Last night I promised a picture of the big pile o’ dirty clothes in the wardrobe department. I took several, but forgot to reset my camera so they’re too big (file size) for Bloggie. I’ll get more tomorrow. Those piles aren’t going to disappear overnight.

I do have a picture of Shelley-Jo in her brand new blue gown, taken the day after Thanksgiving (last Friday), when it was finally cold enough to wear it. She looks great in all her period clothes, but she did mention that having something made to fit her makes a big difference. I’m grateful for her patience with my slow progress.

Here also is a picture of the stockings knit by volunteers so far. Thanks to Penny’s husband Ian for the photo styling.

The little green cap is Shaina’s first completed knitting project, and a fine one it is too. She’s well on her way to finishing a knitted pocket based on the one found on the Gunnister body (with this project she learned two-color knitting, the stranded method) and next up is stockings, I believe. Penny’s doing a great job teaching and Shaina is an able and willing student.

Update on the sheepy front. I’ve done some digging, and have been asking around. Thanks to Jackie for her comment yesterday, and especial thanks for a link to an article. It will require a morning-clear head and cup of coffee to properly digest, but I think there’s a lot of food for experimentation there.

I checked in with Liz Lodge, Director of Museum Operations (really her job is much more interesting, and more complicated than that) and she pointed me to the Portland breed, which she looked into years ago when building Plimoth Plantation’s rare breeds animal program. Portlands sound amazing (google them; I hate to link to sites without permission) but at the time she wasn’t able to get any for our program. We’re both thinking about them again.

Thanks to Carolyn for her two posts. I knew I shouldn’t hazard guesses, that’s why they call it hazarding, I bet, it’s dangerous. Carolyn thinks Jacob wouldn’t make very good stockings after all. I’ll keep looking.

Carolyn’s second post was about the lace on the Laton jacket. Tonight I got a message from Susan North, one of the curators of costume at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, England, and a very special friend of the jacket project. Without her assistance and encouragement, we would never have been able to come this far with this much faithfulness to the original. Ms North made the same suggestion as Carolyn did about the lace in the portrait perhaps not being rendered exactly to life by the artist, for whatever reason. She also suggested that the note in the records about the lace being added after the original construction of the jacket doesn’t necessarily mean that this lace replaced another lace; it’s possible it was the first lace put on the jacket and actually is the one represented in the portrait.

What most excites and encourages me, though, isn’t whether the lace is the same or not but that so many people are getting involved in the discussion. I bet this jacket wasn’t talked about so much when it was the hot new thing way back in the 1600s. That, in my opinion, is the real power of this project and this blog, the opportunity to bring many people, from different communities of interest and different parts of the world, together in spirited discussion to further the study and understanding of historic clothing.