Tricia writes tonight, beginning a “thread” about gold threads for the vines on the jacket. I’m most grateful, as we’re opening the museum two weeks from Saturday and the Day Job is insisting on more of my attention. I’ll try to take some photos tomorrow of that busy-ness. But tonight:

How I wish I could spin straw into gold these days! We are working on the gold thread for the vines on the jacket and we are closer to an answer, but not quite to a decision yet.

Bill at Golden Threads took a light yellow silk (Soie Ovale from Au Ver a Soie) and spun gilt strip onto it for us to try. We would love to use silk-cored gilt No. 5 passing for this jacket to be as close as we can get to the original historical thread within the economics of the project. We could use 2% WM gold strip, but since the project is funded mostly from your sample kit purchases at this point, that might be too rich for us.

I took a series of gold threads and stitched plaited braid at the same scale as the jacket close to each other to see which one could form the stitch well and how easy it was to form the stitch. One measure I used was how long it took me to stitch about 1.5 inches of the line with the thread.

Five threads were tried:

- #371 Gold Wire by Benton and Johnson. A great faux thread made by evaporating metal onto a plastic sheet and slitting it to wrap the core thread.
- The experimental thread by Golden Threads, three ends of Soie Ovale wrapped by gilt (electroplated) strip.
- Gilt No. 5 Passing by Golden Threads. The same gilt strip as above, but around a cotton or poly-cotton core
- 2% WM No. 5 Passing by Benton and Johnson. A higher amount of gold on the strip that results in a richer color. The threads of the time period were around 2.5% WM gold.
- A thinner gilt passing thread by Leoni in Germany

Here you can see all of these threads very close up. One of the things that distinguish western gold threads from Eastern (Asian) gold threads is the width of the wrap, these are very narrow. Also most western threads are wrapped with 100% metal instead of a foil on a strip of paper or plastic. The faux thread (#371) is an exception to that rule. Tomorrow the stitched plaited braid samples.

Tricia

Tags: Benton & Johnson, Day Job, gold thread, Golden Threads, Leoni, Tricia

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 5th, 2008 at 8:40 pm and is filed under Materials, Progress. 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.