Today’s post is a show & tell. Judy H does beautiful embroidery, both on The Jacket and on her own projects. These pictures show elements from Judy’s Big Project, to complete the panels for a 17^th century casket.

Judy says: “When in the early 1960’s, I saw an advertisement in an English magazine for a lovely casket, I fell in love. It turned out that it was far too expensive at the time and I decided to make one. (Foolish girl.) I had a friend who had a lovely one and she agreed to let me have a wonderful cabinet maker copy it. But, it has taken me almost 40 years to figure out how I wanted to stitch it, whether canvas work or embroidery, flat or raised on silk. I decided on silk threads on satin weave silk with both raised and flat work. I am designing it myself, but am using mostly motifs from original caskets. Getting involved in digital photographing is such fun. I’ve taken many photos of caskets and 17thc pictures downloaded them to my computer and then edited, cut and pasted, etc so I have computer files, for instance, of lions, birds, flowers castles, etc. Then I design using those motifs. The only one so far that is not old and is my design is of our house built in 1750 and it doesn’t look like a castle.”

I don’t know so much foolish, as ambitious and determined. Of course, those of us who are associated with The Jacket can hardly throw stones at Big Ambitious Projects…Judy’s needlework is gorgeous, as you can see, and the finished cabinet will be stunning. These photos show both the embroidery and Judy’s design.

Thanks, Judy, for sharing your work today.

This week we’re trying to finish up some warm garments for the interpreters before the start of the next embroidery session. Yesterday I showed you the blue gown I’m working on.

Here’s Shaina’s project. This is her first doublet. A doublet is a man’s upper body garment. It’s the most fitted garment we make for men, and she’s doing a great job. It fits her pretty nicely, but it fits the man she’s making it for even better. It’s a beautiful, smooth charcoal grey color, an example of how really beautiful a piece of wool can be when it’s a good quality. The striped lining is hemp/cotton and very sharp looking. She’s just got the buttonholes left to do and then it’ll be done.

There’s Penny using the new laptop to make labels for knitting kits, and to keep track of what’s being sent where. Eight more knitting kits are in my trunk, to be taken to the PO tomorrow morning.

When I’m hand sewing, what am I doing? Here are some pictures of my current project. So far it is just the bodice part of what will be a gown in simple blue wool. I lined the front of the bodice in brown linen mostly because when I was cutting it out there wasn’t enough washed coarse cream linen for the whole lining. I cut the sleeves and back out of the cream and the fronts out of brown linen. That’s a period thing too, though, cutting the part of the lining that might show out of a better cloth than the rest of the lining. So convenience and historical precedent jump together as it were.

I’ve been stab-stitching, or I’ve also seen it called half-back stitching, the outside to the lining, all the way around. We, the three of us who make all the period clothing for the interpreters, sew internal seams on sewing machines because we’d never be able to keep up without that time-saver. But everything that shows is done by hand; buttonholes, pleats, hems, and this half back stitching around the waist, up the fronts, around the neck and around the sleeves.

I have yet to sew the buttonholes and put on the buttons, stitch on the wings (little flaps that go over the shoulders) and pleat the petticoat part. The pleats will be sewn directly to the finished waistline. At that point I’ll try it on the intended wearer to mark the hem and then hem it.

For this gown I’m going to sew horizontal stripes in the petticoat in brown wool. This interpreter is playing Mrs Standish this fall, and it will be done in time for her to wear at least a little bit before we close for the season, but next year she’ll likely be someone different. I wanted to make a nice gown, but not too nice, so she’ll be able to wear it again next year no matter which character she’s playing.

During the October session, the Spangle Group (Mark, Tricia, Wendy) met to talk over the spangle research. By spangles, I mean the teardrop-shaped metal tags that are strung on the metal threads used to make the bobbin lace. I have learned from Carolyn that to lacers, spangles mean beaded rings that decorate (and weight) bobbins that are used for a particular kind of lace making. Not those spangles.

Anyway, Mark and Tricia and Wendy came up with a hypothesis as to how those spangles were made in the 17^th century. Mark went away for a while with some flat metal ribbon from Tricia’s stash. He came back not too much later with a tiny paper wrapped package.

 This is what was in it. He made a tool, a spangle punch. This tool is round, the one we’ll need is teardrop shaped, but he was testing the theory. He also had punched a few round sequins from the metal ribbon. The tool is tiny, maybe 5/8” long.

What Mark and Tricia and Wendy were seeing on the original spangles from the MFA, the way the metal curled or broke, the shape of the individual spangles, and so on, they saw these same things in the ones Mark made. Success.

Very exciting. We’ve got the process, now we need some wider metal ribbon to punch the spangles out of. Tricia is tracking down possible manufacturers of such metal stock and Mark is working on making the right size and shape tool to do the job.

I can hear murmuring; yes, we’ve talked about the possibility of offering spangles for sale to lacers and embroiderers. Nothing’s definite yet, but we do know there’s a desire for them so we’ll see what we can do.

One more milestone today, Tricia emailed me that she’s ordered the threads we need to make the lace. A big day all around.

Today we were even more in the 17^th century than usual. Saturday there was a big wind and rain storm that affected southeastern New England. Power went out at the office in the morning (only a little while after Penny got in, apparently) and hasn’t been back since.

When I got in this morning, we got a call saying power would be back within the hour, so we all settled down with some hand sewing near the sunny window. This was fine for a few hours, but then the sun started to move away from the window and we all got hungry. Our lunches needed heating so we packed up our hand sewing and headed home.

As I was pulling out of the parking lot the electric company trucks were coming up the drive so I’m assuming the problem’s been sorted out and we’ll have electricity tomorrow.

I’ll get back to the emails tomorrow, and I plan to post from the shiny new laptop just for kicks. I need to put together a schedule for the November embroiderers and put together some more kits for knitters.

It was a nice interlude today, though. Quiet, and somehow spending time just sewing felt like a treat that I don’t get to indulge in much lately.