embroidery as you can see at the following pictures:

And now I used the purple sewing thread with which I worked the border embellishment and secured the end of both threads to the backside of the embroidery with several stitches.[emember_protected not_for=3-4 do_not_show_restricted_msg=1]

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I hope you enjoyed the first pictures about the process of how I created the embroidered knight belt patches – I still have several more pictures to post and to write about and will try to post part 2 of this posting as soon as possible. 😀