Having been trained as a scientist, I am apt to always question a statement, think about other ways things could have been done and ask for data to back up the statements.  I have to thank Susan and her patience with me all day.  The lack of written records because of the Great Fire in London frustrates us because many of the answers to these questions would have been recorded or derived from the record. But we have to try to derive the answers from the limited number of
embroidered examples.

When Susan brought up that the pattern outline was drawn on the linen by the tailor and then given over to the embroiderers workshop for the embroidery pattern to be applied, I had to question.  Not because I thought she was wrong, but I always need to find the evidence to defend the position.

We had the sleeves in front of us.  So I started looking closely at the inking.  What I saw was that the outline for the sleeve was done in strokes and contained similar errors to my tracing of the pattern outline.  Slight places where the ink was off track and a redo of that area happened a few times.  Also where the ink was thicker where the stroke started and then thin where the ink ran dry.  I asked if they had any evidence of tracing or template using.  We didn’t come to a conclusion on that.

Then the inking of the embroidery pattern.  It was much better done. There were thickenings of the ink and some places I noted where the drawing had elements that overlapped.  Not printed for sure.  The person who drew the pattern was very expert.  The same deviations from the intended line weren’t seen – possibly the difference between a tracing and freehand drawing by an expert.  What I did see that was interesting was an overlapping of motifs.  Let me explain.  On a particular butterfly, the outline of the wings contained stripe and half circle details.  On one wing the pattern of half circles did not overlap the stripes.  But on the other, one half circle overlapped a stripe – as if the drafter was free handing the design and couldn’t make the elements fit.  I don’t know how the embroiderer would have treated this mistake in the drafting.  There were several of these
types of errors when I took a cursory look.

Overall the pattern for the sleeve was custom for the shape and size of the sleeve, not a cut of a repeating pattern like ours is.  It is beautiful and very complex.  I would so love to analyze the ink on the outline and the embroidery pattern to determine if it was from the same bottle or not.    Won’t happen, but wouldn’t it be interesting to know!

I do agree with Susan that an expert drafter made the embroidery pattern and that the tailor did the outline.  But it was worth looking closely at the piece to support the claim.  Susan suggested that the master embroiderer in the workshop may have been the pattern designer/transferrer.  There is evidence to support that in the practices of today’s workshops.  In the Japanese tradition, the only person who can make a new design is the master.  Here you see me trying to trace our pattern.

Tricia

It’s funny Robbin should mention Aimee J in the comments as the person who shared a frame with Kris at the first embroidery session.

Yesterday I received an email from Marilyn, who came to the first session as Kris’ guest, on the last day when we had moved from the big workroom up to the wardrobe office. Marilyn is a Japanese embroiderer, as some of our other volunteers are, and has been trying to reach Aimee about a Japanese embroidery class.

Unfortunately, her contact info is out of date. She asked me if mine was any better, and it is not. I said I’d ask here – Aimee, if you’re reading, please send me a note jhall@plimoth.org and I’ll help get you in touch with Marilyn. I think the information is time-sensitive. If anyone else knows Aimee, please ask her to get in touch.

As it happens when researching these things, one ah-ha leads to many questions. I am blogging all this so I don’t forget anything and so please forgive my rambling from one subject to another. So after I went “oh crud”  and joked about a lot of stitching in front of American
football to make those covered seams, I started to think about the order of
things. This was great as I verbalized it to Susan and she went and got a
colleague of hers who is working on the pattern book and had been thinking
about exactly these questions about the Laton jacket.

So the back
seam on the arm would have to be joined and then embroidered upon. Also
the godets or gussets would have to be installed on the fronts and backs
and then embroidered. Also the fronts would need to be joined to the back
along the side seams and then embroidered. Then the rest of the seams could be made along with the cuffs, collar and wings being installed.
Again the vertical integration idea came up.  Well, I asked, then who sewed
the initial seams? A tailor on-site with the embroiderers or the
embroiderers themselves? Or could the tailor embroider plaited braid. Susan and her colleague felt that the well known tailors guild and
embroiderers guild meant that the people were separate and the pieces would
have been turned over. The implication was that the initial seams were done by the embroiderers and then the partially completed jacket was turned over to a tailor’s shop who finished it.

They brought up that
the bespoke (English for Custom-Made) nature of the jackets meant that the
tailor had made a muslin for the person or had modified a general pattern
they had using measurements they had made of the person. They mentioned
that measurements weren’t like we make them, in inches, but more like
positions on a tape. The order would then have been to draw the outline of
the pattern pieces on pieces of linen to then send to the embroiderer’s
workshop for design application and embroidery.  They mentioned evidence
from inventory books that the commissioner may have supplied the linen
themselves to the tailor.  (This brought up the question about suppling
embroidery threads too). Certainly we can see on many jackets that the embroidery was worked to the pattern outline and stopped and that on many jackets the outline is visible and so hasn’t been altered. I had asked if they thought that there could have been an industry supplying partially completed jackets for final construction after purchase. I mentioned this in light of the comment in ‘The French Garden’ about embroidered jackets for sale in the Royal Exchange, implying ‘Ready-Made’. Susan and her colleague really felt that the jackets were commissioned bespoke. And certainly there is plenty of evidence from the garments themselves to support that along with the great cost we now know in making them on risk of having a buyer.

More tomorrow
about the linen and pattern making.

Tricia

Another question we had was how the lace was applied to the jacket and what happened at corners when the lace had to change direction (think front edge corners).

Well, the lace is whipped down with a white thread in a very fast and crude fashion.  Susan and I joked that we would need to replicate the haphazard way it was done – maybe enlisting someone who couldn’t sew.
Was the lace applied by the wearer herself?  Maybe.  When the lace turned around the corner of the front of the jacket, it was eased in place.  No folds at all.  Just a small amount of bunching of the straight edge to help the lace turn the corner.   This was consistent with a nightcap in the MET collection that I had studied earlier this summer.  The lace was whipped into place on the internal edge of the cuff on this nightcap and the join was rough as I saw on the jacket.  On the jacket, the lace edge was whipped to the front of the jacket, on the linen edge.

As we talked further, I asked Susan if more was known about the Laton jacket.  Certainly the portrait and jacket survived and ended up together.  Were there any contemporary family papers, an account book perhaps that survived?  Sadly, no she said.  The pieces had surfaced in the early century with auction houses and no papers have been found.  There are so many questions we have about the commissioning of
jackets and price that one good account book could give us answers.  I also told her that if we had a price for the embroidery or jacket we could make all kinds of calculations based on our work to give order
of magnitude answers to so many questions.  Again, the day put ideas in our heads of info we needed to  be on the watch for in the future.  I put it out there for all of you reading – if you come upon any of
this – let me know!

Tricia