I got up this morning and found that my inbox was very, very full! I hadn’t had my caffeine yet and so it took a minute to register that Susan North (Curator at V&A) had been generous with her time and photographed motifs that I was having difficulty figuring out stitch direction and other details. Thank you Susan! What a treat and so valuable.

I bring this up as I saw something that was very interesting. On many of the motifs there were dark areas where it looked as if a silver thread had been used to make one small stitch. When magnified, I laughed. It was where the Gilt Sylke Twist (the real 17th century version!) had broken the metal wrap and it had piled up on itself as the stitch was made. In their case, they had used a very thin silver strip (visit our December blogs to see why we used a gilt wire) and so it looked like a pile-up of silver. So I guess the professional didn’t waste his (her??) time taking out those areas to fix them as we have been doing. Hmmm, maybe we can pick up some speed here!

I love these little details - seeing the same mistakes that we make really means we are on the right track. I am happy that we waited for these pictures to start motifs such as the bird, as I saw details in the tails that we didn’t pick up from earlier photos. Now I have to change the directions for them as there are more stitches used in the tail than we could earlier discern.

Tricia

I included the photo of Tricia’s first embroidery with the Gilt Sylke Twist. On the lower right corner you can see where the wire snapped and piled up. In an earlier comment, Tricia mentioned she hadn’t noticed the snag until she got much further along, but now the new information makes it look like a more exact recreation of the original. Gotta love that.
Jill

Tags: GST, silk, thread

This entry was posted on Friday, January 18th, 2008 at 6:34 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.