Here’s Tricia:

This project has come together in a way none of us could have imagined. What is amazing is that if we can dream it – the way becomes clear. Well, we have some big dreams, we will outline some of them and how you can help them to come true over the next few months. One of our dreams is that this project can be used to preserve what is a rapidly disappearing art. In fact, we will call it an endangered species. What do I mean by that?Well, for an art form to survive it must be transferred from person to person and also be well documented for others to study and learn. This is obvious to us all. But we can’t only teach others the embroidery skills, but the materials used to perform the art form have to exist. One thing that I have learned well is that without the right materials, certain stitches can not be made because the stiffness/limpness of the thread prevents it from being formed. This means that the manufacturers that make these materials must have a healthy business and be able to bring on employees that can learn the art to continue the firm once they retire. When we embarked on this project I felt the time was ripe. There are a number of the essential materials which are being used on this project that are on the edge of extinction. We might be just in time to prevent it.

As a consumer culture, we have been trained to expect cheaper products and large corporations with anonymous workers in foreign countries. This is the farthest from the case in the embroidery business. Most businesses that produce materials, especially those that I will call ‘high end’, are companies of three or less people. Shockingly, many of the major brands of threads you use come from family-owned businesses with less than 15 employees. The embroidery business has not been strong for awhile and these manufacturers don’t have an obvious transition plan for when their owners decide to retire.

As I teach across the country, I have tried to explain the situation of many of these businesses. I like to call them Artisan Manufacturers, as they truly use the knowledge from the past – usually from an unbroken chain of family going back in some cases for hundreds of years. Their unique understanding of how the threads, fabrics, and needles are made is something that must be preserved for future generations.

When making our choices of materials to use on this project, we not only looked for those which most closely replicated those of the time period, but gave preference to Artisan Manufacturers. Their knowledge base has been indispensable in reproducing new threads. But we also want to create awareness of their techniques and compare them to the materials of the past. Future blog entries will examine these Artisan Manufacturers and their connections to the past. We hope that it will educate our blog readers and you will lend your support to saving our embroidery heritage.

Tricia

Here’s Tricia:

I had to get these pictures up on the blog as it just shows the magic of doing this project. Here we see the last day of session 1 after moving back to the Wardrobe department. One of our intrepid stitchers, Carrie, is working away and one of the interpreters marched in to do a little work after her shift in the village. The meeting of the old and new. I didn’t get a picture of her making copies at the Xerox (so funny), but it is always fun when the interpreters walk in and can finally speak in our current century. Being able to share the project back and forth puts you in a bit of a time machine! That is the magic of living history.

Now a bit about our stitchers. The young lady in this picture is Carrie Midura. She runs a business in making historically accurate clothing for re-enactors (www.cherrydawson.com). I found her profession so interesting. Being a professional – Carrie embroidered like a woman on fire and made wonderful progress all week. As a young embroiderer myself, I was really happy to look around the room and find many of the women there in their early 30’s. As we are hoping that this knowledge base won’t die, I was thrilled to find many who were working at a high level of skill and were interested in being involved. Now we have to pass it along to our younger friends.

Tricia

Samples from Sharon H and Lauren S arrived today.

Tricia’s writing tonight:

You may have seen some of our earlier hand-wringing over the linen and if it would get here in time for the first session. Well, we managed to get a piece that was 1.9 yards long while we were waiting for our original order of 7 yards. We had been really worried that in the transfer of such a large and complicated pattern, we would make many mistakes. This process of cutting the fabric for tracing became an enormous word problem. It went something like this:If you have 1.9 yards of fabric of one dye lot that matches no other fabric, how big can you cut the pieces to fit the only 11 slate frames located on earth (insert 22 sets of frame piece sizes here)? Note that there are 16 pattern pieces to fit in the frames and each has some random grain direction you must follow. But be sure to end up with some leftover pieces big enough to use if you screw up the inking. Now what time did the train reach the station? Please state the answer in millimeters.

Well, the answer wasn’t obvious. Finally, I cut up pieces of freezer paper to the estimated sizes needed to fit the pattern pieces in the frames. Laid out on the fabric, I was able to nest them to optimize the fabric cut. Phew. I could mess up the transfer on three large pieces and still have fabric of the right dye lot to make a new transfer.

The cutting of the linen proceeded and the freezer paper had an unintended use. I realized that when I ink quilt fabric for autographs, I always iron freezer paper to the back to keep the fabric nice and stiff for inking. So that should work with the linen too! It was the best idea ever for the pattern transfer! If you have ever tried to transfer a pattern to linen before, you will know that the pencil, wax, or ink nib always makes the linen shift. By applying it to freezer paper, the pattern could still be seen through but it was almost like writing on paper.

Since I don’t have a light table that is as big as the pattern pieces, I improvised one. I had a piece of clear Plexiglas cut to 24″ x 36″ and laid it over my existing light box. This allowed me to tape the pattern onto it and then the linen-freezer paper on top of that. The entire piece of linen was taped down around the edges. When I needed light near the ends, I shifted the Plexiglas over the light.

Tracing proceeded using an archival Pigma Pen in black with a 0.01 nib. It took forever. About 16 hours total. But amazingly – no mistake – but lots of hand cramps.

