Earlier this week, we began deconstructing various elements on a piece of old ecclesiastical embroidery, to see how the elements were originally made and to learn something about the materials and techniques used.

You can find the photos of the whole piece of goldwork embroidery in the first article in the series, and you can find the rest of the backstory, along with my reasons for deconstructing this piece, in the second article of the series, where we began deconstructing the goldwork grapes.

Today, we’re going concentrate on this piece of high relief goldwork:

Here on Needle ‘n Thread, I like to organize indexes for the various projects that I blog about in a series. You can find all these project indexes listed under “Tips & Techniques” in the main menu here on Needle ‘n Thread.

I’ve found that project indexes are a good way to keep a project organized, so that you can easily find it again and go through it to find tips and techniques that we cover in the process of completing the project.

So this is officially the project index for this series on Deconstructing Goldwork.

Several years ago, the following piece of old ecclesiastical goldwork embroidery was handed over to me. It is beyond use as far as an ecclesiastical piece is concerned, and rather than leaving it in some storage cupboard somewhere, the general consensus was that I could take it apart, save some hard-to-find materials on it, and learn something in the process.

Overall, though the piece is attractive in parts and might look ok from afar, it is not really a well-designed ecclesiastical piece. Still, I like certain individual elements of the design.

This is an excellent piece for learning. Although I would never consider taking certain embroideries apart, this one is perfect for “deconstructing” in order to learn from it. Since I’m photographing the process and discoveries, I thought I would share them with you.