Gathering Materials

Good planning is always a win for an on-time, under-budget project. I actually planned materials and design in stages - the suns on the sleeves first, starting in the centers and moving outwards. Then the flowers around the neckline, as I had some spare time.

Fabric Base

As for any project, you gotta start with the materials. This one started with some fabulous green silk. It was a medium thickness, a charmeuse. I hadn't used this particular type of silk before - I'm more of a habatoi girl myself. Roxana had dyed this herself, in accordance with her textile research and it was a lovely and vibrant shade of green (somewhere between "lime" and "grass") that isn't done justice by the web photos. Recommendation For the next endeavor, I plan to use something more like a silk satin, or maybe a heavy habatoi. Possibly something lined or backed. I've also used an acetate that is a fair imitation of a shot silk. That's been fairly easy to work with - it's a very tight weave. The problem is something that is so light that the weight of the metal pulls and distorts it. Or a fabric that is loose or textured that the coils and rough edges of metal catch on it and cause pulls in the fabric, or distortions in the metal.

I also lined the final choli with 100% cotton fabric from the quilting section. This gave the final product some added strength, and also protected our delicate Queen's skin from the scratchy ends of the metal threads and wires.

Metal Threads

The types of metal thread out there are nearly endless. Basically, if it's shiny, someone has found a way to attach it to themselves! (and the Indians did it first :P) So I'm not even going to try to mention everything that's out there. Here's stuff that I found. My two sources are T.L. Barnes - a SCAdian lady who teaches and sells at Pennsic, she was my teacher. And Berlin Embroidery Designs who sells both kits and supplies. She's based in Canada, and had some limitations on what forms of payment she could take, but she was exceedingly easy to work with and helpful.

Purl - in both silver and gold - this is the hollow coils of metal wire that form the center of the suns on the sleeves and the leaves around the neckline. This is one of the most common elements of zardozi work. It's made by taking a very thin wire, and coiling it around a solid cylinder. There are quite a few different kinds of this stuff, all being very similar in shape, but differing in metal texture and color. The common descriptions include:

• gold, silver and copper - type of metal color. This may or may not imply actual metal content, be sure to check on that, if you feel strongly about it.
• smooth or rough - the texture of the wire. Smooth purl is very shiny, as though polished. Rough purl is more textured, and not so shiny.
• green tint, yellow tint, rose tint - the type of gold color - a careful eye can see differences in the tint of gold, particularly when you do a side by side comparison. Green, yellow and rose are tints I've seen. This isn't such a common discrimination in online descriptions.

You can extend your supply by slightly stretching this, pulling apart the coils as you would pull apart a slinky (except they don't go back the way a slinky does). The more you stretch, the more the background comes through - but this may be a desired effect. I can't give a great guideline to increase in length from stretching.

• Pearl Purl (also called bullion) - silver and gold - a thicker spiral of wire. The wire is thicker than regular purl, and it is more of a rounded shape. The wire is similarly coiled in a spiral, but the spiral is not hollow inside. You have to stretch this out a little to have a place to stitch it down. I hear it's called "pearl" purl, because the stretched cord looks like many, many small beads. It has, in fact, been mistaken for beadwork on my embroidery. This stuff forms the swirling flames on the suns. It's a bit pricier than regular purl - it's also a lot more metal.
• Passing thread - gold and silver - a very thin silk or nylon thread, with metallic wrap around it. It's called a "passing" thread because it can be used to attach the other stuff - which is exactly what I do with this. All the other stuff is tacked down with this. In addition, as a large, straight stitch, the rays coming from the suns are this thread and the chain stitches around the center of the suns and used for the stems of the flowers are this thread.

• Thick gold foil wrapped thread - gold and silver - The four larger rays coming from the suns are of this material. It's a nylon cord, wrapped with a sort of foil. Nothing period here! It was really quite cheap, but I can't recommend it. It's hard to work with. It frays so you have to finish it carefully. It's too thick to actually sew with and it required a lot of tacking down, or it buckles unpleasantly. I have a ton, but I probably won't buy more.
• Gold Chord - strands of cord, twisted, and twisted around another twist, forming a rope. This stuff is pretty cool! It's much easier to take down and it folds upon itself, making tight corners and U-turns easier. This stuff is the edge around the neckline flowers.
• Gold plate - forms the flower petals. This stuff was new to me - I found it online, and thought "what the heck". It was a hoot! Maybe I'm a sick, sick person for enjoying it, but I found this stuff really fun to work with. It crinkles easy, so you have to store it carefully, in a way it won't get bent. And there's a knack to it. But I was very happy with the results and the speed with which I could work.

Other stuff

As always, there's a bunch of other paraphernalia. And you should always pick tools that work for you.

