Some on line goodies

My wonderful trip to New York to see their exhibit which included many period embroidery books had me doing a little poking.  There are a number of design sources on line, including scans of some embroidery designs.

One is Johann Siebacher's Schön  Neues Modelbuch von allerley lustigen Mödeln naczunehen, zuwürcken unn zusticken, found here.  You can download a pdf of the book, or just view it.

Here is a lovely page from this book.  St. George is a common image -- and those lovely stars in the lower design are also very common in many forms of embroidery.



There are also pages with needle lace patterns:


Another one that is available on line is Federico Vinciolo's I Singolari E Nuovi Disegni. The Dover edition of this book is one of the first ones I bought when I first started doing historically based embroidery.  It is available on several sites, here is one.  This one will be familiar to many as "the purple cover."   The Vinciolo also has both charted designs and needle lace patterns.

In fact, one of the charted designs is one that I used for one of my earliest pieces done for the SCA.  I did this stag in several forms -- canvas, free and blackwork -- each of them a little bag.  I was originally going to do it in all 12 of the Athena's Thimble categories (though I haven't figured out how I was going to accomplish it in a couple of the forms).  Perhaps some day I'll come back to that plan.


Here's a picture of the canvas work stag.

One of the groups I am in on Facebook is Historic Hand Embroidery.  There, a link was given to a blog post of a list of modelbuchs, including links to ones that are on line.  I forsee an afternoon of clicking and downloading :)  Here is the Modelbuch list.

There are a couple of things to remember about these books:  They are very "late period" to people in the SCA, they freely "borrowed" from each other (you will find designs repeated across books), and unlike today's pattern books, they give no guidelines as to how the embroider was to be executed.  There are no color keys, no stitch diagrams, no materials lists.

So, as I continue to work on the pieces for my upcoming classes and for my big couching & laid project, I am also building up my "to do" list as I peruse these books.  It may be time to make some lists.