It's always useful to find out what other writers and artists think about their work. This, from Rosemary Sutcliff:
"The temptation is to try & use everything you’ve found out in…research. That can be fatal, because you…only need to use about 1/10. It’s…like an iceberg…It has to be there, because it gives you the freedom of the period. But you don’t use it.”
It has some relevance to my planning of embroidery projects, especially the #OpusAnglicanum. I need to know something about it, but I'm not trying to do a period-accurate one, so I have to be a bit careful about what I include of what I know.