As you can see on the images I shared in this post many of the ladies in the images have decorated sleeves on their shifts. And soemtimed on the body of the shift too. Like this:
I thought about weaving trim, but I think that embroidery is a more likely technique for this. Especially since there is decoration on the chest too.
This is a small scale illustration, so any pattern would probably be very stylized, but I still used this painting as inspiration for my embroidery.
As you may see from the not yet finished sleeve to the left I use a type of Aida where the threads are glued together with a water soluble glue. After embroidering you put the fabric in water and dry it, you can then pull out the guiding threads. Not even before old age started affect my eyes did I have very good eyesight, so I can't really do counted embroidery on linen without help.
The embroidery threads are cotton. Silk, or even wool, would probably have been the period choice, since they take dyes so much better than vegetable fibres, especially linen. But cotton is actually not htat hard to dye, and cotton was both grown and woven in Spain in teh 13th century, so I could make some kind of argument for using it. But it's really because I already had the yarn, from thrift stores, and because I want to be able to wash my underwarm in hot water.
The embroidery is extremely simple brick stitching, since I saw it used on some 13th century German textiles when I was looking around for period embroidery stitches.
Now I need to finish the next sleeve embroidery.
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