Finishing the gold hood

 It's time to finish up my posts about the gold hood.

In my last post I had just finished couching down thread in all the big segments of the hood. There was still some empty space before the edge though, but not enough for a full motif. Here I had to do my own design and chose to add a pomegranate motif. It's a very common motif, and it's in embroidery on the Cranach hood that I have also used as inspiration.

I really ran out of thread when doing the pomegranates. The ones to the left were finished as I wanted to, but with the right ones I had to use viner gold passing, four threads, instead of the jap gold, two hreads, and I used pearl purl 2 and more copper pearl purl to fill in the motifs.

To fill in more of the gaps I added several enamel buttons, that are copies of finds from Sweden in approximately the right time period, I also added some rows of freshwater pearls.

The backside of the embroidery is really not beautiful. But whenever I've heard experts talk about medieval embroidery, they keep saying that the backsides are bad, and that they are even glued down. Well if glue is historically accurate, why not use it. I've painted the whole backside with regular wood glue, watered down a bit to make it easier to brush over he threads. The white tape is holding the shanks of the buttons, so that they don't wobble around.

Then it was on to finish the hood so that I could actually wear it. I lined it in a layer of quite heavy white linen, but only the areas under the embroideries. The back was just the outer linen fabric, pleated into place. The hood is held in place by two ribbons tied from just where the embroidery ends, behind my ears, and the ribbons are tucked up under the hood so that they are not visible.

When I wore the hood I'm covering it with a silk gauze veil, since most portraits of embroidered hoods show a sheer fabric over the hood.

Photo by Johan Falkenström - https://www.instagram.com/jfalkenstrom/