One last post from Tricia on thread development – this time the gold thread for the coiling vines. One of the challenging things on this project is knowing how much of a thread to have made. Since we are doing some rather new stuff, having an accurate estimate is very important because we can’t just pick up the phone and get more very fast.  It becomes even harder when material has to be dyed or you are looking for what components are already available. Right now we are in the middle of finalizing the gold threadwe will use for the coiling vines.On the original jacket the thread is most likely silver gilt (gold over silver) wire that has been rolled flat and wrapped around a silk core. The similar threads made today (#5 passing by Golden Threads or Benton and Johnson) are wrapped around a cotton core.  The cotton seems to make it a bit stiffer than the silk. Our friend at Golden Threads has done a small trial with a silk core and we are waiting to try it out very soon - I’ll post comparative photos once we have tried them. The problem we are having is that the cotton-cored thread doesn’t bend enough to get the plaited braid packed closely enough to look like the original.So if the silk core works, we need to have enough of a source of silk core material in yellow to make the thread for the jacket and a bit extra for good luck. So how much??  There is a spool with our name on it at Access Commodities waiting for this estimate. If there isn’t enough silk there - well - we will have to do a dyeing run. Ugg.During the December session, Wendy took out all the master pattern pieces and measured the length of each coil on the master repeat. The numbers ranged from about 7″ for the thistle to as much as 9.25″ for the pea pods. With all the little tendrils in reverse chain and our need to make sure we didn’t underestimate anything, we decided to use 10″ as the number.She then counted the number of coils on each piece of the jacket. Again the numbers ranged from 3 on the collar to 28 on the back. Once we multiplied the total times 10″ per coil, we arrived at 2400 inches of plaited braid.From my very early time trials, I had kept a detailed list of the amount of thread and stitches I had done, and was able to back calculate that it takes about 15″ of thread to stitch one linear inch of plaited braid.Multiply that and you get 36,000 inches or just under 1000 meters of gold thread.  PHEW! Someone needs to come up with one of those USA Today factoids on that one - like “if you took all the stitchers working on the jacket and laid them head to toe we could wrap them 100 times with the gold thread on the jacket”.Tricia

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