The Lords’ Prayer – an Aramaic transliteration in surface embroidery: 3 – Completion of the lettering

Over the next couple of weeks I managed to complete all of the lettering on the Lord’s Prayer panel that I made over the summer. This is what it looked like after about twenty hours of stitching:

It was already starting to look a lot more ‘solid’, but I wanted to get the lettering filled in. This took HOURS! The smallest font has letters barely a quarter of an inch high, so each stitch had to be very precisely placed, or the letters became indistinct. As this isn’t ‘English’ (it’s a transliteration of Aramaic, the language that Jesus spoke), then unless the letters were clearly depicted, the phonetic spelling wasn’t going to be readable, so I had to be very careful.  So, all the small lettering was worked in one strand of Anchor stranded cotton, in split backstitch – doing the outline first, and then filling in with more rows of split back stitch. Most of my free time during August this year, then, was spent working on the filling in of the lettering of the panel:

The word ‘Abwoon’ (usually translated ‘Our Father’) and the word ‘Ameyn’ were going to be given much more prominence on the panel than the rest of the lettering. I did this by outlining the letters first in the same way that I did for the smaller fonts:

Then, using four strands of Anchor stranded cotton, I worked several rows of loose stem stitch in the shapes. I didn’t work right up to the edges of each shape,though, so that when I satin stitched across the letters, the profile of each letter would be gently rounded.

This shows the word Abwoon, partially done:

Next up, is the good bit – starting to add the decoration.

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