Seahorse Embroidered Napkin

I'm still plodding along with unfinished projects, and thankfully I have had less mistakes and muck-ups this week (although the chilly weather is making for slow handwork).

This simple embroidered napkin had been partially embroidered in purple floss, but I never recorded the colour number (a suprising mistake for me; since I know what I am like, and how prone I am to put a project down and come back to it months later). 

I wasn't happy with the stitching anyway, so I unpicked it and started again in this deep red floss.

The piece is worked in a hoop, and I used DMC cotton floss in split and double running stitches. 

I added a running stitch around the border of this thrifted napkin.

The sea-horse design is part of my personal heraldry.

It probably seems like I have oodles of these napkins (and I do have quite a few) but they are extremely handy at tournaments for covering plates of food to keep the flies and wasps away, as well as for wiping hands and covering up my camera and other mundanities.

I plan to add some decorative weights such as beads to the corners of some in the future so that they are more useful as dish covers on windy days (in the same vein as my chalice cover project shown here: Broider Me 'Bethan: March 2018 (broidermebethan.blogspot.com) ).

Scribal Work

I've been plodding along with scribal assignments lately. I've had a bit of a rough patch where I've been making a lot of mistakes and things just haven't been working out the way they should. Sewing projects needing extra unpicking, spilt paint, dye lots that don't match, projects taking waaaay longer than they should - that sort of thing. I'm nearly at the end of my current batch of scribal assignments, and luckily I seem to be also at the end of the patch of bad crafting luck I've been having also.

 

Murphy's Laws of Sewing

 

Two New Banners for Baronial Device Banner Project

A relatively recent project that I completed (and forgot to post about) was the creation of two new banners for my Barony's device banner project.

My Barony has a series of banners in Baronial colours that record the registered heraldry of the populace. It is a great chronological record of our members, and the banners are a really striking decoration at events.

Some of the banners at an event in 2017 (I think). There are two junior navy, two red, two white and now two navy banners.

I got involved in this project when I was quite new to the SCA and have made many of the devices over the years for people who did not have the skills or time.

In the last several years I have been responsible for managing the banner project, and we recently ran out of room on banner six. I created two new blank banners using almost ten metres of navy cotton fabric and cotton lining. They were edged in red bias binding. I copied the previous style and previous construction technique of hand sewing the bias on with a combination of running stitch and back stitch. That was quite a lot of hand sewing! I didn't mind it though, because I find hand sewing quite soothing when there isn't a deadline looming.