Catherine, Laura and Jen joined us for last weekend’s embroidery session. All of them have been here before and so are considered “veterans.” They certainly showed their experience; they all accomplished a great deal.

Catherine was working on the unwieldy back piece, and stitched three complete roses along with a few odds & ends here and there. Laura mostly worked on the collar & cuffs frame, finishing the cuffs to the point that they are ready for goldwork. She also stitched the detached butterfly wing piece, and then sewed it to the collar, which made the collar done-done-done.

Jen was working on an equally unwieldy front, and did some of everything, including fancy worms. Fancy worms are composed of two parallel rows of ceylon stitch, in two different colors, with the head stitched separately in a third color but also in ceylon stitch. These worms also get black back stitched antennae (thus making them not technically worms, I know) but are not wrapped like the plain worms.

Here are all of them with their frames. They were friends from before this project, and traveled here together sort of like a girls’ weekend away. They have such fun together, it makes the atmosphere of the weekend sort of like a party. A few different times we’ve had friends meet here both to enjoy each other’s company and to work together on the project. It puts me in mind of all the different sorts of women’s gatherings to work and talk, like quilting bees or houseraisings (OK, there the men are working I guess but if you don’t think it’s a lot of work to feed timberframers, I’d like to introduce you to a couple of cooks I know…..)

Since the very first embroidery session, Tokens & Trifles has been donating a small commemorative needlework project designed by Wendy White to each new embroiderer. The back of the needlebook, which is stitched on Thistle Threads’ perforated card with cotton floss, has the date of the session the embroiderer attended. Many participants have completed their needlebooks; our 2007 summer intern, Laura, stitched hers as her very first needlework project.

Carli was here for the first time two weeks ago, and this time she brought her completed needlebook for show & tell. Carli didn’t just stitch as written, though, she made improvements. First off she chose different, more vibrant colors. You all know how different the same design in a different colorway can be.

She was afraid she’d smash up the corners of the perforated card, carrying it around with her, so she decided to protect them with – - detached buttonhole stitch. Yes, really.

There is no end to the ingenuity, creativity and ambition of needleworkers.

For Susan, who wrote in the comments asking about stitching on the ‘oes’: yes, thank heaven, we can carry the thread. They are sewn on with a fine silk, and it doesn’t show. I’m so relieved – tying off each and every oe would have been a nightmare.

(There is, however, an end to my patience with this program. I’m having a lot of trouble with the newest version of WordPress; anyone out there know how to wrap text? What am I missing? Send me a note at jhall@plimoth.org if you can help. I have tried the WP documentation page, but I’m not finding the secret key.)

Please note! I am cancelling the October 24-27 session.

Great progress is being made this weekend on the silk embroidery. We have 10 embroiderers scheduled for September 26-29. I anticipate that after that weekend we won’t have enough silk and GST embroidery left to make a full weekend session worth while.

There is still plenty to do – we’re just on hold for the moment. Tricia is going to examine the birds during a trip to the UK next month (green, green, green with envy) so we’re holding off on those for now. The gold coils need to be done before any other gold, and the coils have to be a unified hand, however we’re going to manage that.

After the gold coils, we’ll be calling for volunteers to come again, to do lots of gold – the centers of pansies, roses, strawberry flowers and honeysuckles, the peas, the tops of pea pods and foxglove, the stamens of honeysuckle and columbine. And I’m probably forgetting something. Plus there will be the thousands of ‘oes’, and the sewing-on of the detached pieces. And I haven’t even mentioned the lace.

When I saw the finished collar, I remarked to Tricia that there were more oes than I’d imagined. She wryly agreed, noting that she had double-checked the density on the original jacket and there are indeed more oes per square inch than we were thinking. So. Don’t despair, there’s more to do and we still need lots of help. Just not in October.

This is bittersweet, for me, at least. It feels great to be approaching another milestone, but I will miss the gatherings of embroiderers. You all are great company, and talented too.

Look who, or what, showed up out the back window on Saturday afternoon?

Only about half of this flock of turkeys show in this photo. This flock has been making regular “rounds” about the museum lately. I’ve seen them a few times mid-morning in a field in the 1627 English Village; once I surprised them crossing the main driveway at dusk.

