Where’s Waldo?
Tricia finishes last night’s story:
While we were transferring the embroidery design to the pattern pieces, we found several exceptions to the master repeat. Sometimes it was a simple change form a rounded wing butterfly to a spiky butterfly, sometimes a bud was replaced by a leaf. There are two big changes. For some reason, on the arms the bird no longer sits on the borage coil but sits on the honeysuckle coil. This meant that the honeysuckle bud is eliminated and the borage has a butterfly in the coil. Both flowers appear on the wide part of the upper arm so we can’t quite decide why the bird was moved by the original pattern drafter. And this change is mirrored on each arm.
A second much more subtle change may have been a mistake. A bud was replaced by a folded pansy on the jacket in only one spot. This motif shows up multiple times on the panel that is owned by the Embroiderers’ Guild (see page 9 of Raised Embroidery by Barbara and Roy Hirst for a picture of the full panel). I am not going to tell you where this folded pansy appears on the jacket – you’ll just have to visit to see it! We plan on making this a game when the jacket is displayed – a “Where’s Waldo?” sort of treasure hunt.
Because of the minor changes we had noted, once our tracings were done, we had to go over each pattern piece and compare it to the jacket. What a time-consuming process. Every tendril, bud, and leaf was checked to try for the most accurate pattern we could get. From that process we were able to note some of the inconsistencies mentioned above.
Tricia
Here I am again. Tricia uses the editorial “we” too – in this case she really did all the checking and double-checking, in the process probably becoming more familiar with this embroidery pattern than anyone since the original designer.
Tags: , folded pansy, master pattern, motifs