• Needles - one with an eye big enough for your passing thread, but thin enough to go through the purl's hollow inside. If you want to draw anything else through the fabric, you'll need a needle for that - such as finishing off the chording. Most of the metal stuff can sit on top of the fabric - all the purl, pearl purl and metal plate lies solely on top of the fabric.
• Frame - I did this on a hoop - it was a big pain. I now have a frame. I found a spiffy wood frame made for sitting in a chair from the guy that sells the cheap boxes at Pennsic. It was $70 and it's extremely cool. It can be completely deconstructed for traveling and everything seen from the outside is wood, so it blends right in at SCA events. You can get tension in only two directions (up/down), not all four (up/down/right/left). Traditional zardozi makers would have a flat table-like frame that necessitates sitting on the floor. I like sitting in a chair, cranky European that I am, but I suspect that much can be gained from having 4 directions of tension.
• Padding - Depending on what style you want to create, you may want some amount of padding. I used padding under the center of the suns. There are also a few options in padding - felt is good padding, easy to shape and cheap. Depending on the fabric, you can also use the ground fabric, making it blend into the background. I've also used layers of thick thread or a bit of the purl underneath to add depth. You can try to match the padding to the metal on top, the fabric below, or use a whole new color for another effect. What is period, you ask? I honestly don't know. For this project, the padding was scraps of the same silk as the ground fabric, folded up and tacked down with gold passing thread.

Embroidery

Having picked out materials, I started to work on the general idea of my design. The suns were easy - they were simple shapes, and I could make little ones and do two and get a time-estimate. Since the purl works well with padding, I chose to do the centers with that. Since the pearl purl can be shaped, and holds stiff I used it for the wavy sunbeams. Adding the thick metal cord was good for giving a demarcation between beams, which seemed like they might be hard to line up perfectly flat with each other.

I wanted to make sure that the suns were all relatively the same, so I used a template. It consisted of three stencils for making the main parts of the sun - a circle, a circle with the four rays, the four wavy beams. All was done on a grid and was made for a maximum of symmetry for all four quadrants of each stencil. All three parts were on one piece of paper, which I lined up with respect to the bottom of the sleeve. And, to make the process easier, each sun was the same distance apart as the distance between stencils, so the stencil can also be used to measure the spacing of the suns.

I'd figure out a placement for the center, and pin it into place. Then I'd secure the padding in the space of the circle (left side of template), I'd remove the template and put on the purl. I'd line up the rays (center of template) and stitch down the cord. Finally, I'd lay on the beams (right side) and line them up as best I could (they are harder to align) so that the points crossed the beams, and the circle looked reasonably centered. Then I'd put in a loose running stitch in the passing thread around the edge of the stencil. After removing it, the pearl purl is stitched down, slightly over the running stitches. The rays are added at the end in a fairly free form manner

The flowers were a much more organic process. I figured out the shape of the first flower by stitching it and freeform stitched the stem and a leaf. I used a ruler to get close to that shape in all the other flowers. After filling up the neckline with 3 flowers, I added the three stems with chain stitch and three leaves made of purl - one center stem and branching sides in a V shape. I matched the other side, and added the gold cord around the outside.

Finishing

Now to make the pretty and newly shiny fabric into a garment! The pattern I used was actually a pattern Roxana herself had made, and I don't honestly have a great pattern for it. It was based off of an 18th century choli garment that has a cut and shape very like the shape of the Mughal period cholis we see in pre-16th century pictures. Most women work very hard to find the One True Choli pattern that fits comfortably, looks snazzy and accommodates their comfort range of historical accuracy. This choli was a back tied choli - tied with two ties of the same fabric - 1" wide. I hand sewed it one afternoon. Why? Why not. Since the embroidery took me at least 4 weeks, I figured why stop now? The hand-sewing for a choli is not intense. Even with small, careful stitching and not being a fabulously efficient hand-sewer, it only took me about 5 hours. For rectangular patterns that can often meet in odd corners, the flexibility of hand sewing can be a real win for nice, flat seams.

I ended up doing a fitting with Roxanae. This was a great thing - we needed to take it in at a few places. I highly recommend doing a fitting - especially when you are using someone else's pattern. Double especially when you are fitting royalty. Not only do they need to look really snazzy, but they also have a hectic life on the throne and they may gain or loose weight pretty significantly. Even after the fitting, Roxanae's lost so much weight between her first and second reigns that she shrunk out of it. ... And yes, I have considered following her Majesty around with a plate of cheesecake. :)

I finished up by making a lining with the newly adjusted choli pattern shapes out of 100% cotton. I got a close match from the quilting section of a Jo-Ann's fabrics. I did cheat and use a machine for this part. This was pretty important - the fabric had become scratchy with the metal threads in it, so having a lining was a must. As always - preshrink, preshrink, preshrink!!