Well, it looks like the No’s are running significantly ahead of the “yes”s in the “Shall I put in a silver background” poll, if you include the votes in the comments.

The major objection is loosing the motifs amongst the bling.

An alternative ‘simple task’ would have been to couch some gold around the outside of the piece to give it a plain border, but unfortunately there’s isn’t enough room within my stretcher bars .

So – we’ll leave the ‘simple stitching task’ issue for the moment.

I decided yesterday that I’d reached a good finishing point on my black dress (it still has to be fitted but I need an extra pair of hands for that), and I took up my Historical Sampler once more. YAY!

The first thing I did was frog out a trefoil that has been stitched badly, and that I didn’t like the colours of. While I was doing it, I put a nice big hole in the ground material.

What a mess! I’d originally had a lot of trouble with the outline of the trefoil, which you can see.

A BIG mess.

I needed something large that would cover all of that over.

I found this :-

Unfortunately, I don’t have an accession record for it – but it’s obviously from an historical item.

I decided to do that, with a few modifications.

Firstly, the felt, to cover up that horror!

Much nicer, although now I’m committing the cardinal sin in Elizabethan embroidery of having motifs touching. It touches 4 (oh well, in for a penny…..)

I’m really going to have to build up the bird to make sure it stands out below it.

I then covered the red felt in a single strand of red YLI embroidery thread in satin stitch.

I find that placing the felt so that it’s just a tiny tiny bit inside the drawn outline, then sewing from the drawn outline on the linen– rather than coming up through the felt – seems to help my stitches not to slip around the place on this dimensional surface.

Next, I put some Grecian twist around the outline of the Pomengranate, and also in a semicircle one third of the way down the fruit.

The original has a row of purls in this curved middle section. There was no way I was going to deal with that many small (very small –  3 or 4 mm) purls in my version.

I decided to do battlement couching instead, using Lurex gold thread and red YLI silk to couch it down. If the photo were focused, you could see that it looks quite pretty- with a lot of red and the gold gleaming through.

The next thing to do is to add some more Grecian twist in a curve below the battlement couching to finish off that section.

I don’t feel I can include the original’s random chips of purl inside or around the Pom – it’s just too small, and the space around it too crowded.

I excluded the gold thread figuring 8’s in the body of the fruit for the same reason, although I would have to have done that.

I just have the crown to do. The question is – to purl, or to couch? I’ll have to see how fiddly I feel like getting when I sit down to do it. The crown is 1 cm high at it’s highest point. It will also be outlined in a gold twist thread.

I’m thinking – the two threads of the outline will cover the two outer small sepals, leaving room for purls only in the centre one.

Perhaps couching (with the gold outline) would be better. It would look more coherent.

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Obviously, I’m feeling a lot better, to be able to do this. How long this will last, I have no idea. Another day, a week, a year? Here’s hoping for a year!

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