Let Down Your Plaited Braids.

Tricia’s writing again tonight, but first I want to mention the receipt of two more lace samples, from Carolyn W and Mary D.
Here you can see the trials stitched in plaited braid. What I found was that the 371 Gold Wire was the most flexible and easiest to stitch with. This made the line of plaited braid the fastest to stitch.

The Gilt No 5 Passing and 2% WM No 5 Passing were the second best to stitch with, but took almost 50% longer to work with. It is hard to say why this is. The thread is stiffer which might make the bend at the needle larger and therefore harder to pull through the fabric. Also, when working with the tight plaited braid, the stiff threads don’t separate as well when placing your needle under stitches to make passes.

Unfortunately the silk-cored Gilt No. 5 Passing took the longest to work with (two times the 371 gold wire time) and was the most difficult. The needle and thread didn’t go through the fabric as well as the others. It seemed very slightly larger - almost like a No 5.5 Passing. When we reported back to Bill, he asked if we could wait for a sample with one less end of silk in the core. We will wait.

The Leoni thread needs to be looked into a bit more. The thickness of the thread was thinner than we were looking for. It also seemed to be damaged in the spooling process with the wrap rubbed off in many places.

The good news was that we could use a real metal wrap; the bad news so far is that it takes longer to work and the silk core needs tweaking.

Tricia

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

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 6th, 2008 at 9:24 pm and is filed under Materials, Progress, Stitches. 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.