A First Attempt at Historic Embroidery

With my growing interest in historic textiles, I figured it was time I started delving in head first. This is my first project. Basically, what I needed was a tough piece of material to put over my leg while I card alpaca (prep for spinning it into yarn, for those who might not know... I'll do another post about it soon!). If not... I have a feeling my jeans would be a bit worn in odd places!

Here's what I did: I cut out two pieces of canvas duck cloth fabric (it's a little heavier than regular canvas, either that or I just ended up with really nice quality stuff) about 14.5" by 11.5". I then marked a 1/2" seam allowance around both pieces so I could fold it in and stitch it together. Nice and easy leg protection! But, knowing me, the plain fabric was boring so I needed a bit of embellishment. For my purposes, it would be more of a border than anything else, but still necessary. Here is the plain fabric, before I chose a pattern:

Then it was the quest for a pattern. I did a bunch of research from different periods and cultures on my Pinterest boards lately (here is the link if anyone is interested) and I settled on a 12th century Sicilian embroidery design. After some playing around I eventually got it traced on my fabric so it looked something like this:

I really liked the contrast of the black pen (yeah, I know, I should use a fabric pencil... I couldn't fine mine). I decided to go ahead and continue with the black/cream contrast and found some black sewing thread. I wasn't sure what kind of stitch I wanted to do with it, but jumped right in with a plain satin stitch and LOVE the result! It's not super fancy, but still gets me some decent (needed) practice on a basic stitch.

Yes, I know... my embroidery skills need a lot of work. That's why I'm getting practice! :)