Strawberry Swete Bag

           

Front and Back of the same piece of work.  For larger pictures, please click on the photos.

For the West Kingdom Needleworker’s Guild, I completed one piece in Blackwork. For more information about the history of Blackwork, see the article from the Skinner Sisters. The Needleworker’s Guild also has a great bibliography on the subject of Blackwork.

This is the front of my third piece of Blackwork, of which I am quite proud. I decided to do a swete bag, and base the basic design of the bag on this extant piece, from 1588-1600.

I decided to do the embroidery on 28-count linen. Thanks to a gift from the Floss Fairy, I had a skein of pink Kreinik Soie d'Alger which I was dying to try. I really believe that the floss is what made most of the difference. The Soie d'Alger is thicker than the Eterna stuff I was using, and the Kreinik was a lot easier to work.

I took the pattern from Bronwen's Blackwork Library. It is also from the Bostocke sampler. In order to fit the space on the swete bag, I needed to modify the pattern slightly. Instead of doing two repeats, I did one, and changed the direction of one of the strawberries' stems to balance the pattern a bit better.

The hardest part of the embroidery was the leaves. They were not necessarily difficult, but I had a bit of trouble navigating through the first leaf. By the time I finished with the third leaf, however, I had the pattern down.

Once done with the Blackwork, I decided to decorate the other side of the swete bag with the recipient's initials. I looked through some of my cross stitch materials, and found a pattern that I like. I then used the same pink silk floss to stitch the initial on the other side of the fabric. This is the back of the Blackwork. If you look closely at the picture, you can see that the initial is reversed.