Drachenwald – we have dragons ;) – Klosterstich / dragon fun project – Embroidery & Calligraphy

Some of you may ask what embroidery has to do with calligraphy – but sometimes you can also find letters, words and whole texts/stories on tapestries,… following a typical style of its time…

…and I decided to embroider “We have Dragons” – and that’s a kind of calligraphy – just with thread and needle instead of ink and embroidered…

Sounds difficult? maybe, but it is rather easy if you dare to try it (and have enough letters to get a feeling of the style you want to copy

First I took a look at the letters which were available for me and I was very happy because  the Tristan tapestry has many of them…

I could find all letters besides the “W” but I just followed the style for the “V” and doubled it for the “W” (after taking a look at the available “M” and “N” and finding a style similarity with the “V”).

I also took a look at the spacing between the letters and the spacing between the words and what connected or separated them – that’s how I found the lovely + crosses + …because this crosses don’t appear as regular separators (sometimes a small ring was used, sometimes just emtpy space) I decided to ‘just’ use them for the start and the end as a additional decoration

…and not to forget this small extra tiny bits at the base or top of some letters… this small bits really are the additional spice of your embroidered calligraphy

Then I wrote down the words – ca. the height which I wanted to achieve in the end – on 3 small stripes of paper/ one word on each stripe and arranged them underneath the embroidery to get a feeling which distance between the letters and at the beginning and end could work well…

As soon as I found a nice distance between the words I connected the stripes with a glue stripe

Finally I pinned the stripe with the words, just leaving some space for the embroidery, to the fabric and started to copy the words with a pencil on the fabric – still playing a little bit with the space – and started embroidering…

While embroidering I made the decision to alter the distance and shape of some of the words – maybe some of you can see the difference between the paper stripe, the drawing with the pencil and the final embroidery – but small differences between the outlines at the fabric and the final embroidery are period

For example the “A” , “R” and the “S” – I tried to copy the angles and the small extras as exact as possible

…and now I am working to fill the background with yellow wool…

I think that’s the first time that I embroider the “outlines” before I start working at the background – normally I fill the background first and then start with the outlines…