Sture Shirt Embroidery Practice
Sture Shirt #2 Collar Embroidery
Originally uploaded by Ragnvaeig. Since several of you seemed to think something was amiss with my waxed linen thread, I've been experimenting. I switched waxes and am still having the same difficulty. I think frualeydis might have been right in that the thread itself is just too soft to take to embroidery or waxing terribly well. I was able to get 20 or so stitches out of wetted thread when working on my Birgitta cap. I can make the waxed thread work if I re-spin it between my fingers after every third stitch and rewax halfway through a 40 cm length. This doesn't feel like a sustainable technique as-is, but I haven't found a local store that sells plain white linen thread, or linen thread at all that isn't part of a giant pack of colours I wouldn't otherwise use. I think I'm stuck using nasty words until I finish this particular project, as I want it to be as uniform as I can manage, and then I'll try replacing the thread with whatever I can find on the internet that's of a more solid spin.
Said current project is to practice the embroidery from the Sture shirts on handkerchiefs. (The end product set I'm hoping to donate as a prize, but it'll let me know what stitches I enjoy/can manage and give me a baseline for how to make my pieces look more like the originals.)
The handkerchief pictured, currently about 60% finished, is from shirt #2 in Nylen's Stureskjortorna. I did up the hems with a four-sided stitch having drawn out two threads with a stuff of four threads between, each square crossing four threads per side. The edging is what I'm using the waxed linen thread for; each triangle grouping is done with one coral stitch skipping four threads, one bullion stitch of four wraps, and one French knot. Doing this in a finished shirt, I'd use a thinner linen thread and skip more threads for the coral stitch.