Navigating into uncharted territory

There is evidence that embroiderers of the 16th century drew their designs with ink onto their linen. The ink was then covered over by the embroidery itself. But with cutwork, where you want as clean a final presentation as possible, we need another less permanent method.

In cases where you are following the grain of the cloth, a pulled thread can form a guide. Or if you don’t want to pull a thread, a running stitch with a contrasting thread. But for diagonals or other designs where you can’t rely only on the grain to guide you, I believe they used starch. I have mentioned starch in prior posts…it makes an excellent temporary fray-check but one of the other things it can also do is allow you to “sketch” on your linen with small holes made with a larger needle. The starch makes the holes stay until you can finalize your design, allowing evaluation of needed course corrections with nothing permanently cut or damaged.

And let’s face it: a truly even weave linen is a mythological creature rarely if ever obtained. I have bought a $70 yard of “even weave” linen and it isn’t.

Back then THEY also had the same problem finding it. I have blown up scaled photos of extant pieces off of museum web catalogues and done the counts to prove it and seen where THEY did things to mitigate the lack of an even weave in their work.

The key thing to using non-even weave linen is that things need to look correct from a normal viewing distance. So when designing your piece, measure and make your motifs square and equidistant and do the amount of 4-sided stich it takes to get to where you need to be or connect them regardless of how many you have done to get there. One side might have 24 stitches and the other might have 28. As long as the opening it creates is square, your work will look right. And when doing straight runs of work if you at pulling out 10 threads from the weft to get a 1/2" gap and have to pull out 14 threads from the warp to get the same distance, then so-be-it..

But what about diagonals? With diagonals, having an even weave linen to work with is more important but if you grid out your benchmarks with colored thread and then sketch in the route you want to take to get there with the starch hole method, you can play with where you need to incorporate an extra thread here and there in order to make the design work. And no one will ever notice that your stitching isn’t technically always over the same exact number of threads both ways.

Wheat starch is easily found on Amazon or in Chinese food supply stores. and I mix it at an 8:1 ratio with water and heat for about 15 seconds in the microwave to get it to a gelatin state for application onto the linen. When it dries, I then iron it and the steam from the iron reconstitutes it briefly to give the linen a lovely crisp pressed finish perfect for working with. If you need to pull threads for your design I advise doing that first because pulling out threads will obviously be more difficult once the starch is in place.