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

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

Tonight Tricia continues the story of how we chose which jacket to recreate. What have I been doing while she’s blogging? Well, taking pictures of Laura, for one. Here’s Laura in her first completed reproduction garment – a man’s shirt, which was basically underwear in the period. She did a great job and is now more than halfway through a cassock (outer garment) to go with. Laura is this year’s summer intern with the Colonial Wardrobe & Textiles Department (which right now consists of just the two of us and some dedicated volunteers). Talk about being thrown in at the deep end! Besides making new clothes, she’s spending a fair amount of time helping Kathy process kit orders, and as of today, keeping track of returned samples! Drumroll….we now have TWO completed samples in hand! I won’t mention last names here, but Wendy & Robbin, your samples safely arrived and are just beautiful.

Here’s Tricia:
A great off-shoot of making all the calculations from the last blog entry was the realization that each stitch type has its own materials cost and labor cost. So if you were a professional workshop of the past, the stitches chosen for a motif can dramatically change the cost to produce the jacket. Therefore, knowing these numbers could give us a ‘yard stick’ to use to evaluate historic pieces for their possible relative expense to one another. As an example spiral trellis takes a lot more silk than detached buttonhole or trellis stitch to work.

This came home to me when we were evaluating which jacket we would adapt. We were visiting a piece at the MET and it was beautiful Jill was struck by the gold thread stitch used for the vine, something I will call here “ladder stitch with zigzag interlacing”. It was dramatic and she was convinced that we should abandon the dreaded plaited braid in favor of this beautiful stitch. Having just taught this stitch on a piece the week before - I was horrified. The stitch consumed an enormous amount of thread, was worked in two passes, and took forever to work an inch. It made plaited braid look like a cake walk. So I convinced her to abandon this idea. (Yes, I gave up the idea, but in my defense, is that not a GORGEOUS stitch? JMH)But then the light bulb went off, why did the professionals use this stitch for this particular jacket? It must have been very expensive to work as it used more thread and more time. So who was the jacket made for? Did everyone who looked at the jacket when worn realize that it was more expensive and so it became a status symbol? When we have the chance some day to show pictures of the jacket, we can discuss why we think the piece may have been made for a child or very young girl. If so, why go to the expense? Who was she?

Another factor to consider was that jackets of this type were made over a 30 year time frame. Was this jacket early or late compared to others? And what was inflation like at that time? The materials and labor costs could be quite different along that spectrum of time, making something less or more expensive to produce depending on when it was made.

This was exciting. I plan to work a sample with rectangle samples and lengths of stitches of the period to measure the relative times and materials costs in the near future to give a more accurate set of data to use for these types of material culture investigations. Part of the purpose of the project has been to examine the past through the eyes of those that ‘did’. I think we are uncovering a lot of insights as we do so!

Tricia

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

Here’s the schedule for the June embroidery session. I expect the later sessions to be similar, with a combination of plenty of time for stitching, good food, conversation, and entertaining programs.

This bit of information applies to participants in all the sessions:

If you usually use a magnifier, please bring it. If you are able to bring a lamp, please do so. The chairs are wooden; if you would like a seat cushion, please bring one.

Please let Kathy know as soon as possible about any allergies or dietary restrictions.

This is what we’ll be doing in just a couple of weeks:

Tuesday, June 19

9:30 - 10:00 check-in, orientation, get acquainted; we’ll meet in the lobby of the Henry Hornblower II Visitors’ Center at Plimoth Plantation.

10:00 we’ll begin stitching in Accomack, across the path from the Visitors’ Center. We’ll have a mid-morning tea break when we’re ready.

1:00 lunch provided by Plimoth Plantation

2:00 - 5:30 stitching, with a tea & snacks break mid-afternoon

Dinner at Plimoth Plantation.

Evening program: Wendy White and Tricia Wilson Nguyen of Tokens & Trifles will teach a small project using perforated paper and motifs from Plimoth Plantation’s ‘EC’ sampler.

Wednesday, June 20

9:00 - 1:00 stitching, with a break for snacks and chat

1:00 lunch at Plimoth Plantation

2:00 – 3:30 stitching. The late afternoon is for seeing Plimoth Plantation, other Plymouth sites, and shopping.

Dinner on your own.

Thursday, June 21

Today is the filming for the PBS show Needle Arts Studio with Shay Pendray. I’ve scheduled a full day of stitching so whenever they want to film, we’ll be ready.

9:00 - 12:00 stitching

12:00 - 2:00 lunch, with a presentation by Kathleen Curtin, Plimoth Plantation’s Colonial Foodways Historian and author of Giving Thanks, Thanksgiving History & Recipes from the Pilgims to Pumpkin Pie

2:00 - 5:30 stitching, with a snacks break

Dinner at Plimoth Plantation

7:30 We’ll meet Peter Follansbee, joiner, in the Crafts Center. Peter will tell us about his work, especially how he lays out and carves designs on his beautiful reproduction furniture.

Friday, June 22

9:00 - 11:00 stitching

11:00 - tea and snacks break

11:30 tour of collection with Karin Goldstein, Curator of Originals

1:00 lunch

2:00 - 4:00 stitching

We’ll break at 4:00 today for thank yous & farewells & to give those driving an early start.

I’m really looking forward to meeting each of you. This promises to be an extraordinary experience.