Artisan Works Embroidery Work in Progress

Blackwork Forehead Cloth – WIP1

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.

This is a floral strawberry roundel band embroidery pattern, inspired by Elizabethan English blackwork designs.  It is freely available for anyone to use, but please give credit to Sidney Eileen if you share or post it online.
This is a floral strawberry roundel band embroidery pattern I created, inspired by Elizabethan English blackwork designs. It is freely available for anyone to use, but please give credit to Sidney Eileen if you share or post it online.

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.

Blackwork Forehead Cloth - WIP2, silk on linen, by Sidney Eileen
Silk on linen, 16.5″x8.25″. The frehead cloth is outlined with a running stitch in all-purpose black thread, is stretched onto an embroidery frame, and the pattern has been drawn in pencil.

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

Project: Blackwork Forehead Cloth