Opus Anglicanum (eBook)

CHAPTER 2

OPUS STITCHING

Although opus anglicanum sometimes includes small areas of other stitches for effect and texture – laid-and-couched work, trellis couching and even tiny areas of satin stitch turn up from time to time – there are two stitches that define this style of embroidery: split stitch and underside couching. However, simply mastering these two stitches is not enough to make something opus.

Split stitch is used like a paintbrush, with every stitch being carefully placed and its direction being carefully chosen to express shape, light and character. Unlike later techniques such as crewel work, where the stitcher must show mastery of dozens of different stitches, opus is about knowing every subtle nuance of only the two simple techniques of split stitching and underside couching. Split stitch is covered in depth in this chapter; for an introduction to and instructions for, underside couching, see Chapter 6.

THREAD CHOICE AND CHARACTERISTICS

As introduced in the previous chapter, the stitching thread used for split stitching absolutely must be silk – and not just any old silk but filament silk: it reflects the light and plays with it to create three dimensions out of two.

Filament is silk reeled directly from a cocoon, as one long, continuous fibre only. This fibre is barely visible to the naked eye, so often several are layered into one thread for stitching with. Generally speaking, throughout this book, four strands are used for the stitching of drapery and other background details such as floors, but only two are used for the faces, and this echoes the practice used for original pieces.

Layered filaments can then be twisted to make the plied threads that most of us are used to, such as the Como silk that I use from time to time. Such twisted filaments are distinguished by their high lustre; they can be used as they are, or sometimes, as with Como, I pick them apart to use as filament threads.

Most of the silk currently available, however, is spun silk, which has a rougher, duller appearance. A true filament silk comes from the traditional Chinese method of production wherein the silkworm is never allowed to hatch and eat its way out of the cocoon; because the hatching process would break the filament, instead, the worm is boiled inside the cocoon and one continuous filament is able to be reeled off. Spun silk is made either from broken filaments or from cocoons where the silkworm has been allowed to hatch and eat its way out of the cocoon, thus breaking the filament apart in the process. If you pull apart the individual plies of a spun-silk thread and try to sew with them, they will break because they are much weaker, being made of many short broken pieces of silk filament.

Filament silk is flighty stuff. I often tell students that this is the naughty child of embroidery threads. If it can find a way to misbehave, it will: it will snag on the slightest thing and tangle if you so much as look at it funnily. There are fierce debates about whether or not to use thread conditioners with filament, the main argument against being that they dull the shine. I don’t use conditioner on my thread, but I think it is a good tool for a beginner to use. Think of a thread conditioner as the training wheels that stabilize a small child’s bike – they are something really useful for your first baby steps, but you want to get rid of them as soon as possible, because you will look rather silly if you keep using them into your teens.

The best way to make sure that filament silk behaves is a bit of self care. File your nails. Use a hand scrub once a week to slough off rough skin. Moisturize. Then moisturize again. I am very keen on a solid hand-cream bar that I keep in my sewing box that is made from beeswax and cocoa butter, because it goes on quite dry and doesn’t make the threads sticky if you use it on your hands and then embroider straight away.

Como silk

This is a filament silk that has been twisted and is sold as ten- and twenty-five-gram cones for weaving and as spools. I use this for many different things, and it can be pulled apart into four or sixteen strands and then used for embroidery. It can be used whole for underside couching or making decorative braids for edging and finishing.

Woad-dyed silk from The Mulberry Dyer

This thread is now sadly discontinued. It is not quite as shiny as some of the other filament silks, but it has more body and sits on the canvas more like the original silks do.

Spun silk

This is made from broken silk-filament fibres and so is less shiny. I keep two weights of this in stock: 60/2nm, which is roughly of the same thickness as sewing cotton, and 30/2nm, which is thicker – the spun-silk thread in the earlier photo is of the 30/2nm weight, which I bought undyed and dyed myself by using woad.

This spun-silk thread is used for stem stitch and the upper layer of trellis couching, where it provides textural contrast to the shine of filament silk (see the ‘Trellis couching’ box in Chapter 12), and for assembling finished projects (see Chapter 16). However, it is not used for working split stitch in opus anglicanum.

DeVere Yarns 36 thread

This is another twisted-filament thread. I don’t use this much: it is of a similar weight to 60/2nm thread but a lot more expensive – you would use them both in much the same way for working opus anglicanum.

DeVere Yarns 60 thread

This is a very loosely twisted filament, basically ten threads of their 6-count thread. This is interchangeable with the DeVere Yarns 6 thread, if you want to be lazy (which I very often do); you can pull a strand of this 60-count thread apart and have five two-thread strands ready to sew with without having to mess around.

Tram silk

This is also sold for weaving as ten-gram cones or spools of 500 metres in length. It comes in a far more limited range of colours, but it is cheap and sews up quite nicely. It is slightly thicker than DeVere Yarns 6 thread, which makes the tram silk thread easier for beginners and for experimenting with. The limited range of colours isn’t really a problem; in fact, it encourages a more medieval way of working, as medieval embroiderers didn’t have hundreds of colours to choose from. When working on your own medieval designs, it is actually very freeing to limit your colour palette, as it saves time agonizing over which of thirty shades of blue to use.

DeVere Yarns 6 thread

This is a very fine, flat filament. Normally, you would use at least two strands of this held together. One strand of sewing thread should be of roughly the same thickness as one thread pulled from the background canvas, so two strands is the minimum that I would use with the fine ramie that I prefer as canvas. One strand is almost too fine to see and doesn’t give significantly better results. In practice, two strands held together are used for flesh and at least four for drapery, in line with original practice, where the flesh is always treated with more detail than the clothing.

WORKING AN OPUS ANGLICANUM PIECE

General points before you start

You need to stitch with filament silks in order to achieve the full effect of opus anglicanum; any other thread type won’t match the characteristics of true opus.

Pack your stitches closely together, then pack them even closer. If you look at an area that you are trying to fill with split stitch and think ‘Yes, I just need one more row to fill that’, you almost certainly need two, or possibly three.

Always split something. I will remind you of this so often that you will feel like you are a teenager again and your mum is nagging you to pick up your socks/close the door/do your homework. This repetition is because this point is so important.

Never be ashamed when you realize that you left a tiny gap in your stitching; go back and fix it by adding a few extra stitches as needed. But, when you do go back, always fill the gap by bringing the needle up through and down into – or splitting out of and into, respectively – the existing stitching and following the direction of the original stitches.

Be aware that going back and adding just one stitch can change the whole expression of a face: it is definitely worth doing this sometimes, to achieve the desired effect.

The initial drawing that you transfer on to your canvas is only a guideline. If you later think that the hand should be positioned at a different angle, change it. If you draw the line a bit wobbly, smooth over it when you stitch, and, if you want to sew an angel in a cowboy hat, well, yee-haw!

The colours used in original pieces and other examples of opus are again for reference only and don’t...