Here's an update -- with the proper soie perlee colour this time. Not a great picture, but you can see the difference, I hope. I've finished all the buttonhole stitch now, and it was like stitching with water. Lovely and smooth, but yes, very twisty thread. I finally squinted at it and realised it was a Z-twist thread, so perhaps if I'd worked right to left rather than my usual left to right, it might have been easier. We'll never know. The trick, I think, with this particular stitch is not to pull it tight, but just to let it sit on the fabric. I'm hoping that a looser tension will discourage any curling edge when it's cut from the fabric.
Mabel, the diacritical mark in the name reminds people to pronounce the "e" (the name has 3 syllables, rather than two). In this case, it's pronounced as a kind of soft 'ey', I'd guess. Part of the plot driver in
The Simarillion revolves around changes in spoken language, specifically whether the first letter of that particular name was spoken as an "S" or the older soft "th". But the author was a philologist...
