Today Tricia Wilson Nguyen is guest-writing. The actual pattern development was carried out by Tricia and Denise Lebica, a former tailor with the Colonial Wardrobe Department, with help from Johanna Tower, who worked with us as both an intern and a tailor.

Tonight we will start a discussion of how the embroidery pattern for the jacket was developed. One of the considerations when we were choosing a jacket for the adaptation was how to draft the embroidery pattern. Our first choice jacket, the Laton jacket at theV&A museum, was behind glass and wouldn’t be able to be accessed for photography from all sides. A quick review of the available photos from scholars, the auction house and the V&A did not result in all the jacket being viewable, especially the all important back. It is on the back of the jacket where a photo can often be taken that shows much of the repeat of the pattern and has the least curvature. Many of you will realize that tracing a motif from a picture of a curved object won’t give you a true shape.

The eventual choice (V&A acc. number 1359-1900) kept coming to the top of our list as it has a close cousin in the collection of the Embroiderers’ Guild. Housed in Hampton court, and called both a cushion and a coif in different references, is a panel which is unmistakably related to the jacket design. The panel (EG acc. number 1982.79) has been photographed flat and contains nine of the twelve motifs that are on the jacket. The existing photography could be used to trace the related elements and give us a start, as well as the photography of the jacket itself. If you would like to see this piece, there are two publications which show it. The first is “Raised Embroidery” by Barbara and Roy Hirst. It is pictured in its entirety on page 9. A slightly cropped version of the photo is shown in “Treasures from the Embroiderers Guild Collection” edited by Elizabeth Benn. The panel is shown on page 15.

So to start, we referred to the on-line information on the jacket measurement, divided by the number of coils vertically and came up with a coil height of 4 inches. This matched our measurements on the jacket at the MET and so we thought we were off and running. We enlarged all the photography of the V&A jacket and the EG panel so that the coils matched this number. A week later, we had to rescale when costume curator Susan North (as a double check) pulled the jacket from storage and gave us specific measurements we requested. In fact the coil height was 2 5/8″. We were glad we checked as the published measurement was from the tip of the sleeve to the collar and not the bottom of the jacket to the collar!

Leaves of tracing paper were placed over sections in the photographs and 2 x 2 repeats were traced off both pieces until all the elements were captured. This required us to scan the pieces and check off motifs and their repeats until we had no more to scratch out. As you look at photos of the jackets, think about how confusing they look to the eye. The repeat in the pattern only shows up if you have a yard or more of the embroidered fabric to look at. But ours was cut up and reassembled in a jacket shape!

These tracing papers were then xeroxed in multiples (as well as rescaled to 2 5/8″). We used the mirror function on the xerox to get matchbook facing patterns, as they are on the front right and left. Now coming up with a vine was all that was left before we could cut and paste! Since a large area of the jacket wasn’t available to trace, the vine pattern that was available to us was the one on the panel. But it was mirrored down the middle of the panel, and we could tell that the jacket didn’t have this flip. So we traced the 3 x 3 vine to the right and then tiled it along a big piece of dressmaker’s paper. You can see Denise tracing the vine to extend it in the photo. At this point we had a large piece of paper with a vine all over it.

For our first attempt, we cut the motifs out of the paper and tried laying it over the vine (here you can see that in process). In some areas they fit well, for some we had to cut the vine out. We continued to refer to the photos of the panel and the jacket to try to put motifs in what would appear to be the correct order. At this point since we were mixing tracings from two different embroidery pieces, we were resigned that our pattern would be an adaptation of the original. Denise and I conferred on the placement of motifs and struggled to make sure that we didn’t have red flowers next to other red flowers and details like that. We never guessed that we might get to the ‘real pattern’…but more on that tomorrow night.Tricia

Tags: pattern, tracing

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 2nd, 2007 at 12:59 pm and is filed under Materials, Progress. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.