With Halloween this Sunday, it’s the perfect time to share a blackwork sampler design that was created for CrossStitch & Needlework in 2015. Blackwork is a form of counted cross stitch worked entirely with black floss. It’s also sometimes known as Spanish blackwork because it was believed to have been introduced to the court of Henry VIII by Catherine of Aragon, Henry’s first queen. However, a form of blackwork may have been in England prior to 1500 because Chaucer makes mention of black silk embroidery on a white collar in his Canterbury Tales.
Blackwork is visible in the garments of many portraits painted in the 1500s, but because of the corrosiveness of the thread’s iron-based dyes, there are few well-preserved English examples of clothing from the period. There are, however, surviving examples from non-English pieces because their silks contained less iron in the dye. These days, most blackwork is stitched using cotton embroidery floss, not silk.
If you want to spend your weekend with a Halloween-themed cozy mystery, you still have time to grab your copy of A Stitch to Die For, only .99 cents through Sunday.
An Anastasia Pollack Crafting Mystery, Book 5
Ever since her husband died and left her in debt equal to the gross national product of Uzbekistan, magazine crafts editor and reluctant amateur sleuth Anastasia Pollack has stumbled across one dead body after another—but always in work-related settings. When a killer targets the elderly nasty neighbor who lives across the street from her, murder strikes too close to home. Couple that with a series of unsettling events days before Halloween, and Anastasia begins to wonder if someone is sending her a deadly message.
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