Who Gets to be the Draftsman?
Here’s Tricia continuing the story:
For the last two entries we have been talking about the sample embroidery we worked and the insights we have gained. Another insight is that of the pattern drafting.
Remember that Denise drafted the sample pattern from the photos and I worked the embroidery. Well, I had difficulties with some of her drafting as just the perimeters of some of the shapes were taken. When examining the photos and trying to apply the same stitch to the piece, I often had to add lines so I had anchor places for my detached stitches. Take a look at the photo. The borage flower can’t be worked as one piece as the direction of the detached buttonhole has to change for each petal. So each petal needed to be drawn separately. Looking at the close-ups of this flower showed that there were ’seam lines’ if you might call them that, which were visible in the flower.Because of this, our original plan to have Denise draft the pattern and trace it to the linen had to change. An embroiderer needed to draft the master pattern to take into account the lines which needed to be added (or subtracted in the case of the butteryfly’s detached wings). Unfortunately, Denise left Plimoth before she was able to transfer the pattern to the linen - so I got to do that too…but more on that in a later blog entry.
When looking at the numerous stumpwork or tent stitch pictures worked by girls and young women, you often see pattern lines that have not been covered. If the girl bought the piece with the transfer and then chose what stitches to use, the draftsman cannot decide what lines to omit or place to aid the stitcher. In the case of the jackets, I don’t recall seeing yet any lines that are uncovered. The exception of course is where a black thread has degraded, but the needle holes are still obvious. I wonder what this says about the relationship between the draftsman and the embroiderer. We do know from primary sources that these two professions could stand alone and were not always one and the same.
As we have been surveying the jackets and coifs with coiling stems, a pattern is starting to emerge about stitch choices for particular motifs. At this point I have seen numerous birds worked in trellis and spiral trellis. Trellis also seems to be the often chosen treatment for a butterfly body. This may have been more general than at first glance and may have been a constant in a particular workshop. If a draftsman was part of the staff, he may have been familiar with the code in the shop and able to transfer a very workable pattern for use. This is just a thought - a conjecture from a limited amount of data and our own observations. A fresh look at pieces in many collections would help to build a case for these and other hypotheses that are being developed as part of this ‘living history’. We put them out there to start to solicit comments from the collective memory of the readers of this blog.
Tricia
Tags: , drafting, master pattern, sample