Wendy got this photo; one of the neat things about seeing this flock in person is you can see the “teenagers” among the adults. This year’s chicks are about half the size of the adults and not quite completely feathered. They look gangly, all legs, and kind of awkward. Well, sort of like teenagers.

As of September 12, 2008, here is the collar piece. You’ll notice it has both gold work and sequins, necessitating the use of shades just to look at it.

I’m pretty sure Tricia is going to blog about this piece, and I don’t want to scoop her so I won’t say any more – but this picture really is worth a thousand words.

Thanks to Debbie from NJ for the suggestion that it is time to do status reports on all the pieces once again.

Here are photos of the wings and two of the five gussets. The wings are now done except for the bird beaks, a possible bird-eye detail, and all the gold and sequins.

These gussets are also done except for gold and sequins. There are three more gussets; one of them has a tiny scridge (note use of technical term) of green ceylon, part of a columbine, that is yet to do; the rest is just gold and sequins. “Tricia traced this wrong,” said Wendy, when she was examining the gussets for done-ness. “Really? No way,” I said. “Yes, she should have fixed it so we didn’t have to deal with this silly little edge.” Note that Tricia was not in the room to defend herself.

Carolyn left a detailed comment about working with the GST. I thought more people would find it here:

The main feature of the thread that I had to learn to deal with is similar to what the stitchers have noted: it is raspy when rubbed against other threads. This means that when tensioning, I had to be very careful to note if the GST got caught anywhere and had to fuss with it a bit more than some other threads. The positive side was that once in place, it did not move much because of the wire structure.
Another tensioning problem was that the silk stretched a bit more than the metal, so if pulling too hard the wire would break leaving an area of bare filament silk that “puffed” a bit if not twisted. These areas were not very noticable if in whole stitch cloth, but showed up more in half stitch or filling areas. Once I got used to it, though, I could avoid over-pulling and my rate of metal-popping went way down.
If the GST rubbed too much on the edge of a bobbin or hairclip (I used the same kind of small hair clip to hold the thread on the bobbin as is used for the metal threads, shown on an earlier blog entry) the wire would break, so I also learned to make sure I moved the rubbing spot often. Kind of like avoiding nerve wear in carpel tunnel syndrome!
I’ve now finished the Torchon square with the GST so can also comment on tying off with it. I used magic threads at the start, so just had to pull the GST through the loops. It was raspy, and in one case my magic thread broke because it was so much thinner and weaker. Overall, though, it was easy to manage the GST and the knots held well. I used a surgeon’s knot(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surgeon’s_knot) to make sure the silk held tight. The knot ends could be bent over to a spot on the back and stayed put because of the wire.
And the outcome? The colors are wonderful, the lace has some structure from the wire so I could see using it for flowers, leaves, etc in 3-D work, sort of a middle-ground between silk and actual metal wire. The gold is not obvious but adds another depth of sheen to the silk, and glimmers subtly in certain angles of light. I really like it and plan to use it for more lace pieces.

-Carolyn W

I just had to add my two cents on this piece of ’show and tell’ that Carolyn Wetzel brought in at the last session.  I had close-up pictures that I really wanted to post as they showed the gilt sylke twist used as bobbin lace.  It was very exciting to see her piece.  I had been thinking about begging someone to try it out.  Carolyn had a few comments on working with it from a ‘how-to’ point of view. I hope we can convince her to add her experience to the blog as a record.

There are others out there trying this thread for a number of other stitches and uses that were not historically found.  Please let us know what you are doing with it.  I can tell you that I made GST silk purl by hand about a month ago for a project I will be teaching.  I will try to post a picture of it soon.  Another very, very strange twist is that the thread is conductive.  Of course, if you wrap a copper-silver-gold wire around silk, it is basically an electrical wire.  My main occupation is in a field called electronic textiles which is now growing rapidly.  One of the big problems in that field is that all the yarns we use are gray (stainless steel or silver based).  The industry has been very excited by this GST development and many researchers are trying the thread to see what other textile processing techniques can be used without destroying the wire wrap.  I hope we can find some good ones, for both the historic and modern users will help provide a market to keep the thread alive.

Tricia