At Her Leisure

Now that the Christmas ornaments are finished, I started one of those 18th century pocketbooks. It's one that's patterned in Fitting and Proper. The museum page is here: https://mycchc.catalogaccess.com/objects/29491. It's using the leftover wools from my embroidered 1805 dress from a couple of years ago with the addition of blues, browns, and black. I just bought the small skeins this time. It's done on petit point canvas, though it gives me a slightly larger gauge than the original (22ct for me, 25ct for the original). I had to double the 2-ply crewel wools to get good coverage so if I wanted to do more flamestitch/Bargello/Irish stitch in the future, I would probably plan for 4-ply wools. On the other hand, the leftovers may be more useful as 2-ply so maybe not.

I've mostly been working on the 1897 evening dress, but in between times I've made some nice progress.


The whole thing is eleven rows of four motifs. It's physically harder to do than cross-stitch because the wools are thicker than the cotton embroidery threads, but it's mentally easier because it's a single repeated motif with the same fill pattern in different colors.