Friday, October 23, 2015

Royal Gloves - hummingbird

My commission for gloves for the Royals of Ansteorra has been delivered, so now I can post my pretty pictures!  The gloves were for Sven II and Antigone II and were given in court a couple of weeks ago.

I had a lot of fun with these, since I had a lot of latitude for design work.  I decided to go with a Viking theme, since they both have some great Viking kits.  I wanted to use their heraldry in a way that maintains the artistic aesthetic for the Viking age.  I spent quite a bit of time futzing with the designs until I found something that I really liked.  My inspiration was largely woodwork and stonework designs from the Viking era.  Here is the hummingbird for Antigone.

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The ground fabric for the embroidery was a nice Dupioni silk.  I drew the hummingbird on the muslin that I was using to reinforce my silk and then basted the design to show on the front.  Below are the front and back showing the tiny basting stitches.  

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I wanted a little bit of depth on the hummingbird, so the arc of the wing has a layered stitching underneath the satin stitch.

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The stitching is in Rainbow Gallery Splendor silks, which is a spun silk.  Both Antigone and Sven have white charges on their devices.  The Viking aesthetic would have been lots of bright colors.  I decided to take a bit of artistic licence with the colors.  I chose a color palette with lots of colors, but then picked extremely washed out versions of the colors.  My goal was to see lots of colors up close, but for the charges to look white from a distance.  Here's a fuzzy progress  picture of the stitching.

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Here's another progress picture for the hummingbird.  The fill stitches are a variety of colors and the outline is all in white.

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I pulled some threads from the dupioni and used them for the eye embroidery.  And here is the finished hummingbird!

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