Mammen Masks

I had so much fun making the elevation coat/caftan that I decided to make one for me.  This time I am using motifs from the Mammen embroidery to decorate the neck and cuffs.  The small masks will go on the neck edges down to where the brooch will sit, I could (and probably should) go all the way down the front but (a) I find that rather heavy looking on the lighter colored wool and (b) I am lazy.  I'll be using the acanthus vine motif on the cuffs, changing the color scheme just a little bit to correspond with the silks I have available.

The threads are a combination of filament silk and spun silk.  The filament looks much nicer and seems to wear better, you really can barely tell the difference between the spun and regular DMC cotton, which is deeply annoying to me but this is all left overs from other projects so it's not so bad.  I'm really happy with how this is looking so far.  The stitching is also going fairly quickly which is a nice change from some of my recent projects.

Sadly I don't have a picture of the totally done elevation coat, but you can get a general idea of what I did from the pictures.  I'm very pleased with the design I came up with for the cuffs.  My original plan for the neck was more elaborate and I think would have been more effective but the lady who received the coat was thrilled with it as is, so it all worked out.  Trying to sew a garment without measurements is bad enough, but when it's for something like a Laurel elevation, when it's going to be seen by literally EVERYONE and you really do want the person to be happy with it, it's a little scary.  I'm very glad she was so happy and that it fit so well.