In-Process Pictures

This represents the first deliberate departure from what I can see in the photograph. The label on the original has five vertical lines like this, but they weren’t evenly spaced. There are other examples where the artist clearly took pains to space things more evenly (even going so far as to change the width of the stitches themselves to create an even number of boxes across in one case), so I’m not sure why they didn’t do so here. Maybe they were just getting started and hadn’t figured out how to space things? Maybe they were getting near the end and just didn’t care anymore? Regardless, since I’m going to have to look at this for the next months (years?), I decided it would be more calming to my modern brain to space it evenly.

Also, the field of this shield and its repetitions are mostly bare linen. There are some areas where the white silk thread is still in place, so I believe it was originally embroidered, but the thread has pulled out. So, I decided to go ahead and embroider the whole thing white.

There are many instances on this pouch where the white silk thread is gone. Is there something about white silk thread that is more prone to breakage?

One of the interesting differences between long-armed cross stitch and modern cross stitch is that it was worked vertically and horizontally, based on the whim of the artist. I thought folks might be interested to see the lion with only the vertical stitches, to get an idea of how they would change direction.

This one is particularly interesting. All of these shields are 21 stitches wide, with each stitch skipping two threads on the base linen. The embroiderer of this pouch wanted the label (the black part) to have an even number of vertical stripes, so they had to come up with a way to do 20 stitches across instead. So, they stitched one of the vertical yellow lines skipping four threads instead of two. I thought that I would do three threads on both edges to balance it out and make it less obvious that the stripes are wider.

This actually caused me problems, because the stitches of the vertical stripes didn't line up with the stitches of the horizontal stripes above and below. This made it extremely difficult to push the needle between the threads where they met. I never would have thought it would impact it so much.

Can you tell that the two yellow vertical lines on the left side are wider than all the others? That's what the original artist did to allow for an even number of vertical lines in the label across an odd number of vertical lines of stitching.