Finishing old projects...

Today I finished an embroidery I've been working on for I don't know how long!
(I think a lot of people who are interested in medieval emobroidery and textiles will recognise the pattern - it's from a silk purse displayed in the textiles study room at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Timothy J. Mitchell's article on counted thread embroidery with drafts of this purse and others can be found on his homepage A Stitch Out of Time.)

The finished piece is less than half the size of what I originally intented it to be and it will be a very small purse indeed if I ever assemble it. When started working on it, I didn't worry too much about the materials and went for the cheepest option: mercerised cotton thread instead of real silk. At the time it seemed like the right decision to make, but after a while I realised that if I was going to wear this with my medieval clothing, I actually wanted it to be silk (or at least look like it, which this thread didn't)... By then I had done almost two thirds of what can be seen in the picture above, but I put it aside and ignored it successfully for years. This summer, in an attempt to relax after all the work with my thesis, I decided to finish it after all. I think I'll make it into a purse now while I'm at it and use it for my mobile rather than with my medieval outfits!

My thesis, by the way, will soon be available - I still have one image I need to check the copyright for before I can post it in the digital archive I mentioned in a previous post. Now the holiday's over I'll hopefully get round to it... After handing in my thesis in May, I continued working with Eric of Pomerania's Belt - there were still a couple of things I hadn't been able to explain properly. The analysis of the weave I present in my thesis is still correct (as far as I can tell), but the way I tried to recreate it isn't. But eventually I did figured it out - just in time to include the new findings in my paper proposal for the NESAT conference (North European Symposium on Archaeological Textiles) that takes place in May next year! When I got back from my vacation there was an e-mail in my inbox, telling me that my proposal had been accepted - yay! So whatever else happens this autumn (does anyone out there want to hire an archaeologist specialising in textiles ;-) ???!), I will still be here weaving Eric of Pomerania's Belt in my spare time. And if my research continues in the direction it's heading at the moment, I think I will have a rather interesting paper to present!