Tricia continues:

Lamora has promised to fill us in someday on the process she used to name the threads. But we were thrilled to learn that she didn’t use a numbering system. Instead, she named them using 17^th-century names and spellings. How appropriate and indicative of the detail she puts to everything.

Gilt Sylke Twist is the “official” name for the thread. The colors that have been made are (modern color name in parentheses):

- Bisse (Cream)
- Isabella (Yellow)
- Carnacion (Pink)
- Redde (Red)
- Grene (Green)
- Graie Blewe (Light Blue)
- Indico-Blewe (Dark Blue)
- Purple (Purple)

As mentioned before, seven of these colors are for the jacket. When the last batch of silk was sent to England to be spun, Lamora decided to gift herself the purple. We have found that the effect of the gold is best on medium and dark colors, so she was very interested to see a purple. It is beautiful!

Access Commodities has found that it spools up nicely on their larger standard spool and the spool holds 35 meters. The pricing was almost set a few weeks ago, but the continued fluctuation of the US Dollar against the Euro along with a just-announced price increase to the base silk thread has sent them back to the drawing board. Waste in the process and the increasing costs of gold are just two of the factors they have to get their calculators around. Hopefully all the calculations will be done soon and we can let that number out.

Some other notes about the threads and their up-coming release:

• The colors will be limited edition. As explained before, for timing and historical accuracy we had to use base silk that was available in the archives and some of those colors will not be able to be dyed again. If sales are good, then those will be replaced by a close match.
• The release is delayed (it was going to be January 1^st) because of the re-pricing but also because of our need to hold back thread for the jacket, since some of the colors are limited edition. The yield of the manufacturing process is not yet fully calculated so we aren’t sure exactly how much of the limited edition colors there will be. The runs aren’t finished yet. Once we are sure that we have held back enough of the colors for the jacket, we can release the excess for sale. Guess I’ll be spending some of the January session doing some calculations on those colors for the jacket. Glad we’ve been keeping such close records!

Tricia

Actually, my take-away message on that last point would be: let’s use the next few sessions to make a big chunk of progress in the gilt sylke twist embroidery and speed up the release of the limited edition colors! We still have openings in the popular Friday – Monday sessions: February 8 – 11 and February 29 – March 3. Call me [508-746-1622 X 8119 or email jhall@plimoth.org] to let me know you’re coming.

More from Tricia:

Once Lamora and I had determined that the thread could go ‘commercial’, it only made sense to turn over control of manufacturing to her and Bill. I would take the role of active consumer and promoter of the thread, trying to find ways to use it and make the needlework public aware (watch for magazine articles and projects in the future). Now I just had to OK the color palette and wait for goodness to happen.

Well, I think that the colors have been the most difficult part of getting this thread made. We started with the colors we needed for the project and the colors that had already been purchased for the jacket. We were already embroidering with them and weren’t going to rip anything out! Immediately I knew we had a big problem with the blues and yellow. While we had found an acceptable set of blues in the Soie Perlee, the Soie Ovale line didn’t have a close match.

Blue was only dyed using either indigo or woad in the 17th century. These blues have a ‘blue jeans’ cast to them. Using something with a lot of purple, yellow or green undertones wouldn’t look historic at all. Dyeing silk is complicated by many factors including the August vacation (most of France is gone), the amount of silk that must be dyed (enormous), and the planned schedule of the companies (there are thousands of colors in the AVS line). All of these factors were conspiring against us – they didn’t match up with our need to get the jacket done by June, 2008.

The next problem is dye lot and having enough of something to make the thread. I don’t know how many times I talked to Access Commodities and they talked to Au Ver a Soie. The cones of silk were taken out of the warehouses of both companies and estimates as to ‘how much’ was left were made. Sometimes a promising color had to be set aside because we didn’t have time to dye new and there wasn’t enough to make what we estimated we needed. Little spools kept coming. I twisted them and compared them to the photos and silks we were already using.

Quickly we found that the red, cream and pink could be sent over to England (for the addition of the gold wire). But a few months passed trying to hone in on the rest of the colors. Some had to be sent from France. Some were special colors, never to be dyed again and leftover from former special projects at AVS.

We got the first shipment of the thread back from England in October I think. At Plimoth, we had coined the term ‘glitter thread’ but Lamora surprised us with a great and well researched name: Gilt Sylke Twist.

Tricia

More from Tricia. We’re almost to the end of the story!

Lamora and I discussed my trials, sent pictures, and passed little samples back and forth. We discussed in detail my opinion on how well the average stitcher would do with the thread. It’s one thing for someone with years of training with gold threads and another thing for someone who looks at it and decides to try some other stitch for needlepoint! In the end, we decided that it was versatile enough to be given a chance. (Now all of you have to give it a chance and make this a success for the three companies involved so they make more neat threads!)

Bill was surprised that the round wire version worked the best; he had been concerned that as soon as we pulled it through the fabric that it would strip off the silk. We all decided that these first versions were so good (trust that experienced maker to get it right the first time!) that we didn’t need to test anymore and could now pick colors and get silk to Bill to make more.

