18 November 2016

The finished brick stitch purse

Finished brick stitch purse
Finished brick stitch purse
Originally uploaded by Catrijn.
Well hello there! Things have been happening, but not making it to the blog. I haven't had any large clothing projects to encourage me to post, and a fair bit of my crafting time has diverted to metalwork and enamel.

The last picture of this was just the embroidery, flat. The next step was lining. I fully backed the embroidery with a lightweight linen, raw edges to the inside, before folding to a pouch shape. Then folded in half, the sides were whipstitched together going through both lining and embroidery ground. Those edges were then covered in a tubular tablet woven-edging (4 cards, threaded for wide diagonals and set for a chevron). That edging continues up across the top edge opening. In theory, the edging could also be the initial stitching holding the edges together, but I was happier having that already lined up perfectly and stable. The carrying string and the drawstring are both fingerloop braids. The handle string is a six-loop braid ( A grene dorge of vj bowes -- c. 1475), using full strands of the embroidery silk. For the drawstring, which needed to be thin, I split the silk from 2-ply to single, and then used the divided five loop braid to make two matching strings. And finally, tassels. There's a whole skein of silk in those three.