Fantastic Embroidery Reference Sites!

I am finding so many great embroidery blogs and reference pages from members of the SCA and other medieval living history groups from around the world, I decided to make a blog entry to keep track of them all!  While I will post blogs about specific crafts as I dabble in them, this list below should be useful for almost any medieval textile research and examples you might be interested in researching.  I will continually update this list as I go, so these will be easier to find.

Enjoy!

Sabrina de la Bere:
http://www.bayrose.org/AandS/Ventures.html

Historic Needlework Resources
http://medieval.webcon.net.au/index.html

The Antique Pattern Library

What a fabulous resource for the fiber arts enthusiast!  Plenty of wonderful patterns and books, many from the Guttenburg Project.  These books were scanned in by volunteers, and some date back to the 1840s!  All these books are downloadable, so you can print them out to enjoy. 

Check it out:

http://www.antiquepatternlibrary.org/html/warm/catalog.htm

Also, ther is another great resource for vintage textile crafts.  All these books and magazines can be downloaded for free! 

Look here:

http://www.cs.arizona.edu/patterns/weaving/books.html#E

So You Want to Learn to Sew?

If you have been following along in my blog, by now you probably have figured out that this is also a way for me to placemark reference material in a way to make it useful to others.  Sometimes, refering to my blog saves time for those who are interested in my little treasures of knowlege.  Some people think I am crazy for spending so much time looking up this stuff.  For me, it's a hobby. ;)

The following is an incredibly thorough guide to every kind of decorative embroidery stitch.  The book is called ENCYCLOPEDIA OF NEEDLEWORK  By Thérèse de Dillmont.

Published in 1884, this fantastic reference is invaluable anyone interested in decorative stitchwork.

Find it here:

http://encyclopediaofneedlework.com/index.htm

Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry Musée Condé, Chantilly

Book of Hours are a rich source of knowledge and information.  Since my persona in the SCA harkens from the region of France, I turn to Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry  Musée Condé, Chantilly.  You may be familiar with the series of Calendar photos such as the one below:

But this book has so much more than the 12 months we are familiar with - and I found a website which has all of them available to view.  The images can be blown up to see detail on the garments, and there is so much to see!  This website is definitely worth a browse.

Fantastic Persian Embroidery Resource

 

While doing some medieval persian research, I ran across this fantastic site which has tons of documented pieces of real medieval embroidery.  I particularly love the colors of this piece.  Information on this wall hanging is as follows:

:Embroidered Hanging; Eastern Iran or Afghanistan, 14th century; Polychrome embroidery;

This photograph appeared in a note about a textile gallery exhibit posted at the website for HALI, a publication devoted to oriental carpets and textiles.:

Enjoy!