Historical Stumpwork

I was now beginning to embark on my Level 4 course. The first technique I had to study was Stumpwork embroidery, as one of my absolute favourite techniques, I couldn't wait to get started researching historical Stumpwork.

I was so happy that stumpwork was the first technique to study. I love historical stumpwork pieces, and well as the modern pieces and all the textures. I also love the fact that you work on all the different little elements, it doesn't look like you've done much to your piece and then, it all gets put together and voilà, the final piece is revealed!

Research

The first thing I had to do was to research historical stumpwork. I was planning a visit to London to go the V&A to have a look at some of the stumpwork pieces there. I had seen them before, but I hadn't gone specifically to study them, so I was looking forward to taking photos, making sketches and notes. Unfortunately, the covid-19 pandemic hit and I was unable to go as the country went into lockdown.

I, instead, studied some of the pieces online. I discovered the V&A have an excellent website with a catalogue of all their pieces and I managed to view a lot of images zoomed in enabling me to see a lot of detail. It's by no way a substitute for seeing the real thing, but I felt fortunate to be safe at home, studying something I loved.

I managed to make some sketches of some of the historical designs, and tried to work out what stitches had been used. It was easier in some photos than others!

I really love the style of the flowers in these historical pieces, especially the flowing vines that often connect them. I also love the fact that they played no attention to scale what so ever! For me it gives the pieces a kind of magical, fantasy element.

Working my samples

Now it was time to get the needle and thread out, and start working some samples based on the historical designs. If you've been reading my other blog posts, you'll be aware by now, that I do love a floral design! I've also always fancied trying these needlelace covered oranges that you often see in stumpwork. So with plenty of time on my hands due to lockdown, now seemed to be the time to give it a go. I ordered some paper balls of different sizes and got to work. Well, it took forever! I should have chosen smaller paper balls, it literally takes hours and hours to cover these balls. So if you fancy trying it, I advise you to start quite small.

Once the oranges were done, I started work on all the other elements. Plenty of needlelace in this one. It's a good job I love doing it! Pretty pleased with the final result though, so it was worth the effort.

With the other pieces, I kept to the beautiful historical style and techniques, but tried to up date it with the choice of colours. I absolutely loved doing these samples, they are the perfect combination of all my embroidery loves.

I wasn't quite finished with my stumpwork samples though, I had to do a stumpwork figure, but more on that next time. You can read about it here: Stumpwork figure (claireharveyembroidery.com)