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/

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.

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.