Hemming Populace Banners

I've been busy, but there's not lots of pretty pictures for hemming six banners. I snip, clean off threads, roll the brocade, stitch, and repeat. I am currently hemming banner number five, so there is an end in sight. Well, an end to hemming anyway. I will still need to cut and sew the loops to for the banners to hang from. I've also begun plotting banner stands, so that I can display them. Progress!

Populace banners

I've been on a banner kick lately and I had some left over brocade, so I decided that Giant Sparkly Banner needed some friends. The project was born and I am working on six populace banners - two each for Ansteorra (kingdom), Bryn Gwlad (Barony), and for Hellsgate (shire with Bryn Gwlad). These little banners have been moved around my house stacks several times in various states of completion, but finally I got a picture of all of them together. Last night I finished backing them all with canvas and now all I have left is gobs of hand sewing to roll the hems and close out the raw edges. Anyway, here they are, starting to look fairly spiffy!

Production on these was fairly simplified since I was aiming to actually finish them this year. I wanted a look that would complement Giant Sparkly Banner, but they aren't competition pieces, so bring on the sewing machine and quilter's hacks! The black is a sturdy cotton velvet with a very short pile. It's a very pretty velvet, but it's best feature is that a test swatch passed the ironing test - on high heat. That means I can do all sorts of fun things with it.

First, I fused a tear-away stabilizer to the back of the brocade. The brocade is pretty, but it would never hold up to the abuse I was about to heap out without some help. I cut out the and fused the velvet charges to the brocade using Heat-N-Bond. I wanted something that could pass for hand embroidery at a distance, so skipped the traditional fusible+satin stitch option. My machine has a nice blanket stitch option, so I used a narrow blanket stitch and stitched down the edges for each of the charges.

Any banner that is going to sit next to Giant Sparkly Banner is going to need a little pizazz, so I dug out my left over gold twist. I couched the gold twist around all of the edges by hand, on top of the blanket stitch. The result is nice. The gold twist makes a nice contrast border for the velvet and adds some sparkle, while also covering up any stray machine stitching that wasn't exactly flush with the edge of the charges.

I left the fused stabilizer on the back, which made the stitching for the couching quick work. I didn't need a hoop or frame, since my tension was perfect. The lightweight tear-away stabilizer didn't hamper my the needle work at all. Below you can see the back of the pieces with visible machine work in black and hand work in gold.

Overall, this was a great approach to get maximum bang for my time. I started to feel like the project was dragging, but then realized that there were six of these things! After the embroidery was all finished, I ironed out the pieces, squared them off, and cut the canvas backing. This part was all classic quilter's skills, except I had a stack of brocade, which is less cooperative than quilter's cottons. Again, I found that you can never have too many binder clips and there is always a use for more. After taming the wild brocade and squaring things off I managed to actually hit my target of a width of 12 inches for the banners (although some of my hems will be very small). In another stunning development, when I finally hung them up, the charges are all lined up correctly. I kind of held my breath on that one, because no matter how much you plan and check and re-check you always fear that something weird would happen. Will one be out of vertical alignement? horizontal alignment? upside down? I kind of just stood there and stared for a bit when they turned out just fine. Hooray!

Giant Sparkly Banner on Tour

Giant Sparkly Banner made a trip to Kingdom A&S and to Bryn Gwlad A&S competitions. Above are pictures of it in action. Below is a picture of the banner completed getting ready to go traveling.

My display used two trays: one for materials and one for technique. The materials tray contained my tools including scissors, needles (in the needlebook), and a laying tool. I made skeins with the threads I used in the green, the passing gold, and the gold twist. Finally, I included a sample of the gold twist lucet cord, which I stored on a thread winder.

The second tray displayed the various steps for the embroidery. The two fill patters were embroidered in a series of steps

