Sometimes we all come by some book and decide to buy it and later think that you may have been crazy to have done it. Years ago I bought a modern copy of The Besler Florilegium, which was originally published in 1613. It is huge and used to hold my computer up. But I have used it many times on this project to look up the flowers on the project to help confirm that it is what we think it is or some
detail. It came in handy last night on the borage.

When we made the pattern for the embroidery, we traced the existing embroidery and the borage looked like there were just two rows of black in the center. We worked it yesterday as we can see it on the piece. But the placement of the pistils just didn’t look right to me. As I was working on the instructions for the books, I pasted in pictures of the original and noted that some of the borages had a few more rows. Hmmmm, I thought. Might the center have been filled entirely with black and did it degrade over time? I have been working on another project with a blackwork nightcap and have been studying where the black threads cleave from the surface of the linen and so the pattern I was seeing on this borage made sense that there may have been more. Hence looking up of the borage in the Besler Florilegium. It isn’t a flower I am familiar with and I wanted to see how a period interpretation of the flower looked. As you can see here, the center is a cone of ivory and black framed by the pistils. There was the answer, our borage is a funny projection and I needed to go back and add more black trellis stitches immediately! Here you see our new ‘finished borage’. Much better.

Tricia

Tags: besler florilegium, borage, motifs, trellis stitch

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 13th, 2008 at 2:40 pm and is filed under Progress, Stitches. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.