Embroidery Prepping.

I'm absolutely delighted to be part of the Archaeotechnika this year, and doubly so to get to do some embroidery demonstration there. I really like to embroider, but I seem to get around to it way, way too rarely - but this demonstration means I get to do it for two days straight.

Plus a little extra time to prep, because obviously if the goal is to show gold embroidery, it's no use to spend the first few hours of demo time checking the frame, inking the contours and stitching the contour lines... so that is what I've been doing here as prep.

First step, however, was to choose appropriate motifs. Something that is appropriately medieval, from the time of around 1200 (because the dress reconstruction I'll be wearing is from about that time), that has gold, and that is adequately easy to stitch. 

I ended up looking at the Ashmolean Bestiary, half by chance (because I was browsing the Bodleian Library catalogue for MSS from the timespan), and I've picked the image from fol. 47r, which is a crow.

There's two gold parts, the frame and the circular background, so plenty of space for couched work and the opportunity to do both linear and circular gold; I'll be doing the silk parts in split stitch and the contours in stem stitch. 

To show how the un-stitched thing looks, I might ink in another motif on the side, but haven't decided yet what it is going to be. Another bird? Maybe the delightfully weird neck-bird from fol. 82r?