What Do We Do?
A few days ago, Robbin did a great job of describing a typical session in the comments but I would like to add to her commentary with a photo journal of the last session. This journal is courtesy of my father, Bill Wilson, an amateur photographer. He was accompanying my mother for the day while she stitched on the jacket. They had come from Michigan to see the grandkids, but since my mother was my stitching mentor and an avid embroiderer, she couldn’t pass up the opportunity to work on the jacket.
During the session, we all laughed a lot at the sheer number of photos my dad took (350 to be exact!), but through his zealous need to document, we have some insights into the workings of our day that we can share with those of you thinking of coming out and joining us. Bear with me over a few blogs and keep your eyes out in the background for little visual nuggets. I have carefully chosen photos since I had great material to work with!
Typically we start around 9 am with breakfast nibbles and everyone rolling in and finding the wardrobe department which is housed in this building along a road from the main parking lot. The nibbles are hand baked by Marcia from the food department and I typically skip breakfast and drive all the way from Boston to see what the delicious offering of the day is. I do blame Marcia whole heartedly for my need to go on a diet this year! Jill and the staff welcome the stitchers and help them find stations to sit at. Depending on the traffic (Boston is notorious), I roll in before 10 am and everyone is ready to get started as introductions have been made. For those who are new to the project, we give them a doodle cloth in a hoop and ask them to work about an inch of reverse chain followed by a small bud shape in detached buttonhole. This helps to break the ice and allows myself and Wendy to look at their technique and give tips to improve the look.
Typical hints are the need to twist their needle a bit to retain twist while working or to put more or less stitches in a row of detached buttonhole to help match others on the jacket. Sometimes we find that a stitcher is more comfortable with a different stitch such as trellis or ceylon and we move them to work on motifs that use those stitches.
Once the doodle cloths are underway, we start working with stitchers that are returning to find them a jacket frame to work on and decide on a motif to start with. Here, 
Rosemary and I are talking about a sleeve and what needs to be done on it and discussing color variations to the motif from the instruction book. Once our returning stitchers have some starting direction and are off to the races, we go back to some basic information.
Here I am reading from the instruction book. We have a set of instructions that are used by each stitcher for reference. It contains basic info such as how to fill out the record sheet, don’t eat in the room, etc. It also has different views of the jacket at the V&A we are working from to help identify what color to use as there are many variations, we have discovered. Then there are directions for the stitch types followed by detailed directions and pictures of every motif on the jacket being worked.
More tomorrow
Tricia
Tags: Bill Wilson, instruction manual, motifs, Rosemary, Schedules, Tricia, Wendy
