Lagartera Class

Last Saturday I went along to the class Gay Sanderson ran for  the SA Embroiderers' Guild Certificate Course. The class was in Largartera, an embroidery style from the Spanish village of the same name. The Guild has done work on this form of embroidery in the past, producing a book that is still in print.

Traditional Lagartera uses double running and satin stitch on evenweave linen.

I have been a bit busy in the last week - partly because of the Adelaide Festival of Arts - and prepared for the class very early on Saturday morning - choosing what looked like a piece of evenweave linen that I could see without too much extra magnification.

As the class progressed from examining Gay's many examples of Lagartera work, to actual stitching, an interesting problem emerged on my linen.

The design, which was square, emerged rectangular. Gay checked my counting, which, somewhat to my relief, was accurate.

My linen was not, in fact, evenweave, but had more threads in the warp than the weft.




I decided to press on regardless.  It meant the satin stitch diamonds had to be worked with rather longer stitches than would otherwise have been the case. I used three strands of cotton, both for the satin stitch and for the backstitch outlines of the diamonds.


The linen was good to work with - just not square!

I finished off the sample last night.

I will probably make it up into a small gift bag, rather than the pincushion originally intended!

It was a great class, focused and fun.  Gay is an engaging and relaxed teacher and there was a lot of sharing of knowledge and skill.

I'm sure I'll do more Lagartera.