Thursday 17 October 2013

G[r]eek Alphabet - Y is for Yggdrasil

I've talked about this before but Yggdrasil is the world tree, a figure from Norse mythology.

This was going to be a composition with lots of greens and earth tones. I did debate whether to have a bright tree on a dark background or vice versa, but with some back up opinions I decided to stick with the dark tree on a slightly lighter background.

Colour test shot of a lighter and darker green fabric. Photo taken while I was debating whether the tree would be dark green on light green or the reverse

This following was testing out the colour for the letter Y (white) and the snake (greeny yellow).

I had looked up some deer pictures for colour reference but I decided that I needed a contrast and I couldn't face such fine hemming so I used some fake leather that wouldn't need hemming for both the tree and the deer.

Late colour testing including the cut out tree in a redder fake leather, the deer in a fake leather suede that is paler and more yellowy and the yellowy green of the snake to be, plus the white of the ribbon for the Y

Final debate was about the width of the letter Y. Mostly I've used this type of ribbon at full width but when I laid it over the tree, you couldn't see the tree either side.

Debating how thick a ribbon to use for the letter Y. The full width of the white ribbon felt too overpowering here
 So instead I decided I would use it half thickness.

Debating how thick a ribbon to use for the letter Y. The half width of the white ribbon felt more appropriate to the composition
 This is an early stage of sewing down. The tree is partially sewn down, the tree also, the deer are started sewing and the snake is in progress.
Part way through sewing down the design. Snake is half way done, tree is part sewn as are the deer.
 Snake completely sewn down, I'm on to the details! One of the things you can see from this picture to the next is that I've used embroidery to slightly tidy the outlines of the snake, specially at the head and tail. This was to smooth the outline which was hard to create while sewing down quite a thick snake.
Part way through sewing down the design fabrics, the snake fabric is now sewn down, although later additional details were embroidered on to finish him off
 One of the things I decided late on was that the slight leaves embroidery was too bright. I decided to over sew with darker colours to tone it down. The squirrel, part of the original design was debated a bit as to whether I wanted to include it in such a busy design, but I decided I wanted a squirrel so I put him in. The raven however, did not make the cut.

Y is for Yggdrasil the world tree complete

Mythology Spot


For more lovely info on the mythos of Yggdrasil try this great article Norse Mythology : Yggdrasil and the Well of Urd.

In summary of the details I've included.
  • The squirrel is Ratatosk - a messenger animal
  • The snake is probably Nidhogg, a snake who gnaws at the roots
  • The deer are two of the 4 that spend time in the tree. Their names are Dain, Dvalin, Duneyr, and Dyrathror. There wasn't room for 4 deer - sorry.
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