WiP - Melissa's Elizabethan Gloves

I'm working on these gloves for quite a while now - Started them in Summer 2005, but I was never very content how the shape of the glove turned out. My goal was to make "real" Elizabethan gloves for ladies, with the very slim, longish, pointy fingers, like all pictures and artifacts show. More than to add just a wonderful embroidered cuff in Elizabethan style to a modern leather glove...
O.k., so the first version of the leather part sucked. Didn't looked like the thing I intended at all. After having a hard time with the embroidery (o.k., needle painting is not easy at all, but please try needle painting on silk velvet!!! It's NOT funny... And it looks like... not good at all), I just gave up and stopped the project.

And I didn't like the look of the wool thread on the silk velvet - while the velvet shimmers, the embroidery looks... matte.

So I got myself a really nice looking silk thread of unspun silk (au ver a soie, soie ovale - I bought it here: http://www.tentakulum.de/ , a fabulous thread store in Frankfurt/Main, they have an online shop) . After some try outs I decided on chain stitch, which is period and looks nice (and is easy and fast to do :-)

I already started the embroidery - at the top paatern in the picture if you stare really hard, you might see a hint of green :-)

The design for the embroidery is based on a Swiss tablecloth in Zurich (1612), that I've found in the book "Mit Nadel und Faden" (great overview of embroidery andtextile arts). The design on the tablecloth is the edge surronding a religious motive, I've added the leaves and roses at the bottom.

Back to the correct pattern of the glove:
After slipping on the left glove, already finished, but not good looking, I was feeling very brave and silly, I took a scissor and started cutting. Didn't cut my fingers, took the slit-up glove as a mock up, created a new pattern and FINALLY suceeded!!! It just looks like the Original Elizabethan glove that's on display in museums!!! Yeah!!!

To show the different form of the gloves I've put my14th century glove (my first glove!!) besides it and laid it on top. You can see the difference very easy, as the fingers on the Elizabethan glove are longer and more pointy. The gussets (inserts between the fingers) are extra long and pointy, too. I will try to take some pictures later (not so easy with the leather being dark blue...)