Poppy and Acorns - Petal Bag

 This is the Poppy panel of the petal purse. I thought that I would do a six petal poppy to go with the acorns. A number of embroidered poppies have only four petals, but others do have six. The acorn caps are detached buttonhole and the nuts are a couched gimp.

The fabric that I used for the background is a Dupon silk in off white.  I ran the warp from side to side so that the more distinct weft with the slubs runs up and down. I mounted the silk with a white cotton backing in stretcher bars to keep both layers of fabric taut while stitching.

To transfer the design to the fabric, I placed a tracing of the design on tissue paper on the silk and then thread basted through all of the layers with a pale gold silk thread. Later I carefully tore off the paper so that the design on the silk was there but not too bold. It was easy to cover or tear out as necessary.

When the design was on the silk, I could finally start the embroidery. I mainly used satin stitch or soft shading with added stems of outline stitch. During this step I also added the flat elements of the design like the couched gold tendril and the snail. The snail is silk covered bullion wire that it couched in a spiral.

It was fun to be able to start the color embroidery after all of the work getting to this point.

Corn Flowers and Strawberries - Petal Bag

 

The second panel of the Petal Bag features Corn Flowers and Strawberries.

As I continue on my stitching journey to finish the bag, here are a few more of the steps from thought to completed article.

Once I decided on the basic shape of the bag, I started on the drawings of the sides. It is pretty rough now but lets me know where I want to place the flowers, leaves and other bits. It is at this stage that I go back to my research to figure out final shapes of flowers and leaves. I try and get the number of petals correct and look at colors.

After the design is refined, I pick colors and decide what elements will be stitched on the base fabric and which ones will be cut out and added later. I try to make enough notes on the drawings so I can remember what I intended to do.

I have a wonderful selection of Chinese silk threads. They are a filament silk that is 2 ply and slightly twisted so they are easy to use as is or split when I need a finer thread. I mostly used them as they came with from the skein. There are 100 colors and each color has 5 shades. In some of  them, the color range is a bit more evenly graduated but it does give me lots of colors to choose from anyway.

Each skein is cut into meter long pieces, then braided and folded in a paper to keep it from getting tangled.

After the drawing are finished, I make copies so I can make a mock up of the bag. If the piece is three dimensional then making a roughly finished object will tell you if it is the size and shape that you want. It is much easier to change the drawings than to try to tweak  the stitched pieces.

I decided that the bag would be too big in the size that I had drawn so I made it smaller and then made another mock up and really like the new size. It was much better so I rescaled all of the drawings in the new size.

Petal Bag - Daisy

I am going to post my stitching journey from idea, through design and finish for my petal bag. This is the Daisy panel of my bag. It is stitched and ready to finish.

I belong to a stitching group that has Zoom meetings twice a month. We discuss almost everything that has to do with stitching and sometimes have a project that we work on. 

We have just finished a long discussion on color and design but I am sure that we will revisit parts of that in the future. Even though we have a common idea for a project, none of us end up doing anything that resembles each others work. One of the projects that we started was the frog purse. I finished mine and have posted it on this blog under the 17th century label along the side.

A while ago, we started discussing stitching a Sweet Bag. These bags were very common in the Tudor period. They range from the very fancy bags that held the Great Seal of the King or Queen to plain ones that would hold sweet herbs in a clothes press. Of course, the ones that have survived are the fancy ones even though we have a number of records of many others that existed but are now lost.  Below are just three of some of the fabulous examples.

I had already done an 17th century bag and wanted to do something else so I started to do some research and decided to make a five sided petal shaped bag. There are many variations on the shape and decoration. In India they can be called Lotus flower or potli bags. I created a Pinterest folder of Sweet bags and other fancy bags so that I could get some inspiration. They are on my Pinterest page at carolynswebb.

I also did some research on flowers and motifs that were popular in the Tudor period and started to narrow down my choices of flowers. I did a thumbnail sketch of one of the sides and decided that was the direction that I was going to go in.