Brickwork in clothing

I found an example of someone who charted some brickwork from the Anna Meyer dress from Holbein’s Darmstadt Madonna (painted between 1526-1528). Very cool. Up to this point I had mostly seen wall hangings and pouches, and trim on a priest's stole.

References

Along the way I thought that I'd post some references pieces in the embroidery genre that I am working on. Unfortunately most of the pictures that I can find are black and white, though the color pictures that I find show brightly colored embroidery with a pretty good variety of colors. In cases where I can get color pictures, I have stitched the patterns in matching colors.

Master Wymarc's web page got me started on this and I found the book "Niedersächsiche Bildstickereien des Mittelalters" by Renate Kroos. It was dumb luck that the book was available through the Georgia library system, since there aren't that many copies. The book has tons of black and white plates of brickwork examples from Germany and information on them. It is in German though, so its been slow going for me. Many of the patterns charted are coming from plates in this book.

The New York Met has a large piece in the Cloisters:
Altar Frontal, late 14th century
German; Silk on linen; 63 x 62 1/2 in. (160 x 158.8 cm)

Lady Sabine Berard has taken lovely detail pictures of the piece which can be found here:
http://www.silverdragon.org/SABINE/cloistext.html

Pattern #3

Pattern #2

Pattern #2:

Pattern #1

I've started charting and stitching some of the patterns, so I'll try to post them as I get them done. For now, I'm playing catch-up since I have a few done already. Historically, these were silk on linen. In general, these are stitched on 28 count DMC Linen using Rainbow Gallery's Splendor silks. These are a 12-ply silk that split into 3 chunks of 4 ply each. I've been using the 4 ply chunks for the stitching.

Here is pattern #1 and a stitched sample:

Introduction

My name is Helene and I currently live in the Barony of South Downs in the SCA Kingdom of Meridies. This blog is to track my progress in the A&S 50 challenge. For more information on the challenge, check out the web page at http://artsandsciences50.org/ and the yahoo group at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AandS50ChallengeCommunity/

I am taking the depth challenge for the A&S 50 with a focus on embroidery. A while back I found "A Stitch Out of Time" and made a small project from it. The article is by Master Richard Wymarc and is a fantastic piece. Since then I've gotten into a style of 14th and 15th Century German counted thread embroidery which uses the brick stitch.

Though Master Richard Wymarc found few examples of this type of embroidery at the V&A, I have found a copy of " Niedersächsiche Bildstickereien des Mittelalters" by Renate Kroos, which has several nice examples. I have decided to begin the challenge by charting and stitching samplers of the geometric patterns used as fill in these pieces. After I get a number of the patterns done, I plan to move on to stitching up several of the full pieces.