After I finished the basic handsewing of my new green dress, I added some bands of white fabric to the maunches and the biceps, as well as to the neckline, to get the lovely, simple but elaborate look of the 12th century for which I strive for.

Because the fabric I am working with was a little bit too short for a full dress – actually this dress was made from 2 nice blankets which I bought at IKEA – I added some blue fabric at the bottom to lengthen the dress that it reaches the ground and I have to say that I very like the look of it – I will take a picture of the whole dress the next time to show you also the bottom part…

Because of the addition of the blue wool fabric at the bottom I decided to use my blue wool thread from Renaissance Dyeing instead green one – which would have matched the green dress fabric – for the embroidery on top of the white fabric – you don’t really recognize the difference if you don’t look close but I think that the blue wool thread gives a slightly different but very interesting feeling to the embroidery especially on the white fabric and so close to the green fabric…

…concerning the embroidery – the “stripes” at the border are worked in chain stitch and the diamonds are worked in stem stitch – two very easy embroidery techniques which I like and use a lot. If you aren’t familiar with them yet or new to embroidery – my friend Mary from Needle ‘n Thread has really good tutorials – here her Chain Stitch Video Tutorial and here her Stem Stitch Video Tutorial.

…btw. I think this wool thread is still a part of the ‘leftover’ threads from my Weiberlisten Wallhanging project - yeah, I have some leftover wool threads from this project *lol* …but well, I really like working with the wool threads from Renaissance Dyeing :)