1. Foundation: The foundation layer is the white interface foundation which was cut to design and ironed on the brocade. In the sample the white layer is shown at either end of the swatch.
2. Laid green stitching: The green threads were laid down for full coverage of the foundation. The stitch length for the green thread is much longer than most embroidery stitches because it will be couched down later. You can see in the picture that the green thread drifts and wiggles where there are no layers above it.
3. Laid gold stitching: The next layer was gold passing thread embroidered in laid work pattern, which was on top of the green embroidery. The letters were embroidered in open laid work using a grid pattern. The leaves of the wreath was patterned after Gabriel's wings from an alter frontal so the only laid work was the single gold twist thread along the center. The top half of the sample shows the laid gold threads before they are couched. There is still some shifting of the gold and green threads and the sheen is at a uniform angle.
4. Couching:After the laid work is finished, the gold pattern (grid or wing/leaf) was couched down. For the grid pattern on the letters, each intersection is couched with a single stitch of gold passing thread. For the wing pattern on the leaves of the wreath, the center gold twist is couched with a longer stitch at an acute angle. The leaves have fewer couching stitches, but the stitches are longer and cover more of the green thread. The bottom half of the stitching in the sample shows the grid with the intersection couched down. The couched intersection gives the work a more dimensional look which adds more sparkle. On the far right end of the swatch you can see the grid couched down without the green layer, to show the couching stitches more clearly.
5. Outline: The final step for each embroidered motif was to add an outline of couched gold twist. The sample shows the gold twist couched on the bottom of the foundation layer. On the right side of the swatch, the end of the twist has been plunged (pulled through the brocade) as is normally done on finished embroidery. This is a good example of why the foundation and brocade combination work so well. The foundation provides stability for the couching stitches, which the looser weave of the brocade allows the much thicker gold twist to be pulled through to the back without creating tears or runs in the weave. The left side of the swatch shows the gold twist left loose on the top, which is what it looks like while it is being couched. You can immediately see that the biggest challenge here is holding the thread in place for stitching, while trying to keep the twist and prevent fraying of the top threads.

Lucet cord edging

I finished the Giant Sparkly Banner a while back, but still need to finish posting progress pictures. Here's a short summary of how I finished the edges using lucet cord. First I prepared the seam by turning in the edges, pinning them, and ironing them flat. Here is a picture of the stitching in progress so that you can see the front layer (the yellow brocade), the back layer (the blue linen), and the gold lucet cord.

Use the first stitch to pick of both pieces of fabric along the folded edges.

The second stitch then goes throughout the middle of the lucet cord. When you pull tight it will close the seam with the cord on top.

I stitched the edges closed with my gold Gutterman thread and they edges look very nice. It's a very simple medieval period technique to decorate edge seams.

Above is an example of a pouch with braids along for seam finishing. The braids on this one look like finger loop braiding. Dutch circa 1617/1622

Above is another good example - Dutch?/Italian? cir cal 1580+

Fun!

I took my children's "mouse battle" hats to the Jagermeister event this weekend at Ffynnon Gath and I won the A&S competition! Wow! Above is my lovely scroll which was painted by Grishka. I had a great time at the event and received a lovely gift basket that included a gorgeous lucet!

I've been fiddling around with the lucet and now that I've got the hang of it there is a string pile starting to accumulate. It's the perfect nervous fiddle for truly lazy days! I also thought I'd post a picture so that you would know that I haven't forgotten the giant sparkly banner. Most of the update pictures have been more of the same, so I haven't written much about them, but today's is a happy update - I am almost finished with the letter fill! Yes, that really is the last two letters of "Society for Creative Anachronism"

Giant Banner Progress Pics

I was out sick last week, so I missed quite a few days of stitching. Bah! Anyway, I started feeling better this weekend and have resumed stitching. One row down, two to go! I fear that the pictures really don't do it justice - the couched gold is very, very sparkly.

I was chatting about the banner this weekend and this project has been really interesting for a couple of reasons. The first big surprise was the depth you get from just one piece of paper for the letters. The first layer of each letter is laid green thread (just DMC cotton floss). The single layer of paper adds a surprising amount of dimensionality to the stitching. I suppose it makes sense when you look at the perspective of the actual thickness of the thread. I just hadn't really realized how much you could get out of so little.

The second layer is the laid criss-cross of gold thread. I am using a gold Gutterman machine embroidery thread for durability/washability/cost/etc. It's a very smooth thread and very nice to work with. Finally, I couch down the criss-cross at the intersections, which adds the texture and sparkle. It's very satisfying to finish a letter and see it glitter.

Giant banner

We have a demo coming up soon that will be hosted at a local museum, so I wanted to make a Really Nice banner. I've been futzing around with the design for a while now and finally called it good this weekend. Due to a slight clerical error said banner is the size of my couch. Ahh, re-size by height or width - does it really matter? (Yes) Anyway, I got it all laid out and the design transferred and took a minute to bask in my success. All the letters in a tidy row. I was itching to get started, but only had just a few minutes after dinner last night to actually start on the stitching. Below is a picture of the first stitching - laid green thread with gold couching. It sparkles! I love the fill, now I have to figure out what I'm going to outline with. Somewhere in the fussy planning over the last couple of weeks I have this hazy idea of a fringe and that the outline will match the fringe. Ahh well, I have a lot of fill stitching ahead, so it's not an immediate crisis.