Goldwork: Student Projects

Happy Monday to all my old and new readers! There has been a surge in newsletter subscribers recently thanks to Mary Corbet's excellent blog on copper monogram stencils. And I've been featured in Nordic Needle's newsletter too. Very grateful for this #communityovercompetition attitude!

As promised last week, today I will share with you the projects my goldwork course students started last week. Please keep in mind that they only had five days to plan, frame-up and start stitching their projects! First up are Erika's Madonna and Monika's Iris. For the Madonna we took an actual picture of the wooden figure and transferred it onto Zweigart Newcastle linen. The Madonna will be mainly stitched using the or nue method with Japanese Tread #12 and an array of Chinese flat silks. Her face, hands and baby Jesus will be silk shaded using flat silk. The Iris stitched by Monika actually comes from an older Inspirations issue. It is a terrific piece to learn basic goldwork techniques. And we even found a quicker way to do the burden stitch filling of the petals that does not involve plunging :)! Can you figure out what it is?

Next up are Kristin's Christmas ornaments from Hazel Everett's excellent book on goldwork embroidery. At first she wanted to do a much simpler design, but as I know her to be a good stitcher, we plunged right in. And the outcome is really good! So much so, that we all decided to spent Christmas with her in Berlin this year :)!

Mari-jan came with a very beautiful stylised design of an iris. It is exactly the kind of design I would like to stitch up myself one day. We decided to not only use a variety of metal threads, but also to incorporate silk shading using Chinese flat silk. As Mari-jan is also a student of Chinse Embroidery with Margaret Lee, she knew how to handle these 'threads-with-a-personality'. Follow Mari-jan on Instagram to see this project develop: @marijanbakker.

And last, but not least: Sabine's version of the peacock clutch bag! This is going to be such a stunning piece when finished. As we could all see that happen, we ordered five more peacock clutch bags from her :)! I will try to nudge my dear ladies into sharing project updates with me. I can then bundle them up and publish them on this blog every once in a while!