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

Rich gave me a tutorial today, which was mostly us both browsing around here and saying, wow, this is going to be so much easier/more fun/less stress, AND we can do so many more interesting and exciting things. Now we just have to explore and learn.

Which I’m working on. Tonight’s job is to post a couple of pictures. Here goes. So first we have part of the group stitching on Sunday morning, before the clouds moved in and blotted out the sun. It’s a really nice space when the sun’s coming in.

Next, Tammy working on the forehead cloth. I’m having trouble with the formatting, probably because I’m still thinking in terms of how I had to do things on the old program.

Rich saw the comments about the troubles viewing the blog on Internet Explorer. He’s hugely apologetic, but there’s not much he can do right now.

Because we got to a crisis point with the old program, he had to throw up a new one without “tearing down” the old blog. This meant we weren’t off line for any length of time, but it also meant there’s glitches. He can fix them, but they’ll take time, and they have to wait their turn on his to-do list. A lot of the problems have to do with IE’s peculiarities. If you can view the blog with any other browser (like Mozilla Firefox) you should be OK.

Please bear with me as I learn this, and enjoy the improvements!

Tim, our first gentleman stitcher, proved not only skillful with a needle and steadfast in the face of multiple trefoils, but also adept at “reconfiguring my bluetooth places” which is what was the trouble the night I couldn’t blog from the embroidery session. Tim brought a little pocket to share at show & tell; work he did over a dozen years ago.

Rich got me a new blog program, so no more bloggie. I hope it will be easier to post pictures with this new program, once I’ve got it figured out, that is. Which may require a tutorial, since I’m not so intuitive when it comes to blog programs. Rich hopes it will be harder for spammers to fill up our site with bogus comments. Please bear with me while I learn this, and I’ll be putting up more photos of this past session.

I took many pictures yesterday, and many more today. Lilia took many pictures today, including some amazing ones of finished motifs.

I uploaded them all to the laptop, using the wireless internet connection in Accomack. I TRIED to upload them to the blog program. Nothing. More nothing.

I decided to email the photos home, some of them, so I could blog when I got here. It didn’t send. Again. And again. (I had deleted them from the camera, so that wasn’t going to help. Not wise, an error in judgment I will not repeat.)

AHA! The laptop is PORTABLE. I will take it home and fuss with it there. I left a big note for Penny so when she comes in tomorrow morning she will not look for it in vain. I began to drive …. halfway home I realized I DO NOT HAVE WIRELESS INTERNET AT HOME.

I don’t know what I was thinking, except isn’t it a good thing I didn’t have to make any important decisions today.

Fortunately, Wendy left a little earlier than I did, and in between preparations to host a houseful of football fans (there’s a game on tonight, I believe…) she sent me these.

First up is Judy L, who has been embroidering with us since Tuesday. Here she’s working on the cuffs & collar piece, doing a full pink as well as bits of several other motifs.

Next is Abigail, joining us again from Dorchester, and working today on Blue. We’re spending some effort on blue this weekend, so we can figure out how much more blue we need, and if there’s any extra or we need to have more made.

Here’s a cornflower, one of the two primarily blue motifs (the other is borage). Gorgeous doesn’t seem to cover it.

Catherine from Washington, DC, did some amazing work today, including a complete honeysuckle motif. Before this session we’ve had only the pink/red trellis stitched buds done. Now that we have the yellow GST she could do the whole thing. Here it is nearly done. I saw it finished a little later. Catherine said that the yellow GST was beautiful, of course, but didn’t really come alive until she added the red. Then the whole motif just sang.

Thanks, Wendy, for saving the blog tonight.

Could you guestimate how much of the embroidery is done using plain silk vs. gilt twist?
Does there seem to be a pattern as to what made the original embroiderers use the gilt rather than the plain?- Phil

I am just loving this blog as it is allowing us all to interact with questions about the embroidery. One of the recent questions was about how much of the jacket is stitched in gilt sylke twist and does there seem to be any rhyme or reason to the choices.

Of the motifs, all the major flower motifs are stitched either 100% or mostly in gilt sylke twist. None of the leaves are stitched with it. The bird is in silk and the butterflies are stitched in silk with the detached wing in gilt sylke twist. The worms are either gilt sylke twist or a mix of the two. The peapods have a silk underlayer and a gilt sylke twist detached layer.

Overall, if something was in detached buttonhole it was done in gilt sylke twist, unless it was a leaf. This composite silk-metal thread wasn’t used for any of the knot (braid) stitch, which was found in the wings of the bird, or trellis stitch that is used in several motifs, including the body of the bird and butterfly.

If you think about the above, all the major elements except the bird are mostly in gilt sylke twist and would shimmer. The supporting elements, which are the leaves, are not and would be a good matte contrast. The only exception was the bird which is done in trellis stitch, a stitch that doesn’t lend itself well to GST. In the original jacket, it seems that the wire was actually silver and so there would have been a contrast between the shimmer of the major motifs and the plaited braid vines which were in silver-gilt.

Tricia

Some interesting conversations have been happening in the comments lately. I decided to bring them to the main blog so no one would miss any information. 

