Nabor Embroidery practice

 Some pattern darning practice. Nabor (Набор) embroidery to be specific. It mimics pick up weaving designs, so it is a thread counted running stitch  that goes the length of the design. 

You have to make sure the tension is even, usually a tug on the fabric at the end of the line evens things up nicely.

The embroidery thread should be 2x to 3x the thickness of the fabric threads. That way the fabric is not seen through gaps between the threads and the design looks full and even. 

Front side

                                                        Reverse side

 

 

The border of "braid stitch" or a "long arm cross stitch" is done traditionally to make the edges neat.

 

One big benefit of doing this type of embroidery as it is done in-hand. No hoop or frame needed. All you need is a needle, thread, fabric and your design. 

As for the design, there are traditional designs, like I used, taken from 19th and 20th century clothing and towels. You can also create your own on grid rule paper. 

This embroidery needs to be done on evenweave or close to it fabric, otherwise the design will distort in width or length. That might be a wanted design feature.

Choose how many threads is each square of design. In the one above, it's two threads, so each line is repeated twice. 

Don't make any part of the design more than 5 squares in length. Threads will be too loose and will catch if you do that. 

Traditional colors in Slavic embroidery tend to be red and black. Pattern darning in the more Scandinavian regions tend to be more blue and green traditionally in Smoyg (pattern darning) embroidery. If you're not trying to replicated a traditional design, have fun with colors!

Turn forward to me and back to the forest.

 Welcome to the hut! Plenty of things to see here, or will be, probably. 

No touching or misbehaving. In Baba Yaga's house if you behave you'll be treated to dinner, if not, you might be dinner... or so they say.

 I managed to make some rather fun and popular costume garb based on Bilibin's illustrations a couple of years ago. Vasilisa is pretty but the Baba Yaga version was way more fun. So I went with that theme. She lives in a house on chicken legs and in rhymes, has a boney leg. I neither confirm or deny having either feature. 

Most of the stuff on here will be current or former projects. Some small, some big. I am really bad at blogging, there will be time gaps and projects will not be in chronological order for a while...if ever. 

I like folklore. Do occasional somewhat shoddy translations from Russian, Belarussian and Ukrainian. Most of all my hobby is collecting hobbies. All of the crafts that are within my abilities will be tried.

Said abilities are sometimes iffy due to health reasons. Things take a while at times. 

 Hanya Vladimirovna Polotskaya

East Kingdom 

 

 

Verjus experiment

Decided to do a quick experiment from necessity.

 
I have a nice green seedless grapevine growing in the back yard. There are always more grapes on it than it can support so they start falling in the middle of summer. It's a sad waste. 

I had to take down some of the grapes bunches so the rest could hopefully ripen to sweetness. So now I have a bowl of green grapes.... what to do?

Little time for research on this when you have a perishable sitting on the table. Thankfully, someone else did the research: https://coquinaria.nl/en/verjuice/ 

Verjus it is! 

Also that site noted a sorrel and parsley variety, both of which I'm growing...so, maybe later?

Cleaned up the grapes. Put them through the blender and pressed the juice by hand through a cloth. 

The dregs we'll use with a meat marinade, for less waste. 

And got a bottle of verjus. Very sour. Nice lemon substitute flavor wise. 

Some of this is to be shared. As I suspect this is too much for me to use before it goes bad. I have about a month and not a lot of time for cooking experiments as there's other crafting to be done.