Embroidered cuffs and collar for a 16th century shift

 After I had finished the cape I realized that I had done 11 out of the 12 HSM challenges, and I really wanted to finish all challenges this year. The challenge that I hadn't done was "go green glow-up", where you should take an old project and upgrade it to your current standards, rather than just making something new.

I decided to redo my smocked shift from 2018. At the time I had just started to dip my toes into 16th century costuming, and one thing I didn't like was blackwork. So instead I did a smocking pattern with white wool and some extra freshwater pearld.

Since then I have learnt to appreciate blackwork a lot more, and this last year I have restarted my interestest in cross stitch. I decided to redo the collar and cuffs, but with an accurate pattern, and in black silk instead of the white wool.

Instead of pattern darning, like I had done on my last shifts, I decided that it would be a lot easier to get a nice looking pattern if I did the cuffs and collar as a separate piece and then sewed it onto the shift. The patterns that I chose were both from a patternbook printed in Augsburg either 1527 or 1529, and it is available here. 

I started with the cuffs.

For the thread I'm using a very fine black silk yarn, it's more like a thick sewing thread than a yarn. I picked up a 1000 m roll from etsy last year when I wanted to try and do pattern darning with it. For the cuffs I went by it line by line, the full length of the cuff. The second cuff was much faster to make, since then I had learnt the pattern and I didn't have to count all the time. 

For the collar I decided to do the embroidery segment by segment. Above you can see that I have finished one segment and started on the second. This made it a lot easier and I got quicker and quicker when I got more familiar with the end result for each segment. When I stared the embroidery on the cuffs I also used a magnifying glass, but for the collar I had gotten so used to the size of the stitches that I didn't have to do that. One issue is that this embroidery is a lot narrower than the wool embroidery that's on the shift now, so I will see how I solve that. To make the embroidery a bit wider I added a straight line of stitches above and under the main embroidery, which is something you see on a lot of pattern.

Here are the finished cuffs and collar, now it's only the small issue of getting them onto the shift.