Doodling with goldwork

As part of my 1520s courtgown I want to try doing goldwork embroidery. Usually I am the kind of person that just orders stuff and then get on with it. When looking around for material I realised that there are a lot of different kinds of gold threads to work with, and I just didn't know what would work best. For once I decided to order a sample pack and do some test embroidery to try out the different techniques.

I ordered my sample pack from The Golden Hinde in the UK, since I couldn't find a supplier in Sweden. For tutorials on how to do goldwork I have followed Sarah Homfray's embroidery channel.
For inspiration for the embroidery I have used different ornaments that I have found in 16th century books, embroideries and pattern books.

I started out with simply doodling some leaves and vines. I used a frixion pen to trace the pattern on the wool that I'm doing the embroidery on. All the gold threads are couched in position.

I added a freshwater pearl. It's the kind of pearl called a nugget, so the irregular shape is great for the 16th century, but it was a bit hard to make the decoration around it. I also started to add some pome granate ornaments.

At this stage I decided to explore some more techniques that were used in historical embroidery, so I added some appliques.

The appliques were accentuated with gold leather, that was also in the sample pack.

I tried to make a majestic bird, but it looks more like a duck. I also added a new cluster of pearls and removed my early doodling, since I wasn't happy about it.

So far I'm mostly happy with the appliques work, and the bird (absolutely not a duck) is really cute even if it didn't turn out as planned. I'm using the different kind of gold threads about randomly, it simply has to do with how much I have of each kind of thread. So far I think my favorite threads are the pearl purl, used in the pome granate motifs, and the roccoco thread that makes up the main stem and leave of the first ornament. I'm not too happy with the copper coloured twist, but there was a lot of it in the sample pack so I'm using it to fill out as much as possible. We will see what happens next, I actually find it hard to be totally creative and come up with something that looks good by myself and isn't just a copy from something else.