Tricia

Tricia continues the story of how the embroidery pattern was transferred to the pattern pieces and the decisions that needed to be made along the way.

As we talked about previously in the blog, we decided to add a matching coif and forehead cloth to this mad project. Since we didn’t have a piece to use as a model, we used the pattern for one that Plimoth has made many times. (Jill here. We chose one of our several coif patterns, different sizes and slightly different shapes, all copied from original 17^th-century coifs.) Then the question was how to orient the pattern. After examining many pictures of historical coifs, I noted that the majority of them do not have any symmetrical patterns. They all seem to cut a pattern out of the master without regard for left or right. From our ‘dead bird’ episode, you will know that I was too wrapped up in symmetry to note which side was up or down on the coif and got going the wrong way and seemed to kill a few birdies in the process. After we discovered my mistake (which was immortalized in a nasty photo of me on-line), we wondered if any care was made to line up the pattern on the seam line that goes atop the head. Our conclusion from viewing photos was that there wasn’t a great deal of fussiness going on in the 17th century, so we barreled ahead with live birds a second time.

For the forehead cloth, a similar viewing of historical photos revealed a similar disregard for symmetry. But the 90 degree point of the cloth was the ‘up’ on the pattern.

Tricia

AUGUST DATES: There’s been a little confusion about the dates of the August embroidery bee. We’ll be meeting and embroidering for three days, WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 8, THURSDAY, AUGUST 9, AND FRIDAY, AUGUST 10. On the questionnaire that went out with the sample kits there’s a typo which I will not reproduce here lest I cause more confusion. These are the right dates. See you in Plymouth.

Tricia describes the process of adapting the embroidery pattern for the cuffs, collar, and wings, (which are absent from the jacket whose embroidery pattern we’re using):

The jacket pattern that we are working with has a collar, cuffs, and the little wings that come from the shoulders. When it came time to transfer the pattern to these pieces, we had to do a little research. The jacket we are adapting does not have these details, so how do we choose? For the collar, we looked at several examples to see if the collar had a mirrored pattern or was cut out from the repeat. The second question to answer was if the design was right side up or upside down when viewed from the back. [Jill here. The collar is a small semi-circular piece of cloth, on the left in the first picture. It is sewn to the center back neckline. The collar hangs down the back, with the embroidered side up. The side that touches the back of the jacket is unworked.] On the ones we looked at, the collar is cut from the repeat such that the curve of a coil fit in the center rounded part of the collar. This means it is viewed upside down when installed in the jacket. The jackets we viewed also showed that the pattern on the collar matched almost exactly the pattern on the part of the back of the jacket which was covered by the collar. So we followed this guidance.

For the wings (the second picture), the examples showed that the design was just cut in the same orientation as the front of the jacket, and the pattern was right side up when viewed from the front. For the cuffs (the two shapes on the right in the first photo), we had a great picture of a cuff laid out before the MET jacket was mounted years ago. It showed that a modification had been made to the design to put a carnation at the center middle, pointing to the free end of the cuff. Then two coils emanated from the bottom of the carnation, each holding a different motif – but mirrored. We tried to follow this lead the first time we drafted the pattern, but the cuffs for the Laton jacket are not as deep as those on the MET jacket, therefore this scheme didn’t work out. Instead, we put a pink motif in the center and cut the design with the edge of the pattern.

(The third picture is two of the five gussets.)

For the gussets, we followed the V&A jacket and used the area of the design that has thistles on it for each of the five gussets.

Tricia

We’ve been calling the garment we’re making a “jacket.” But if you visit the 1627 English Village (and I hope you will) you’ll see women wearing garments of the same shape and calling them “waistcoats.”

Most of the time, we can’t be positive what name a person from the past would assign to which piece of clothing. Names could even be confusing to contemporaries. For example, see Anne Buck’s brief article (“The Baby under the Bush”, Costume, 1977) analyzing the records of a 17^th century inquiry into the parentage of a foundling baby. The woman who unwrapped the baby described the child’s clothes; the mother, who had dressed and abandoned the baby, described the same set of clothes. In more than one instance, the same garment was given different names by the two women. Even in our own time names of garments can be ambiguous. Consider the word “jacket” in 2007. Jacket can mean a tuxedo jacket, a suit jacket, a windbreaker, a baseball jacket – and the different items aren’t interchangeable.

The earliest of the Plymouth Colony wills and inventories date from the early 1630s. Most of those are records of men’s possessions. In the couple of instances when women’s possessions are listed, the word “jacket” does not appear. There are, though, more than a couple of references to “waistcoat”, and at least once to “waistcoat and petticoat.” We know from other sources (including pictorial sources) that garments shaped like the jacket we’re reproducing were worn with a petticoat almost universally by working class women. Sweeping up all the bits of information, we’ve decided to call these garments “waistcoats.”

Since modern people usually think of a vest (sleeveless upper-body garment) when they hear “waistcoat,” we’ve decided to call our reproduction garment a “jacket.” This name conjures an image closer to the item we’re making, and has the added advantage of following the example of costume historian Janet Arnold, hardly a bad thing.

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.