I am going to fast forward here to a few months later and the moment that I verified the thread against a historic piece. A textile conservator friend of mine was letting me examine her breathtaking stumpwork picture. I had the Gilt Sylke Twist with me and was able to lay it on the glass above the piece and look at the similar thread under it and compare. Wow, they were almost identical in size. What luck to get it so close on the first try! I look forward to comparing it to the jacket someday in the future! I’ve added photos of this stumpwork piece. What was sooooooo coooooool about the wire wrapped thread on this piece – it was crocheted! WOW.

I told Wendy White about the historic crochet the next day and found out that she had successfully done it that week with a piece I had given her from the trial spool. Hmmmm. We also got a wonderful email weeks ago from a researcher who is interested in this thread for knitting. Apparently, there are very delicate knit gloves from this period of history made from this type of thread. Now the applications are really going through our heads!

Tricia

Tricia works with the sample threads for the first time. Think about that – this kind of thread hasn’t been available for, how long? Centuries? And there she is in her living room, working with prototypes, bringing the materials and the technique back to life.

Having worked with many different metal threads, I was concerned that while the thread may look good, it might not stitch well. The biggest fear was that the wire or strip might break while doing detached buttonhole or Ceylon (the two stitches on the jacket that use this type of thread) and bunch up on the thread. Even if you could stitch with it, if it required too much care to keep it from breaking or broke too often (such as every other stitch) it would not be feasible to use for the jacket and definitely not become a product.

Here you can see pictures of my trials with the strip (less red shows) and round wire (more red shows). The first thing I found was that the strip was harder to work with because the thread was stiffer. This was because the amount of the silk covered was more than the round-wire-wrapped thread. If the width of the strip was narrower or the number of wraps per inch was lower, it would be more flexible and stitch better.

What I found was that the net density of the detached buttonhole was lower for the strip-wrapped thread than the wire-wrapped thread. So the resulting detached buttonhole looked airy and the linen showed through. So the wire-wrapped was the winner.

Now, how often did the wire break? Almost all the breaks happened at the needle eye and not where the thread was pulling tight at the stitch. Our modern needles have stamped eyes with sharp edges and burrs in the metal. At the time the jacket was made, there were needles made with bored holes (round or egg-shaped eye). Bored needle eyes are smooth inside. You can still get this type of needle from the Japanese Embroidery Center in Georgia. I use them for goldwork as they make the gold go through the linen so easily. But they are expensive as they are handmade and rare.

I found if I only kept a ½” – 1” tail in the needle eye, if it did break then I didn’t lose too much thread. Also, I could cut off that tail and if the gold wire had stripped down and bunched up, I could grip the wire with my thumbnail and pull it back up on the thread, effectively rescuing most of the thread. I found that it might break once or twice at the needle eye for every 20 inches of thread I was using. If I used a better quality needle, that got better. So I was confident enough that the thread would work for the jacket. Now to report to Lamora on my trials.

My first words were – “You won’t believe how much it glitters in the light!”

Tricia

Happy New Year everyone. I hope the New Year brings you peace and joy and everything you most wish for yourself. I’m looking forward to 2008. I hope it is kind to us all.

Tonight Tricia continues the story of the thread:

Needless to say, we made some progress in the horse trading and brought up the issues that would need answers so we could decide if the proposed thread would be a one-time special for this project or would be offered to the general needlework public. Of course the first order of business was the answer to the question – could we make it and would it stitch well??

Lamora sent a few tubes of red Soie Ovale to Bill at Golden Threads and I continued to discuss the parameters of the thread with him. Here you can see my drawing with scribbles to make sure that we were talking the same language (English? American?). Because I didn’t have access to any small pieces of original thread to put in a scanning electron microscope, I didn’t have any accurate measurements of the wire size or thread size. I also haven’t yet (note that YET) seen the jacket we are reproducing in person, so I haven’t been able to hold different gauges close and get a feeling for the size. All I could do was send him pictures of the jacket up close so he could see it when embroidered and trust his decades of experience to choose the rest of the parameters for the runs himself (wise decision!).

We decided that we would try either gilt strip or gilt round wire, even though the original thread was silver wire around silk. Bill was confident with strip and it would give a similar look. We choose gilt (gold on silver/copper) for three reasons; the first was the availability of the gilt (he already had it), silver wire of that gauge would have to be made and required too big of a minimum order at the wire drawer, and the silver would corrode over time leaving the jacket tarnished. Lamora had already made it clear that she didn’t want to carry a silver based product as having it on the shelf and in stores just created so many problems with unhappy customers and product return. So the choice for 100% accuracy was replaced with a 80% solution necessitated by economics.

Weeks went by. Finally a small package showed up from Bill. I swear my screams of delight must have traveled around the world. Not one tube but two tubes. You can see them in this picture – the one on the left was silk wrapped with gilt strip and the one on the right was wrapped with gilt round wire. I was thrilled because we could try both and see which one stitched better. Hopefully it was close and we could narrow in on the thread parameters.

Tomorrow…how did it stitch?

Tricia