Hatband project--Giana

Process Notes for Laurel Hatband and Medallion

March 10-May 11, 2007

 
Materials:

            *light gold silk cloth for both; this is the same cloth Gregorio used for his jerkin

            *Gutermann silk thread in burgundy (color #0267)

            *Gutermann silk thread in dark green (color #0585)

            *Kreinik metallic thread, gold cable for outlines and veins, gold braid (#12) for vine on hatband and outline on medallion

 
Timeline:

March 3, 2007—I find out Gregorio is going to receive his Laurel!

March 7, 2007—Gregorio finds out he is going to receive his Laurel.  Planning ensues.

March 10, 2007—Shopping for fabric, planning of outfit, etc. begins.  We come up with the brilliant idea of having a tall hat with embroidered hatband and medallion (embroidered pieces to be made by me) to use instead of a circlet for his elevation ceremony since this is more appropriate for his persona.

March 11-21, 2007—(Ending date is approximate) I spent a great deal of time trying to put together a pattern for the hatband.  All of the good, clear images of laurels I found were in wreath form, and I couldn’t get them to properly translate into a straight line.  I finally found a good botanical drawing of a single laurel leaf, and I used that to make the pattern I ended up using. (Pattern shown below.)  Of course, all of the wreath patterns made patterning the medallion quite easy. (Pattern shown below.)

 

Next I had to find a way to get the pattern onto the silk for the hatband.  (Close-up of silk shown below.)  It’s an odd color and somewhat uneven in texture, and none of my usual transfer papers would show up; they all just blended into the fabric.  The material was also too thick to use  the light table for transferring the pattern.  Finally I bought some Dritz Mark-B-Gone Tracing paper, and that worked out.  It was a little scary, though.  We didn’t have any extra fabric because Gregorio bought the last of the bolt, and most of it was being used for his jerkin.   I only had one long piece for the hatband and one small square for the medallion and nothing to spare, so I had to get it right the first time.  And this marking paper is dark purple.  Very dark.  It’s odd stuff, moist and spongy.  They include a piece of plastic to slip between your pattern and the tracing paper so the pattern doesn’t get ruined, but I found that I was having a hard time getting the pattern to transfer that way, so I didn’t use the plastic.  Luckily, since I made the pattern myself and printed it out on my own printer, ruining the pattern was not a problem for me.  The tracing paper takes some getting used to, but it really did work very well.  And, as advertised, it does wipe off with a damp sponge, and the marks do disappear after 24-72 hours (some of the marks lasted a bit longer, but I think they had saturated the fabric more and so took longer to dry and disappear).  After getting the pattern onto the fabric, I went over it with a regular #2 pencil (in period they would have drawn on the fabric with charcoal, but that’s a bit messier than I wanted to deal with) so I would still be able to see the pattern after the purple marks disappeared.

 

Finally, it was time to start stitching.  I began the actual embroidering in late March (around March 23).  This seemed like plenty of time to finish by May Crown.  For the hatband, I chose to do a vine of braided gold with the laurel leaves outlined and veined in gold and filled with satin stitch.  All the gold was done in stem stitch.  Each leaf is 1 1/16” long by 7/16” wide.  I had never done satin stitch before except for a few practice stitches on a piece of scrap cloth, so I had no idea how long it was going to take.  I ended up finally finishing the embroidery on Friday, May 11!  That was really cutting it much closer than I liked, but at least it was done in time for Crown.  I think the stitching took longer than it should have even using satin stitch because the material was actually more loosely woven than I realized when I began which made it very “shifty”, so the threads kept slipping out of place, making my outlines uneven, and generally causing me trouble.  I was six or seven leaves in (there were 56 total) when I realized that the project was probably going to take much longer than planned.  Then there were issues with the gold threads being difficult to work with, as metal threads often are.  This also added more time to the project.

 

In retrospect, I would have been much better off backing the silk with a piece of lightweight linen and transferring the pattern to the linen instead of directly to the silk.  This would have made the transfer process much simpler.  It would also have done away with most if not all of the problems I had with the cloth being “shifty” and making the leaves wobbly.  They also came out slightly different sizes and widths because of the way the thread shifted positions in the loose fabric.  I think adding a stabilizing fabric would have made the embroidery much better, and it would have made it go more smoothly and quickly. 

 

May 12-15, 2007—Time for a rush job on finishing the medallion.  I chose to use split stitch for this part of the project, and I backed the silk with linen and transferred the pattern to the linen instead of directly to the silk.  Everything went smoothly and quickly with no difficulties.

 

Overall, I think there ended up being about 90-100 hours of work on the stitching of the hatband.  Each leaf took around an hour to fill in addition to the preliminary outlining and then the outlining in gold.  It does look very pretty in the satin stitch, but I don’t think I will plan any more large projects all in satin stitch in the future, at least not if there’s a deadline involved.  The medallion probably had 10 hours of stitching time total. 

 

Hatband pattern was created using this drawing from http://trees.stanford.edu/images/fig216.jpg:



Medallion pattern was taken from this image from http://www.revelation-illustrated.com/gallery/2654334/photo/thumb/30736_laurel_new.jpg:

I adjusted the image slightly by creating a gap between the two leaves at the top and elongating the pattern to create an oval shape instead of the circle shape shown.  I also took out the ribbon.

 

Image of silk cloth used as the base for both embroideries:

Hatband, embroidery complete but before finishing:

 

Medallion, embroidery complete but before finishing:

Hatband, detail:

Medallion complete, on hat:



Hat, completed:


I will probably be putting bigger images up on one of my photo sites at a later point.  I will post the link when I do. EDIT:  Never mind; I didn't realize that you can click on the photos and get a bigger image.  My first time posting pics on LJ.