Byzantine under tunic

 

In the Kingdom of Acre, when a Sovereign is going to be crowned Queen (or King) they enter the church in a plain white shift with their hair loose and the during the ceremony the church officials dress them in ceremonial clothes. This plain white under tunic is sometimes embellished with white work embroidery. It was my pleasure to do this work on the tunic for our current Queen Persephene for her coronation.

She has a Byzantine persona so before I did any stitching I did some research to find out what were some common Byzantine motifs. I also wanted to incorporate her heraldry if I could. I came up with the following design.

 

The Hippocampus is part of her heraldry. The rest was based on designs I saw repeated over and over in Byzantine mosaics.

 

 

Here is the design sketched out on the tunic and the hoop ready to go on the first motif. I used white DMC floss on heavy weight linen fabric. Silk would have been nicer but I wanted her to be able to wash it with no worries. I marked the linen with a regular #2 pencil which easily came out in the wash after it was done. (always test a swatch first!)

 

The petals on the flower like design were done in satin stitch.

 

The outline and crosses on the motif were done in back stitch

 

 

The circles were done in split stitch. If I had it to do again I would use a tear away interfacing while stitching to keep the fabric at even tension. I had planned to do it originally and even bought the interfacing but thought I would be good enough without it. It turns out with this much embroidery in a circle really warped the fabric in the center of the circle no matter how carefully I stitched it.



 

This is clearly not a good picture. I have since gotten a better camera and hope to get a better picture in the future. The total project took around 40 hours to complete. It was by far the biggest embroidery project I have undertaken. Some people think that is too much work to put in for an under tunic, but I wanted to give Persephene a piece of garb that she could treasure to remind her of her coronation day.