Ivan Matfeevich Rezansky (John Beebe)As described in the last two installments on this project (see part I and part II), I had created an Or nue depiction of my arms, and decided to mount it to some very nice maroon wool I had to make a pouch. Now that the goldwork was done, it was time to affix it to the wool and complete the pearling and goldwork around the outside of the Or nue.
My first step was to mount one side of the wool outer pouch material to my slate frame. I read a few articles online with some suggestions on how to do this:
- Dressing a Slate Frame for Embroidery, at Mary Corbet’s Needle and Thread blog
- Dressing a Slate Frame to Embroider on Silk, at Genoveva von Lubeck’s SCA blog
- Technique to Quickly Mount Embroidery on a Slate Frame, at a blog called Baroque Embellishments
The last one in particular had a great suggestion about using pins along the hem of your fabric to help distribute/support the tension on the fabric across the width of the piece. I ended up using this idea. I first attached a linen strip to each of the two end pieces, and then affixed the embroidery fabric to the linen strips using a herringbone stitch.
I then pinned the hem along the sides, and inserted the side slats. As I laced the sides to the slats, I used a backstitch just inside the pins. This really helped keep the sides straighter as I put tension on the width of the fabric. Once the two sides were laced up, I pulled on one of the end slats to stretch out the length of the fabric as much as I could, and then inserted the cotter pins to maintain that tension. In the picture below, the longer laces at the top and bottom are the sides of the work (ie, the frame is rotated 90 degrees). The fabric has been hemmed over about a half inch along each of the sides, and the stitches were run through the hem.
Once the fabric was framed up, I measured out the center point, and used it to center the cut out goldwork on the wool, and pinned the work into place.
I then used the same green silk to applique the goldwork onto the wool ground. The edge of the goldwork was a bit rough looking. I also noticed that in a few places, the white linen ground under the goldwork was peeking out from under the applique. To fix these problems, I took a pass around the work in split stitch. Even though the edge will eventually be covered up by pearl purl, I liked how this really helped smooth out the work and made it look a bit more finished.
