At a session earlier this month, Abigail from MA brought a masterpiece of needle tatting for us to admire. Here’s a picture. I don’t know how to tat, so if I dare try to explain I’ll get myself in trouble, like the time with the bobbin lace. I do know that “regular” tatting uses a shuttle with a bobbin for the thread, and needle tatting uses a needle to make the knots. That’s the extent of my knowledge.

But isn’t this beautiful? We were at a loss as to how to photograph it, but fortunately we found a willing (mostly) baby.

Embroidery is progressing this week. Catherine and Deb left today, on to more adventures in the storage rooms of the Museum of Fine Arts. Melanie Anne also left today, back to Maine for a while. Kris and Heather arrived this morning so work continued uninterrupted. With all the colors at our disposal (even more of the green silk #325, yay Tricia for bringing it) it seems like the embroidery is just growing on its own. Tricia and I figure we’re about half way done with the embroidery. Not bad, considering we began last June. Still, I’d like to keep up the pace.

Would you like to join us this winter? We have room in two Friday to Monday sessions - February 8 - 11 and February 29 - March 3. Email me at jhall@plimoth.org and let me know.

Oooh. I just noticed Rich has built my categories. That popping noise is my excuse not to go back and recategorize, evaporating. Back to the salt mines.

Penny discovered that if you try to view archived entries in Internet Explorer, it will only show you one page per month (not all the entries). This doesn’t seem to be a problem in Firefox. I bet that’s another thing that can and eventually will be fixed.

Seems I misunderstood, and then misinformed you. I CAN have categories, but it isn’t a simple matter of Rich “importing” them from the old program. He has to build them from scratch, which he will, and then I have to go back and manually categorize all the old entries.

In the meantime, let me share with you some pictures of the 19th century shirt Catherine K brought for show & tell. Hopefully, I’ll put up details of the monogram and cuff. Catherine’s been sleuthing trying to figure out which ancestor owned the shirt. It’s definitely a shirt (man’s garment) not a shift/smock (woman’s garment) but the initials don’t match her family. The ‘S’ matches the maiden surname of a 2 or 3x grandmother, but why would a man’s shirt have her maiden initial? If artifacts could talk…

And let’s try something else. I’ll try putting in a picture of Deb’s shawl. I think the name of the pattern is Wing of the Moth. It’s just lovely. Let’s press our luck and try a side shawl view, shall we?

Although the whole recategorizing process sounds suspiciously like housework (which I avoid if at all possible) I promise to chip away at it, restoring the ability to find back entries by those old categories.

See you soon.

We started another session this morning. Here are a few pictures of the embroiderers.

Wendy’s embroidering today, doing the very first of the strawberry blossoms. They’re blue, for some reason, and the petals are tiny and fussy.

Here ’s a picture of Catherine K from Kansas. She’s the Catherine from the lace committee, and has been hugely helpful in developing the instructions for the lace sample kits.

Here’s a picture of Deb, also from Kansas. She and Catherine traveled together. Deb brought an awesome lace shawl for show & tell. I took some pictures, but I’m still working on uploading them. Some go and some don’t.

Overall, though, I’m liking this program. The answer to the categories question is that we won’t have categories anymore, but we’ll have something better. I can “tag” each entry with as many subjects as necessary. If you search the blog for, say, lace, or spangles, or stitches, then every blog entry with that tag will come up. It’s better, because I often talk about more than one thing per entry, and the old system allowed only one category per entry. But I have to go back and tag the old entries. I’m working on it. Thanks for your patience. Oh, and Go Pats.

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!