Also, I wanted to let you know that over the last several weeks this blog has been the target of spam comments, lots of them. Rich, Plimoth’s patient and hugely helpful web guy, has been deleting them in batches of a couple hundred at least a few times a week. He’s working on a permanent alternative, which may involve closing the comments for a while. We both feel that’s a last resort, but this nonsense is really getting out of hand. The comments won’t close permanently, and if you try to comment and can’t, just send a message to me at work and I’ll post your comment in the next blog. jhall@plimoth.org 

In the top photo of the red petal, (January 7th post) what is the area at the base of the photo that looks as if gold wire has been wrapped many times around the edge of the motif? Is it on the thread, or was it worked onto the edge of the design before stitching the filling? – Mary C 

The bunched up gold in the picture is my first stitching and I didn’t notice that I broke the wire on that reverse chain stitch (so it bunched) until I had worked so much detached buttonhole. I would have taken that one stitch out otherwise. – Tricia 

Hi – I’m in Australia. Is it at all possible to get a kit sent here (if there are any left)? I’ve had a friend recommend the kit as being the best introduction to Elizabethan embroidery.
Do you take Paypal? – Megan

We definitely have kits left, and are happy to send them to Australia, or anywhere else. Tricia did her usual fantastic job with the instructions. They are almost like an intensive class. We don’t take Paypal, unfortunately, but we do take MasterCard, Visa and Discover, as well as checks. Please send requests for kits and payments to Kathy Roncarati, kroncarati@plimoth.org or 508-746-1622 X 8114. 

To answer a similar question, we have plenty of room left in stitching sessions scheduled for February and March. To sign up for a session, please email me at jhall@plimoth.org 

I suspect we will be continuing to embroider into May (another question). I haven’t scheduled sessions that far ahead both because I’m waiting to see Plimoth Plantation’s public programs calendar (avoiding conflicts) and I want to check Tricia’s availability. – Jill 

May I ask how the thread (gilt sylke twist) will be released to the general public? Will the "left overs" from the jacket be sold through Plimoth Plantation, or will it be sold through needlework retailers? – Mary C 

The threads will be sold through Thistle Threads and Plimoth Plantation. Keep checking each for updates on when available. At some point, it will become available to all embroidery stores. Mostly, I have been buying up all of it as it gets made for the Plimoth project and a class to be held in February – so extra is limited at the moment and we just need to make sure that there is enough of the few limited colors before they go for general sale. Plus the final pricing (see earlier blog) must be finished. International readers can also buy through the two ‘vendors’ (via web) as soon as we go live. – Tricia

Jill/Tricia for the sheer pleasure of watching the jacket progress and for the fascinating insights into the whole project, I have tagged this blog for the You Make My Day Award. 

I don’t expect you to follow up in the usual way but I really wanted to include you on my list.  – Coral-seas 

Thank you very much! It is so important (to me especially, I think) to know how many people are enjoying the blog. I had to go look up what this is, and what is the usual response. What a nice thing. I think what I will do is post links here to blogs readers of the Embroiderers’ Story might find interesting. It’s something I’m always meaning to do, and actually have done a couple of times, but have not been consistent with. I’ll be inspired by your comment and try harder! 

For some questions I need to get answers from Tricia, who has been bogged down over the last few weeks by her day job AND by not one but TWO computers that crashed. We can all sympathize there. I’ll post answers and more information soon. Tricia’s computer woes also delayed the production of the lace kits – we were all sending corrections to the instructions to her so she could work her stylish magic. The lace kits will begin going out tomorrow.

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

This is the last installment of the Gilt Sylke Twist story. I think saying that this tale was “interesting” is putting it mildly. Even those of us who were there, and/or knew the end result, were eager to hear the next bit. I didn’t read ahead, either, even though I had them all at once – I read them as I posted them. And personally, I’d like to thank Tricia for writing this up and sending it to me in blog-installments at a strategic time – it made my time off a real vacation without undue interruption for all of you.

I hope that this glimpse into the process of getting a reproduction thread back to market was interesting to those reading the blog. While there are many more details, I wanted to give a glimpse into the industryso all might realize how things get done, how hard it is, and how valued these artisan businesses should be. There are very, very few ‘mega-businesses’ in needlework and of these they had to diversify into technical yarns to stay in business. The vast majority are individual proprietors or businesses with a handful of employees trying to keep a rich legacy alive. When you finally get your hands on a tube of these fantastic threads – realize that there was an entire year of love and determination by a group of people poured into it – those who were inspired to ‘see what it must have looked like 400 years ago.’

As a personal after word to this story, I will tell you what happened the day I first stitched a petal on the jacket with gilt sylke twist. I chose Redde and was working a Pink/Carnation in the middle of the back. Because I have to write the instructions for each motif (as I work it), I work on that piece at home. It was night and I have a set of halogen lights in my ceiling. If you have ever noticed how diamonds sparkle in a jewelry store – halogens are the reason. It is the light closest to candle light without the flickering.

Well, the tubes were sitting there sparkling and as I finished the first petal, I could see what the jacket would look like as I moved the frame. I started crying as it was so beautiful and alive. I also realized it was the first time in a very long time that anyone had seen what it must have looked like when those talented embroiderers of the past applied it. Chills.

When John (Director of Plimoth Plantation) saw the thread for the first time, he immediately asked the staff to put a lighting study on the list of things to do for the exhibition. He realized also that the light needs to be right and change to give the full effect of when the jacket was originally worn. I can’t wait to see it. It will be as if the flower fairies sprinkled glitter on our embroidered garden!

Tricia