So how do we know we aren’t crazy for doing a project like this? By finding someone else who is just as crazy, of course! But isn’t crazy just another word for passionate?Seriously, while we had made an estimate of the number of hours to embroider the jacket we weren’t totally sure we were on the right track. But we found a very interesting website that helped us tremendously. It is the site of Laura Mellin and is called “Extreme Costuming” (www.extremecostuming.com). Laura had just finished an embroidered jacket adapted from two historic pieces as we were working on our time trials. What was better was that Laura has documented her experience in extreme costuming and put her ‘lessons learned’ on the site - I won’t recount them here as you should read her experiences first hand. We learned that her adaptation took her 1,947 hours of work, including hand sewing the jacket. Since a typical work year is 2,000 hours - you have to be amazed that she was able to do this in only a year and 4 months. This gave us a good data point that our estimate was on track. Due to the complexity of the embroidery on our jacket compared to the stitches she had used, we gave ourselves at least 30% more time required.

Laura is following our project and we are making plans for her to get involved too. She was gracious to let us use a few pictures from her collection here today. I personally can’t wait to see her work in person! Meanwhile, take a tea break and surf her site. You will be glad you did! She has made a number of reproduction coifs, nightcaps, and the jacket.

Her experience and our calculations also started to confirm to us that it was unlikely that these jackets were the work of just one individual. Even though the jackets were part of a fashionable wardrobe for many decades, fashion did change frequently in the early 1600s. It is unlikely that a person would commission a jacket and then wait for over a year to get it. This is also a long time for a embroidery shop to wait for payment. Using a large number of people could reduce the turn around time of a jacket to maybe as short as a month. We used this assumption to start looking for mistakes or inconsistencies in the stitching on the existing historic jackets. These mistakes (color use or stitch use) or difference in stitch length could help us identify that different people were working on the same piece. After viewing several pieces in person and looking at the photography of several jackets, the inconsistencies have been showing up quite frequently. For example, on the jacket we are adapting, the honeysuckle bud on the back is stitched entirely in red unlike the rest of these motifs which are stitched with both red and pink. The MET jacket showed us a multitude of such evidence from stitch types being inconsistent, stitch length, and color use on particular motifs. This also made us feel a lot better about having so many hands on our project!

Tricia

Tags: , data, extreme costuming

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 10th, 2007 at 10:11 pm and is filed under Historical Background. 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.