Tricia continues the story:

This is a question I still don’t have the greatest answer to, although with the record keeping we are doing on the project, we will at the end. So how to estimate the amount of thread you need to make of each color on a project of this magnitude. Wow. We had anticipated this at the beginning when I did the time trial. I kept a record of the length of thread I used for the trial and what stitch I was doing and where. 

So I had the beginnings of a database that I could use to estimate amounts. I entered this data into a spreadsheet and then took our master pattern and estimated area of each color on each motif. Using the data, I could calculate the amount of thread per inch of detached buttonhole. Then this number was imputed as a multiplier for the estimated area of each motif as a function of color. (At this point I usually smile, and nod, and hope she doesn’t think I’m a complete idiot. – jmh) 

Phew. Is that enough math talk for you??? (Yes.) Instead of doing it for each and every color, I chose the most prevalent color and estimated that. This would form a maximum that we could manufacture against. I assumed I could make good use of extra thread (i.e. Stash!) After all this data crunching, I came up with a minimum of 500 meters of each color would be needed. Now that’s not trivial and got Bill’s attention.

For the number of colors, I had to go back to Susan North (Costume curator at the V&A). Susan was very kind and took the jacket out of storage and went over it to answer my questions. I gave her a list of what colors I thought each motif was worked in and if I thought it was a wire wrapped silk or not. She verified and corrected my list. She also surmised from the look of the wire that it was silver. We don’t know for sure as it hasn’t been analyzed, but it does make sense as it would have been a nice contrast to the gold stems. She also thought it might be a round wire and not a very thin strip of metal (a flattened wire). I have seen both in the past. 

We came up with eight colors that needed to be made. Red, pink, yellow, cream, white, blue, dark blue, and green.  (In the end we made seven for the jacket and one fun color that wouldn’t be used on the jacket. We decided mid-stream that we would not make both white and cream.)

Now for the silk source…

Tricia