The decorative elements that I chose to add to embellish the Lord’s Prayer panel that I made over the summer were taken from a fantastic book called ‘World of Ornament’ by A. Racinet and M. Dupont-Auberville.
There are various versions available – including a cheap edition by Dover, which has selections from this great book. And it is ‘great’…. it’s the largest book I own. It’s hardback, and weighs about 10 kilos, has 528 pages, and measures 18 x 11 x 2 1/2 inches. It’s enormous! It has colour plates illustrating the decorative styles from every historical period you can think of, and what makes it so useful to me is that all the designs shown are copyright free, so it’s OK for me to use them in designs. The best part of having this particular edition is that inside the back cover of the book is a CD with all the designs on, as individual elements, making it very useful indeed!! But it wasn’t cheap. In fact, I’m not going to tell you how much it cost 🙂 I justified it by counting it as a business expense.
Anyway, the design elements I show here were taken from that book, and here’s the first one:
I interpreted this medallion by keeping the idea of the central ‘flower’, but simplifying it a lot. And I wanted it to look more red than blue.
I couched three rows of Kreinik #16 braid with Gutermann silk thread, adding highlights in Anchor 1006 red – couched lines, stem stitch outline and a few fly stitches.
I worked the central area of the medallion to resemble a flower:
The medallion on the right hand side of the sampler was a similar one, with a different central design, but up the other way.
With this medallion, I used a green sequin in the centre, held down with lazy daisy stitches filled with a single straight stitch, surrounded by dark green fly stitches and three pink French knots.
The long lines extending from each medallion were embellished with tiny gold seed beads. At the end of each line I had been planning to use shisha mirrors, but when I put them on the panel before attaching them, I realised that they looked far too ‘silver’ and just didn’t look right against the yellow fabric, especially as quite a bit of gold Kreinik had already been added by then as well. As the ‘goldness’ had already been set, silvery shisha mirrors just wouldn’t have worked. So I decided to stitch Rhodes stitch circles in red instead:
I defined these first with split back stitch, then worked the actual Rhodes stitches using four strands of Anchor 1006 Red, to make them stand out.
Tiny 2mm sequins filled the gaps in between, and single lazy daisy stitch / fly stitch combination finished off the line.
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