Following my alarming experience with the Jacobean piece going slack after mounting, you will understand I am taking no chances with Bruce – he is going to be stretched to within an inch of his life! (Without stretching any of the gold unduly, of course.) Goldwork classes no.7 and no.8 were scheduled one week apart, because once you’ve begun the mounting process there isn’t an awful lot of homework you can do.

First, however, there was the question of the tail. Would the tutor think the gaps near the tip warranted taking several chips out and re-doing them? Or would a small “prop chip” do the trick? Well, Angela advised me not to unpick any chips as the outlines were really nice and restitching might spoil them; but yes, to try an extra half-chip at the tip to see if that would push things up. I tried, it didn’t, and the line didn’t look as nice, so I took it out again.

Rather optimistically, I’d hoped to finish pretty much all the mounting apart from the sateen finish in class, with a bit of time left over to discuss my next module, Canvaswork. It was not to be, and not because of the time taken over that temporary chip. Mounting is slow work anyway, and getting it done as well as possible means taking your time and not rushing things. Canvaswork will still be there next week, or even next month. So I got started by working out what size I wanted the mounted piece to be, and how I wanted the work to be positioned on the mount board.

Generally in framing you are advised to have slightly more room at the bottom than at the top; apparently this makes it look more balanced when hung on the wall. You will notice that my placement has more room at the top. It felt more natural to have the extra space around the cloud and sun, wide-open skies as it were, and to have the line of grass closer to the edge as it is the ground the kangaroo stands on (well, is suspended above in mid-hop, but you know what I mean).

Next: cutting two identical pieces of mount board, to be glued together for extra strength.

Then calico gets glued to the double mount board, with the glue applied about an inch away from the edge – that is where you attach the embroidery to the calico with herringbone stitch. For goldwork, there is an extra layer, a rather strokable padding called, curiously, bumf. This compensates for all the lumps and bumps of secured plunged ends at the back of the work. The picture shows that layer before trimming it right to the edge of the board.

Time to cut Bruce loose from the frame, with the helping hands of one of my fellow students because you don’t want the fabric to just slump off the frame with the risk of bending some of the gold when you’ve cut one side.

The next step is pinning. This is not a one-time process: I ended up pulling and pinning three times before all the slack had been removed from the fabric (the pictures show the first and second round).

On to the terrifying part, which is turning the work upside down to work the herringbone stitching. This is done exerting a lot of pull on the stitches, so the mounted piece often jitters around on its bubblewrap frame. Although it’s unlikely to jump off the frame altogether, it may shift enough for the stitching to get pressed against the bubblewrap – and two of the elements near the edges are the S-ing sunbeams and the cutwork tail. It’s the part where you occasionally forget to breathe.

Part of this herringboning is getting the fabric to fit snugly around the corners, and closing them up with ladder stitch which, ideally, is invisible once you’ve pulled it. On one corner I succeeded completely, on two partly, and on one a stitch is still quite visible however hard I pulled. Oh well.

This was as much as I could manage in class, so the next step had to be done as homework: lacing. When I got Bruce home after class I thought I noticed a small patch of slackness, which I hoped I’d be able to correct with the lacing. But when I examined the fabric closely just before starting the lacing, in very unforgiving sunlight, it actually looked nice and evenly stretched – an encouraging way to start! It took me a few hours, but by the end of Monday afternoon Bruce was fully laced both ways.

I don’t know if the work looked more evenly and tightly stretched when the lacing was complete – it’s hard to tell from photographs and impossible to tell from memory. But it looked good! This was on a Monday, so I figured that by Saturday it would be clear whether or not the fabric was beginning to slacken. I’d left one end of each direction of lacing unsecured so that it could be tightened if necessary before applying the sateen.

Saturday came, and my 8th Goldwork class, and although the silk hadn’t perceptibly slackened, the lacing had. My guess is that the fabric was still held taut by the pins, which Angela had told me not to remove until after attaching the sateen. So I tightened all the lacing (the long side twice) and securely fastened off the ends. Time for the sateen. This is cut to about 5cm larger all around than your board, and then ironed. It is then folded to approximately the right size, and pinned at the corners.

But before the pinning and attaching there was a small job that needed doing first: because of my small frame there wasn’t a lot of spare silk on all sides of the design, and in some places the stitches which originally attached the silk to the calico backing fabric would clearly show up in the edge around the sateen (what the RSN refer to as the rebate). However, the silk was now so securely attached to the mount board in other ways that I could snip away these offending stitches without risk to Bruce’s taut looks.

The sateen is sewn on using ladder stitch, which attaches two pieces of fabric invisibly (ideally…) by scooping up a bit of one fabric, then taking the needle into the other fabric exactly opposite the exit point in the first fabric. Scoop up a bit of the second fabric, and go back into the first fabric exactly opposite the exit point from the second fabric. This forms a little ladder of parallel stitches which, when you pull the thread, miraculously pulls the fabrics together in such a way that the stitches completely disappear from sight, leaving just some discreet indentations. Well, that’s the theory, and I have applied it in previous cases with great success, but for some reason this time I found that when going from the silk into the sateen, the stitches looked skewed even when I’d gone in precisely opposite the exit point. If, on the other hand, I inserted the needle about a millimetre before where I should theoretically insert it, it looked fine. It’s a mystery, but it did make my stitches on the second half look a lot better (no, I didn’t unpick and re-do the first half).

When attaching the sateen the aim is to have a uniform rebate; in other words, the amount of silk visible between the edge of the board and the edge of the sateen is equally wide all around. This is clearly not the case in my finished piece, but the variations were within what I deemed acceptable. If you go for perfection on this point, you’re in for a long, long haul. By the way, see the two needles? One semi-circular, one with a much shallower curve. The shallower one is the one I’ve been using for oversewing plunged ends, herringboning and ladder stitching. It looked exactly like the other one when it came out of the packet some months ago. It is a testament to the quality of these particular needles that this one survived an entire module with no worse effect than being bent out of shape – the ones I used before this were either so chunky I could hardly navigate them through the fabric, or so thin that they broke at the slightest provocation. Take a bow, Creative Quilting of East Moseley!

Time to attach my name tape (salvaged from the Jacobean piece when I took the sateen off for lacing it) and (finally!) take the pins out. Then came another fairly labour-intensive part which I unfortunately forgot to photograph: firmly stroking all the edges with a mellor in order to remove the pin pricks. This removed them quite well on two sides, but on the sides where the weave ran the other way they were still quite visible. When you look closely at the silk, it is actually a combination of relatively chunky (and sometimes slubby) green threads and rather thin and fragile black threads – you can see this clearly in the pictures of the corners above. Where the pins had gone in, these black threads had bunched together. Angela suggested stroking them back into place with a very fine needle, which worked for almost all of them, except for a few where the black threads had actually frayed through – no help for that, unfortunately. I entered what I had done and what I couldn’t do in the Project Evaluation notes and prepared to look at the front, which I hadn’t seen since the beginning of class.

A sigh of relief: nothing crushed, and no puckering or slackness. Hurray!

Bruce was then packed into a well-padded box with all the sample cloths, drawings, source pictures, scribbles and notes, for Angela to take to Hampton Court Palace for assessment. Because of the lockdown backlog it will probably be a few months, but I’ll let you know what they think of Bruce and Haasje when I get the evaluation. And now on to Canvaswork…