Arming Cap

My son has been sick, but he's been content to let me do a little hand sewing while he's cuddled up on my lap, so I started a couple of small projects. I've got fairly fuzzy hair and I get crazy Muppet helm hair when I fight, so I've needed an arming cap for a while. I machine sewed the pieces together, but then did the seams and hems by hand. It was a surprisingly entertaining project. I've been working on approaching hand sewing more like fun embroidery than a chore and I think I'm getting more comfortable with it.

The cap is made from handkerchief-weight linen, since I want it to be as light weight and cool as possible. I've got a linen helm liner, which should reduce the chance of snags. Hopefully it will hold up and if it doesn't it will be educational.

Girdle Book

I made a girdle book to celebrate my friend Gaston's elevation to Laurel. I realized yesterday that I forgot to take pictures to post about it and this morning when I woke up, it turns out Gaston had done all my work for me by taking a picture and posting it to his blog :) My slacker ways have been rewarded.

Gaston's Post

He says some very nice thing (thanks!) and I encourage you to check out his blog as well. He does great work in armor, brewing, music, and general SCA puttering.

St Martin's panel progress

I've uploaded some progress pictures of the St Martin's panel to Flickr. The above picture shows the current state of things. I've finished the color fill stitching and I'm working on the outlining.

The next thing that I have to think about is painting on the faces. Lady Sabine Berard has generously posted some pictures from the Cloisters at the NY Met. In them, she has a great close up of a painted face from a piece that came out of the same convent: picture. In this particular piece the face is done in "encroaching Gobelin stitch" and painted on, but on the St Martin's panel they just used a regular brick stitch as the foundation.

Unfortunately, I haven't read much on what kind of paint was used for the face. From scribe's guild I know that gouache paint is a good modern equivalent for scroll work, but I'm not sure for painting on embroidery. I'm still looking for sources though, so if anybody knows anything, I would be most grateful.