How Much Time Will The Embroidery Take?
Tricia’s been a whirlwind these past few days, tracking down frame parts from the four corners of the known world; figuring, refiguring, and figuring again how to most efficiently fit the pattern pieces onto the linen and the linen into the frames; not to mention generating fund-raising and product development ideas and answering all the questions I shoot over to her. On top of that, she’s written out some detailed explanations of the different “research & development” steps we’ve gone through but so far mentioned only briefly. This is not only interesting for you to read about, but accomplishes two of our stated goals – to thoroughly document all our work and to share that information as widely as possible. I’m also glad of the help with the blog this week; it gives me space to focus on getting all the details arranged for our June session, and to dress the final 2 new role-players (3 are all set and will begin work as Plymouth Colonists on Friday).
Tricia says:
We mentioned the time trials before in the blog, but I would like to give you a little more description of how that process went and what we learned. The completed sample is shown here. The sample was undertaken with many purposes. We needed a photo of something to encapsulate what the project was about. And it needed to be something that Plimoth Plantation ‘owned’. In other words, we couldn’t use a photo (and a good one doesn’t yet exist) of the historic jacket as we would need to get permission every time we wanted to use it. So a new sample was needed. We decided to make an incompletely worked piece to help communicate the ‘working’ aspect of this project.Jill gave a good recap of why at the last second the botanically correct blue borage was changed to red in a previous blog entry (Red, red, red). There was a proposal for the exhibit funding going out and something that attracted attention was needed. But the sample also would provide much needed data on the time to work the project and amounts of thread used so we could begin our planning process. We started with a four inch by four inch section of a jacket from the V&A (little did we know at this point that it would be the same jacket that we would choose to adapt). We chose this section because it had every type of stitch we might use on it. The design was drafted from a photograph and transferred to the linen in ink by Denise, a former tailor at Plimoth.
Using Au Ver a Soie Soie Perlee threads, I embroidered the piece and photographed it along the way. I kept a log during the entire process with entries for motif part, thread type and color used, stitch type, length of thread, and time taken. This data was then entered into a database and could be used for many calculations.
We estimated that the jacket pattern we were going to use by Janet Arnold had 1152 square inches of embroidered surface area. Our sample was roughly 16 square inches and we assumed that the amount of white space in the design was going to be the same for the sample and our final piece. Using the total time to embroider the piece, we could calculate that around 2300 hours would be needed. Assuming that every stitcher has her own pace and that I am on the fast side, we extended the estimate to between 2500-3000 hours. It will be exciting to see what it turns out to be. To help with future research, we intend to keep a log through the entire process.
From this data, the area of each motif and stitch area could be calculated (I used a small grid of 1/4″ squares to estimate area). This data was entered into my spreadsheet. Then it was simple calculations to get information like:
# minutes/sq inch for a particular stitch
# inches thread/sq inch for a particular stitch
This information was used as part of a larger database that is being filled in to give us thread use estimates per color. When you look at the jacket - it is hard to say that you need to buy 100 tubes of red or just 50. And we want to have the same dye lot for all the threads without ordering too much or under ordering.
Tomorrow we will continue this discussion to talk about how this data has given us insights into the professional workshops and the relative value of pieces of embroidery.
Tricia
