A while ago–well, probably well over a year ago at this point– I introduced you guys to the project I am calling the Opus Anglicanum Bag of Doom, or OBOD. This is a gift I’m making for a friend, in my grand tradition of making excessively complicated things for other people, and then taking forever to do so.
Um.
It’s fine. It’s fine! This is just who I am. It’s good.
Although in some ways this piece is very accurate to the style of Opus Anglicanum, there are a couple of differences I would like to note.
~*Insert disclaimer that I am not an expert on Opus Anglicanum, and if you intend to be one you probably should not be basing your research on random blogs on the internet. Apparently I need to disclaim this now. I thought it was fairly self-evident. If you would like to read actual, peer-reviewed, academic works I have written, DM me. None of them are on the things I share on this blog, because this is a hobby, if an extremely obsessive one*~
Most pieces of Opus Anglicanum are made in one of two ways:
- Slips that have been embroidered onto linen or silk satin, cut out, and then appliqued onto another fabric (usually velvet). A great example of this is the Butler-Bowdon cope, in the collection of the V&A. The embroidery is primarily silk in split-stitch.
2. The other style you see a lot is where any figures you see in the piece are done in slip-stitch and then other elements (frequently the background) are filled in in underside couching. For example, this beautiful alms purse at a museum in Poland
My piece is….neither of these, mostly because it’s taking long enough already, and cutting out slips makes me nervous. Plus, it’s really hard to find silk velvet that behaves the way the handwoven stuff does. So instead, this piece is almost more like an embroidered illuminated manuscript. While there was a lot of overlap in the 14th Century between people who designed embroideries and people who illuminated manuscripts, this straight-up interpretation (and particularly the text on the bag face) is not typical.
I am also not using naturally-dyed silk, mostly because there’s only one place I know that sells naturally dyed filament silk and….she’s in Germany. Shipping is insane. I apologize for being an uncivilized American, far away from the good suppliers of reenactment supplies, but sadly it’s a lot easier to get a museum job if you don’t need to be sponsored for a visa! As a result, I am using synthetically dyed filament silk from Piper’s.
However, I was able to recently look at some opus pieces in our study collection at work, and was very happy to see that the silk used was quite similar in thickness to the floss silk I have! Occasionally my life is cool. But only occasionally, and for a very….er….specific definition of cool.
The bag continues slowly, particularly as it is a deadline-less project and therefore I only really focus on it when I have nothing more pressing. I alternate between really wanting to work on the lion (the shading of the fur is hard to stop when I’ve started!) and being terrified by it. At the moment I’m mostly working on blocking in larger areas of color, since those are simple to work and important for the composition.
The artistic or “painterly” nature of this piece makes it very different from the embroidery that I normally do, and trying to get all of the colors evenly distributed is hard. The manuscript I’ve pulled this from really doesn’t have as many colors– the lion is in greyscale, I added the heraldry, and the vinework is mostly blue, green, pink, and gold– so I’m a little bit on my own trying to get everything balanced. This is also me, so I might be overthinking getting everything balanced, but with something as time consuming as this you do want to get it right the first time. Also, unpicking split stitch in this fine, untwisted silk is challenging.
It’s so shiny though!
Not Another Costuming Blog 