White 14th century XL hood for a friends Pelican elevation – embroidery .4 – how I created the embroidered Pelican patches .2

In my last posting – “White 14th century XL hood for a friends Pelican elevation – embroidery .4 – how I created the embroidered Pelican patches .1” – I showed you how I created the two different kinds of golden beaks for the embroidered pelicans.

After this step and and after finishing the rest of the embroidery for the pelicans, I decided to add even more embroidery. Instead of removing the base fabric in-between the knighthood belt and the pelican embroidery, which didn’t have any appliqué or other kind of embroidery, I made the decision to fill this empty space with lovely purple silk/wool thread.

To create a good surface cover for this empty sections, I decided to execute the filling in one of my favorite medieval embroidery techniques – Klosterstich. This step took quite some time but on the other side it also added a really good contrast to the white wool fabric of the adjacent appliqué embroidery. And last but not least it also spared me from even more work and many worries concerning the next step.

Now, that the pelican & knighthood embroidery was finally finished, I still had to prepare the patches for their last transfer to their final position on the 14th century hood as they were still part of the fabric mounted on my embroidery frame.

And this is what I am going to show you today – how I prepared the patches for their final appliqué – enjoy! 😀

And turning the embroidery into patches in order to apply them to their final position is really quite easy as the following progress pictures will show you:

My very first step, as you can see on the picture above, was to cut out the single patches. While I cut out the patches, I left about 1,0 cm / 0.5 inch seam allowance along the border of the embroidery.

You could actually also leave less seam allowance when you are working with such a fine cotton fabric as base material but the closer you cut it along the edge, the higher the risk is that this material could actually break open and fray. And as soon as it starts fraying, the weave of the base fabric would loosen and therefore endanger the embroidery you placed on top of it. Therefore I recommend to leave a good amount of seam allowance when it is possible.

As soon as the patch was cut out, I started folding this surplus fabric to the inside and pinning it into place. You might have already encountered the small cuts I made from the outside to the inside into the seam allowance – all cuts are made in a about 90° angle to the embroidery and just stop a little bit before reaching the embroidery.

This small cuts allow to fold the fabric to the inside without producing any bulky fabric folds as the fabric can freely spread to the sides as you can see on the picture underneath:

I continued to cut, fold and pin until none of the base fabric was visible anymore: [emember_protected not_for=3-4 do_not_show_restricted_msg=1]

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…and here a picture of the backside of the so prepared patch:

Now I just needed to pin this patch into place and add the very last stitches along the border to connect the patch with the hood fabric. To also add a nice decorative element to this stitches and to sufficiently cover up the border of the appliqué, I decided to use the Surface Couching technique again – the same technique I already used for the silver/purple appliqué border embellishment for the knight belts and pelicans.

For this purpose I used two strands of purple wool-silk thread and couched them alternating with purple sewing thread to the border of the appliqué patches as well as the hood fabric underneath. This was for sure not the fastest technique but it solved two problems at once – it connected the patches to the fabric of the hood and also covered the not so nice looking borders of the appliqué patches. 

This was already the very last step concerning the embroidery for my 14th century XL hood project for my friends Pelican elevation but still not my last posting about it. I have some more pictures of the finished hood on my tablet and will post them as soon as I have the time to prepare the pictures for the blog – hopefully tomorrow. 😀

Previous postings about this knighthood & pelican appliqué patches for the 14th century XL hood project for my friends Pelican elevation can be found here:

• … – how I created the embroidered knight belt patches .1
• … – how I created the embroidered knight belt patches .2
• … – how I created the embroidered knight belt patches .3 – embroidered belt buckles!
• … – how I created the embroidered Pelican patches
• … – how I created the embroidered Pelican patches .1