Sweets Bag, 15th/16th/17th century

Sweet bag, after a fashion. It's more a sampler for techniques than a proper sweet bag: the few surviving examples of which I can find tend to be much more fully embroidered, and ornamented with tassels and cords.

The bag is white linen, embroidered with red silk after the style of this smock. I started it a few years back as practice for the embroidered coif project, but never finished making it up. The squirrel is copied from the above smock, the other motifs (rose, bee, bleeding pelican, oak leaves, mutant-raspberry thing) are all out of A Schole-House for the Needle. The rose side is work in two strands (starting split stitch, switching to back); the squirrel side in single-strand backstitch.

Squirrel, acorn, and raspberry(?).

The string is "An Endented Braid" (5-loop round braid in bichromatic chevrons) from Tak V Bowes Departed, looped in blue and gold size FF silk.

Rose, bee, and a pelican stabbing itself.

I don't actually like how the ultra-narrow casing works, and wish the motifs were all a bit lower down. I'm already tempted to take out the casing for some added height and re-thread the the strings through the material itself to see if the closure works better. And because that appears to be the more customary method. Maybe add some extra tassels...