Rabbits at Dawn

My husband is a big fan of the Crewelwork Company. It’s not that he wants to embroider the kits himself, he wants to buy them for me to do.

So after me telling him for most of 2022 that I had too much to do, I finally gave him the green light to get me a kit from them in November.

I finished stitching it in mid December, a nice, small project. It uses stem stitch, long and short, satin, padded satin, french knot, and laid work. The fabric came pre-printed with the design, so there was no guesswork (ruler work) for the laid work.

Crewelwork is nice style of embroidery, it’s wool threads (in this case from Appletons) over linen twill fabric.

The Crewelwork Company has many designs in the Jacobean style, like the one below:

What makes it Jacobean is the design elements: the tree of life, the laid work, mounts, stylized flowers, etc. It could technically be made in cotton threads and still be Jacobean, but it is closely associated with crewelwork.

I think the Muncaster Bed Hanging is the Crewelwork Company’s largest/most complex kit. It is very expensive, but you are getting a large piece of fabric 100 x 145 cm (40 x 57 inches) with all the threads, needles and instructions. Not to mention all the work that went into developing it. It is a replica of a bed hanging from Muncaster Castle in Cumbria, UK.

A project like this could easily take a couple of years. That’s why I already told my husband to not even think about it!