The 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.