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/

Sometimes it feels good to redo things

 In my last update I posted a photo of where I was with the embroidery and that I was using double couching.

That was basically me trying to convince myself that it looked good. Tonight I finshed the first shape, and I simply wasn't happy with it. So I simply took away the double couching thread, and it hurt to do that when I only have a limited supply of the thread. I tried to save as much as I could, but a lot of it was destroyed. 

Without the double couching the gold thread lies much smoother and I'm much happier with it, even if I now have to figure out how I'm going to make sure that the threads don't move when they don't have the extra couching thread on them.

Still it actually felt good to rip out and go back to what it was before I did the double couching.

The golden cap -preparing the fabric

 So the major challenge in my quest to recreate the specific look of Kristina Gyllenstierna from the 1516 altarpiece in Västerås is to figure out her headpiece.

I have crawled the the web and literature to find anything similar. The only other examples are two tomb monuments, made from the same unknown master as this sculpture. As mentioned in my earlier post I have decided to go for a standard wulsthaube to get the shape of the headwear, even if it's going to be a bit smaller than this really big headpiece. One day I would like to work with worbla or foam to make an exact replica, but that wouldn't exactly be even close to historically accurate.

Then I found this altarpiece from 1506 by Lucas Cranach

Altarpiece with the Martyrdom of St Catharine: St Dorothea, St Agnes, St Kunigunde [left wing, recto]

1506, Lucas Cranach the Elder, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden

The woman to the left has a headpiece that from a distance gives off a very simlar appearance to the headpiece of Kristina Gyllenstierna. This is also the time when I want to scream at my 12-year old self to take note of all the details when you see a painting. I'm pretty sure that I must have seen the original when the family passed Dresden and spent several ours at the art museum. Thankfully though the wonderful Digital Cranach archive  has scans in HD, which lets you really zoom in on the paintings.

It's obvious that the decorations come from gold embroidery, and that is the reason why I have spent quite some time this year practising gold embroidery, and now I'm waiting for my material to arrive. Under all the embroidery there are the diamonds made up from dots though. They continue under the embroidery so they must on the fabric itself. I couldn't find any fabric with that pattern, so I would have to do it myself. After having totally overthought it, I had plans to basically build a full printing set up, I realised that the easiest way of doing a fairly similar pattern would be with a marker pen.

I started out with testing a few pens on a piece of linen. After having bought and tried several pens that were marked as metallic gold I was really disappointed. They looked like rusted brass, and the dots were just black and dirty. So I decided to go wtih a regular marker pen in gold colour instead of metallic gold. This is of course not an historically accurate way of making the dots, but here I think the end result is more important thant the technique. For a more accurate way I could probably have found some kind of gold paint and used a stencil or something.

I continued to test the pen on the fabric to figure out a good size for the diamonds. In the end I thought that diamonds that were 4 cm wide and 5 cm high looked the best.

I then marked the whole fabric with lines and dots 4 and 5 cm apart, so that I got a grid. I used a frixion pen so that I could easily erase the lines and dots, but had painted the shape of the hood pattern with a non-frixion pen so that wouldn't be disappear.

For each diamond I marked out the top, bottom and side centers.

I started with marking out the dots on the side center, and then I simply freehanded the other dots. This makes each diamond a bit unique, and I don't mind that. They are not totally similar in the painting either.

It was a matter of marking and painting, marking and painting. In all it took med around 1,5 hours to finish it all.

And here is the final result - linen fabric with diamonds built up from gold dots.