The Blue Bird of Moderate Satisfaction

As soon as I brought home the Chinese panels I mentioned in my last post, I wanted to have a go at the bird on the green panel. (Despite the colour, it looks like a blackbird to me.)

I’ve been itching to do some silk shading, and I had a piece of rich green dupion silk (grass green weft on a fine black warp), just asking to be used for it.
I decided to limit myself to materials from my stash, as this was very much a learning piece. I backed the silk dupion with some lightweight cotton interfacing which I had happened to spot as a remnant in Watson and Thornton’s fabric shop  that very morning. I used two strands of Devere Yarns silk thread, their size 06 flat silk, for the main embroidery. There are four colours on the bird: Ebony 644 (pure black), Dark Slate 643 (a blueish slate), Saxe 639 (a medium shade of cobalt blue) and Shimmer 6128 (a very pale duck-egg blue). I got three intermediate shades by blending two colours together in the needle.

The metallic thread that I used was not ideal for the task – unlike the thread used on the original Chinese work, it was a rather springy synthetic and would not take tight bends. It was DMC Metallic Thread Art282 in Light Gold, a three-strand thread. The couching was mostly done with half a strand of Devere 06 Vermillion 6125. (Splitting the flat strand was a challenge, to say the least – I think I wasted more lengths than I divided!) I waxed this divided thread for extra strength. One the original Chinese embroidery, the couching of the gold thread is all done in red except for some leaves which are couched in green thread. So I used divided green thread to couch the branch, which I wanted to keep sketchy. (This was done with Devere 06 Green 645 – a very good match for the background fabric.) My couching is not as good as I would like. I need more practice, not just a more sympathetic thread!

This is not a perfect copy of the original, I wasn’t trying for that. It’s about 10% larger, and my feathers had a bit of a mind of their own although I followed the direction of stitching and the outlining as closely as I could. (I also gave the bird a second foot, as it seemed to need one for balance, and a tiny highlight in its eye.)
While I can’t call it a blue bird of total happiness, the finished result looks very much better than I expected, so it is definitely a blue bird of moderate satisfaction.

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Chinese Bird Panels

I saw these two framed panels for sale at Jean Jones Antiques & Collectables in Shrewsbury Market today and couldn’t resist them. Chinese silk and metal thread embroidery, on silk fabric. Each roundel is about 27 cm in diameter: one on green silk, one on blue. I suspect that they date from the late 1960s or 1970s – I’d be glad to find out more about them. I didn’t want to remove them from their frames (they’ve been framed here in Shropshire), so I have had to take these photos through the glass. Aren’t they lovely panels?

The stitching is very neat. The metal threads are laid in pairs in the traditional Chinese manner.

The silkwork is all satin stitch or long and short stitch except for four tiny circular motifs on the blue panel.