Third Place

Michele Roberts visited our chapter to pilot her class, Golden Peacock Feather. There were five students in the class and we were all pretty accomplished stitchers.

Golden Peacock Feather is a design incorporating numerous gold work techniques as taught at the Royal School of Needlework in England. Much of what Michele included in this design involved the use of bullions, paillettes, and various beads, with some threads thrown in as a counter point. The threads were both prosaic and familiar, e.g. cotton floss, and some others more exotic with which I was unfamiliar. The latter, whose name I cannot recall, involves a very slender filament of silk wrapped with an equally slender gold thread; these were used to effect the pin feathers.

There were many learning opportunities in this design to use the vast array of gold work techniques, as several of the pinfeathers are worked in a variety of challenging techniques.