a very merry september to you all!

✦ find me on instagram @the.flightless.artist ✦

Reminiscent of an Elizabethan knot garden, this plan is meant to be viewed from a height. Box-edged beds are filled with an informal mixed planting of shrubs and herbaceous plants.

Terence Conran’s New House Book, 1985

Alexander McQueen Fall 2013

Miniature wedding portraits of Frances and John Croker of Barton by Nicolas Hilliard, circa 1581.

That weird historian thing where you see certain portraits so much in books/TV/online that you sort of forget they're actually real things that exist in the world. Saw the "Armada Portrait" of Elizabeth I in person in Greenwich last month.

Spent the weekend at the most gorgeous wedding, felt like I was in The Favourite (2018), 10/10 for these 16th century vibes

What Rhaenyra Targaryen would have worn... (TUDOR PERIOD)

I am no mother, I am no bride, I am king…

🦄🩸🗡

[WIP - Upon Her Bloody Horn]

A unicorn takes on a human disguise to enact revenge against those who have hunted her kind to extinction, only to find herself caught in the middle of bloody kingdom politics and allured by the one-eyed hunter with whom she's a violent history with.

...

A quick intro for my 80s-inspired Elizabethan dark fantasy WIP with a sort-of-enemies-to-lovers subplot!🤭 Been so obsessed with this WIP yall!!

I comp it as "The Last Unicorn meets Legend (1985) meets Elizabeth: The Golden Age."

I got some good advice from an embroidery youtuber recently for when you're learning new and intimidating stitches: Scale it up. Some Elizabethan stitches work by looping and working around previous stitches to build up a braid. It boggles the mind a bit. By scaling things up with a large-format aida cloth and this velvet thread (Very Velvet by Rainbow Gallery) and a big ole' blunt tapestry needle it makes it easier to see the steps. It's also almost impossible to pierce through your thread. Bonus: If you mess up, it's easy to take the mistake out and retrace your steps. Gonna do a few more lines before I move to a practice piece of linen, then the final project.

Had a last minute notion to make an Elizabethan-inspired embroidery pattern to celebrate the eclipse. I originally thought of doing a coif pattern, but thought the eclipse would get lost in the folds of the cap, so I ultimately went with a sweet bag. Since it was cloudy throughout totality, I thought it would be fun to incorporate the stars & clouds embroidery from a c.1600 waistcoat at the Bath Fashion Museum. The sun design is inspired by various period illustrations of sun motifs, minus the face they always seemed to put on every sun/moon design because I just couldn't make it not look silly.

I have no idea what stitches I would use for this bag, since sweet bags tend to use all sorts of different stitches. The original stars & clouds design is in blackwork, but I haven't seen any evidence of blackwork used on sweet bags. I'd probably do the background in a black or darkest blue metallic gobelin stitch (also ahistorical, but pretty!), the clouds/stars in silver stem stitch, the corona and rays in satin stitch or plaited braid, and the moon in black detatched buttonhole or some other fill stitch. Or I'd do the entire thing in blackwork except the corona and rays of the sun, which I'd do in gilt, documentation be damned.

The matching set of Aziraphale doodles from my completed Inktober challenge!

GENEVA BIBLE (London, 1559) Given to Queen Elizabeth I.

- Margot Lister, Costume