New Project - 13th Century Pouch

My obession with wool embroidery continues. I had a bit of green wool left over from my tunic, so I thought I would make myself a pouch. I've made one using the same design for Lady Gro Torstensdotter. Although I love the colours that I used for that one, I didn't want to do a direct copy, though I might do that as well (cool to think of matching pouches half way around the world from each other!). It needed to have red and yellow, the colours of my heraldry in it, adding the green background would make it more historically accurate (the original is actually on dark green wool, not black) and also mean it was made in the colours of my Barony.

So, of course I couldn't find the original pattern I'd used and I didn't want to muck around printing it out again, so I used another old transfer technique - I put the spare black piece of wool I have with the pattern on it up against the new wool. I then tack stitched over the pattern, when complete I then drew over the line using chalk. Once the general pattern was drawn (the scroll boarder without trefoils and the central shield shape), I pulled the threads out and added the trefoils freehand.

We had to go to a BBQ, it was 30 degrees but I wanted to get started. I finished the central shiled pattern with three crescents on it in about an hour and a half and then another couple of hours on the body of the pouch. The scroll and trefoils are worked in stem stitch using Appletons wool and the red infil stitching is split stitch, again in Appletons wool.

The shield is red pure wool (from a cannibalised jacket from the op-shop). I've shown the whole piece so you can see the shape of the pocket. The crescents are worked in stem stitch in Appletons wool. The shield will be appliqued onto the background of the pouch. In the original, the shield is placed into a cut out section in the ground, in a technqiue known as intarsia. I am still deciding if I will do that or just applique straight onto the ground. There is a slight puckering at the top of the crescents. I am hoping that this will decrease with pressing. The shield section took about an hour and a half to work.