I have started work on a new embroidery project, this one documentable as a project based on Elizabethan English historic pieces.  It’s a forehead cloth which I am blackwork embroidering.  I am also planning to make a matching coif, and between the two of them I will be able to easily cover my candy colored hair at SCA events.  This is also the first thing I am making to enter in the Caid Arts & Sciences Fair and Pentathlon in the SCA, this coming spring.

After perusing a lot of extant blackwork embroidery from the period, I finally settled on creating a strawberry design in a band form with lose roundels.  I made it a band shape so I can potentially also use it for the collar and cuffs of a matching partlet at a later date.

I am doing the embroidery on lightweight, white linen.  The triangle shape based on the dimensions of extant pieces, so it is 16.5″x8.25″.  I drew it using a ruler with a chalk marker, and then basted the outline with a running stitch in all-purpose black thread.  Then I basted and stretched the fabric into an embroidery frame before copying the pattern onto it.  The linen is thin enough that I could see the pattern through the material without a light box, and I traced it in pencil.

I did start some of the actual embroidery last night, a little bit in the lower left corner.

Project: Blackwork Forehead Cloth