And so the stitching on the Italian multicolor piece is complete!

The sprigs are done. I will do a final patrol over the thing to see if I might have forgotten to fill a spot, or left out a curlicue, but unless something surfaces, there is no more double running, Montenegrin, or two-sided Italian cross stitch to work.

What I am up to now is the narrow rolled hem. I want to thank long-distance friend Rhaeya for posting a how-to photo of her method of hand-working a narrow rolled hem on linen. It’s far more efficient and easier than the method I learned from my Grandmother. Granted – the family method was predicated for use on chiffon and it came in handy for a wedding I attended decades ago, which required a bridesmaid’s dress with ruffled tiers of that stuff in light blue. But it didn’t work quite as elegantly as Rhaeya’s does for this heavier linen.

You can see I’ve done the bottom edge, and have begun the side on the left. The remaining hem will probably take another two or three days to do with absolute precision. After that comes a layer of decorative stitching around the edge. The inspiration for that is this photo of the museum original:

See the green verticals? After staring at the thing and doing lots of thought experiments, I have decided to not work them as simple blanket stitch or buttonhole stitch. There’s no real evidence for the “spine” of color those stitches would create along the edge. Nor are these stitches whipped at at angle. A bit of experimentation might be in order, but I do think that some sort of open chain stitch or looping/knotting logic was used here, one that left verticals on both sides, but with a line of horizontals on only the reverse, linking the verticals at the base adjacent to the red border.

I have no pix of the back of the work to confirm my guess, but I do think that it is logical. The only other option would be to take invisible stitches between each rising green line through the body of the hem, with no horizontal stitches seen on the surface front or back. A possibility, but too fussy. The more I look at this, the more I consider the labor that went into my small quotation of the whole, and the more I think on how the larger piece might have been made, the more I believe it was a workshop product. Done as quickly as possible, by a team of stitchers. Discontinuities in corners, very slight differences in the design as stitched on the different sides, and the size of the piece are the main drivers of my thoughts.

So the simpler I can do it, the better. Done as quickly and efficiently as I can, in the spirit of my posited long-ago workshop. And when that stage is done – probably another four to six days, I will cap it all off with my initials and date hidden someplace in the piece, plus little red tassels on each corner, again in homage to the original, as seen below.