Ribbon Embroidered Reticule

A few weeks ago I had a rummage in my fabric stash, and I found a piece of soft peach silk dupioni. Unfolding it, I saw that at some point I'd begun embroidering wild roses. It took a bit of remembering, but eventually I worked out I'd started this piece back in High School.  That's quite a while ago now.  Why on earth had I abandoned it?

I decided I'd finish it.  Going back to the stash, I pulled out a frame, my silk ribbons, a box of silk threads -

Oh boy.  It was pretty quickly VERY clear why I'd abandoned the project the first time round. I use dupioni often for ribbon embroidery as I find that silk ribbons pass very cleanly through the fabric - far more easily than they do through a silk taffeta.
  But this particular  soft-and-supple-seeming dupioni was so tightly woven and so tough that I could hardly get a needle through it.  To drag a ribbon through it, I had to pull the needle through the fabric with a pair of pliers.

 

The mystery now wasn't why I'd abandoned the project the first time round - it was why I hadn't burned it in a fire and salted the earth afterwards.

Presumably I was as much a stubborn idiot then as I am now.  The roses were pretty. I would not waste them.I abandoned my first plan -  to unpick the rather-badly-laid-out stems and start the composition over, and instead stuck to a few simple rose leaves. 

Leaf by leaf, I dragged the thin ribbon through the blasted silk.  The resulting tension issues mean that my little rose bush is not the healthiest-looking rose bush in embroidered history - in fact I'm pretty sure some of the leaves have sawfly.
But I pressed on, swearing ineffectually, until there was a nasty snap, and only the front half of the needle came through.  Yep.  My, soft and supple silk had actually broken a tapestry needle in half.  

 

Dropping plans for any  further leaves, I tied off and threaded up the smallest needle I could get away with and started embroidering rose thorns instead.  Lots of rose thorns. This was NOT a FRIENDLY rose bush.

Once I'd wrestled the embroidery into submission, turning it into something I could show off was practically a walk in the park. I needed a regency reticule, so I made that.  

I figured out some dimensions, cut out a template, marked it up, cut it out, and stitched it up.

 

A hand-stitched drawstring channel was next.

 

Then a pair of ribbon drawstrings to match the roses, and lastly, I used up a hank of green silk thread making a set of little silk tassels for the corners.

And voila - a reticule!

 

 
The embroidery might not be perfectly accurate to the period, but it is very pretty and photogenic, and I never need to sew this AWFUL silk again.

So there.