Last week I finished (in both senses of the word – finished stitching and made up) a project which unfortunately I can’t tell you about yet because it’s been commissioned. But I was mightily pleased and relieved that it was done! So did I then rush back to my Canvaswork, in preparation for Saturday’s class? Uhm, no. It was quite a productive class (more about that in a future FoF), but I had to warn Kathryn the tutor that I had done very little homework and wouldn’t be able to do much for October’s class either. Instead the week was taken up with ordering supplies (cards and envelopes for kits, threads, printed fabrics), gathering materials and setting up one of the three models to be stitched for the Goldwork With Colour course I’m teaching at Rugby’s Percival Guildhouse later this year. (Yes, I am very late. Don’t rub it in. Panic is definitely hovering in the wings.)

The final project in the course (which I can therefore ignore for now) is a peacock, and will use lots of coloured metals and leather, some of which you can see in the box of bling above. It is intended to offer the students the opportunity to create their own version of the design by deciding which materials and techniques to use for the various parts of the peacock. But apart from a small warm-up project that doesn’t need a stitched model (unless I have time to spare) the students will start with one of a pair of or nué designs, choosing a snowdrop on gold or a forget-me-not on silver. I suppose the latter should really be called argent nué, but the term goldwork tends to cover anything metallic so we’ll stick with that. Or nué doesn’t take much in the way of materials: fabric, Jap or smooth passing (I’m using the latter in size no. 6), sewing thread to match the metal, and stranded cotton in whatever colours you need for your picture.

But what is or nué? It is a technique in which metal threads are couched down to complete fill a shape, but using a variety of colours rather than just the usual matching thread – in other words, instead of making the couching as near-invisible as possible, some of it stands out from the gold background to form a picture. Only on that part of the gold which surrounds the picture is the metal couched with the usual golden-yellow sewing thread (or grey in the case of silver threads), in the usual bricked pattern of couching stitches about 3mm apart. The coloured couching is more dense, completely covering the metal threads. There is a related technique sometimes called Italian couching where shading is achieved by working the coloured stitches wider apart or closer together, but in or nué it is done by colour changes rather than variations in stitch density. It is possible to have quite sophisticated shading in an or nué design (some of the medieval examples are stunningly detailed), but often it uses a fairly simple palette in blocks of colour. I decided to keep the shading simple, as it will be the students’ first-ever attempt at this technique. And keeping the shading simple is easier in a design without too much detail. So my first step was to create a relatively simple outline of a snowdrop.

Traditionally or nué is worked with the gold couched down in horizontal lines, but in modern pieces it is sometimes worked in a spiral. In order to present students with both options, I decided early on that the snowdrop would be couched horizontally, and the forget-me-not in a spiral. Now provided you start exactly in the centre, the spiral will more or less automatically form a circle; but keeping the horizontal threads horizontal, especially if you don’t start in the middle of the design and you’ve foolishly decided on an oval shape rather than the traditional rectangle, can be trickier. Fortunately, as the fabric will be covered completely it isn’t a problem to add guidelines. As for knowing when to use which colour couching thread, it is possible to have just the outline on the fabric and refer to an external colour picture, or to put coloured dots in the various blocks, but I chose to use colouring pencils to fill in the design. It doesn’t have to be beautiful, the shades don’t even have to match your thread colours closely – it just serves to show which colour goes where.

Another option is to print the colour picture onto the fabric, and I have in fact ordered printed versions of these two designs. It will be interesting to compare working this technique on two different fabrics – the one I chose for printing is a heavier weight than the one used above – and it will also give me the opportunity (time permitting…) to work the oval design in two ways: starting from the bottom with a pinched start (more of that below), or starting in the middle and working first one half and then the other. With the latter method it will be easier to keep the couched threads horizontal, but because you always work the couching stitches towards the previous line of metal thread it would mean stitching the top half differently from the bottom half. If I do get round to trying it that way I will report back!

For now I was ready to get the snowdrop hooped up, always an exciting moment as it signals the shift from designing and material gathering to actual stitching! It wasn’t until after I’d placed the fabric in the hoop in my usual way (screw at the top) that I realised I wanted to clamp the hoop in my Lowery stand so that the stand faced me, rather than having it by my side. So I rearranged the fabric, clamped it and started by fastening on the golden yellow thread and the first three colours, three shades of green. Because the picture is built up in lines rather than in blocks of colour, it is convenient to have needles with all the necessary colours on the go at the same time (another argument for a limited colour palette ). Needles with white and grey thread will be added once I get further up the design.

And then there is the gold thread. Because passing is practically always couched in pairs, you either have to have two reels from which you unwind the passing simultaneously, or if you have just one reel, you have to decide beforehand how much you are likely to need and cut two single lengths or one double length. I decided on the latter, partly because having two reels of passing attached to your stitching is quite cumbersome, and partly because I want to use a pinched start: double the thread, pinch it to make a sharp crease, couch it down with a single stitch over the crease, and then continue couching over the pair (shown below with Jap thread). It saves on plunging and oversewing, always a good thing in my book.

But how much would I need? I won’t bother you with my scribbled calculations of the width of a pair of passing, how many pairs would fill the shape, and how wide the lines would be on average along the oval, but it worked out at about 6 metres. I cut 7 metres to be on the safe side, doubled it, and wound it onto an old wooden bobbin which Mr Mabel had cut some bits off to make sure it couldn’t roll away. One thing to remember when winding metal threads like these is to wind them by turning the bobbin while holding the thread still; this ensures that it doesn’t get twisted, which in turn stops the metal covering (wire or foil) from working loose from the thread core.

Incidentally, if you look up or nué online or in books you will generally see that every horizontal line is cut, couched and plunged separately; sometimes the amount of plunging and securing is reduced by using a pinched start and only plunging the end of the line, making sure that consecutive lines are worked in opposite directions so the pinched starts are on alternating sides of the shape. This is a perfectly legitimate approach, but it is not one I have chosen to follow. As I mentioned before, I’m not a fan of excessive plunging and oversewing, and I feel justified in trying to avoid it as much as I can by the fact that those medieval embroiderers who produced such beautiful work did too – gold thread was gold thread in those days, and very expensive; they weren’t going to waste a good part of it on the back of the work! Instead, they used the back and forth method, plunging only when the shape had been filled or their metal thread ran out. What’s good enough for them is good enough for me .