Medieval Embroidery Pattern: early 14th Century alms purse

Today, I am sharing a free medieval embroidery pattern with you. Late last year, I visited the Treasury of the basilica of St Servatius in Maastricht, the Netherlands. Among the display cases with medieval textiles sat this very damaged alms purse. Colours faded and threads fallen out. When I studied the pictures I had taken on my computer, I saw traces of gold thread. The embroidery consists of brick stitch executed in gold thread and silk on linen. And since I have never tried brick stitch with gold thread, reconstructing the pattern would certainly teach me a thing or two! You can follow along as I share the pattern and my process with you in this blog. You can also find a downloadable PDF in the membership section of my website.

Unfortunately, the museum’s caption was VERY short: 105, Liège/Maastricht c. 1300. The embroidery uses two colours of untwisted filament silk: red (now blush) and blue (pretty faded as well). Often, a dark stain surrounds these silken brick stitches. And some of that stain still contains traces of a metal thread. The embroidery fabric is a coarser linen or wool, probably evenweave. Unfortunately, I don’t have exact counts. For similar counted thread embroidery, the counts can range from 28 to 72.

As noted, this medieval embroidery pattern employs only one stitch: Brick Stitch. The smallest stitch in the above pattern runs over two fabric threads. Most stitches run over four, and a small number run over six. That’s it. You will need an untwisted filament silk, such as Au Ver à Soie Soie Ovale, if you want a true medieval look. However, it will also work with normal stranded cotton or perlé. For my metal thread, I chose Stech 120/130 made by M.Maurer. This is comparable to passing thread #5.

When you look at the original, the linen or woollen fabric has a very open weave. Today’s embroidery linens don’t. As part of the embroidery is worked in a metal thread, this open weave is likely important. The bigger holes make the metal thread go through more easily. I have therefore opted to use 32 ct Congress cloth instead of linen. The size of the embroidery fabric means that I needed a double thread (or go over your stitch twice) of the Au Ver à Soie Soie Ovale.

When recreating this medieval embroidery pattern, I started in the middle, stitching the red diamond first. How you start and anchor your threads is up to you. Knots are fine by me :).

For the next step, I added the metal thread stitches around the central red diamond. As you can see, metal thread doesn’t spread like silken threads do. It is completely normal to see the background fabric between the stitches. Especially enlarged like this. In real life, this isn’t very noticeable as the sheen of the gold overpowers the dull cream of my fabric. To get the same effect, avoid stark white fabrics. By the way, you can also use metallic threads. They behave more like textile threads, and you will get better coverage. Not period-appropriate, though.

I treated my metal thread just as I treated my silk embroidery thread. However, I did work a little more slowly to give my metal thread time to adjust to all the abrupt movements I made.

Keep adding stitches, working from the middle outwards. The metal thread will tend to drag up silken fibres from the threads running along the back. You can minimise this by being mindful of your stitching path.

And this is the finished medieval embroidery pattern based on the fragments of an alms purse in the Treasury of St Servaas in Maastricht. Would you have guessed that the alms purse was once probably this bright? And are you surprised by how the complete pattern reads?

Embroidered bags like these would have been valuable possessions. Unlike other forms of goldwork embroidery, the metal thread runs on the invisible back. And as the embroidery is full-cover, the labour costs would have been considerable too!