We are gearing up for more stitching right now and birds are top on the agenda.  We have a few individuals who are visiting the area in the next five weeks who will be staying over a week each to work on the jacket.  (Thank you!).  Also, we will be scheduling a session for either the last weekend of March or first of April.  Stay tuned – I should know the dates in a few days. We have been waiting until the wardrobing of the interpreters is done for opening on March 21st so we don’t get in the way in the workroom.  Plus we HOPE old man winter will be almost done here in New England.  We have had a tremendous series of weekend winter storms.

We have quite a few of the birds to work on and they are the last of the silk work on the jacket.  We waited until we got better photographs from my visit to the jackets in October.  Thank goodness we did.  A few tweaks needed to be made from my original stitching of a bird (see the logo above).  What is interesting to me about the birds in general is how the six different birds on three jackets and one panel are all done in spiral trellis and trellis.  The pieces don’t look like they came from the same workshop but there seemed to be a ‘code’ about birds.  The cross hatching of the trellis stitch does give nice texture and maybe you could say it looks like feathers.

Tricia

We had a posting to the comments a few weeks ago that I thought many of you might like to see and not miss:

‘Hello there, I was visiting the Museum of Costume in Bath (UK) last week. I went to see an Edwardian frock, but the lady at the next table, who didn’t show, had come to see a jacket much like yours.

The curator wouldn’t get it out of the box, but she did let me take a few snaps – if you’re interested, they’re here.

Take a look – very cool!  Thank you to the poster for sharing her photos with us all.

Tricia

When Justin left me the silk lining, I was musing about how much fun I had visiting when the silk was on the loom and trying it out.  Justin then announced that you could certainly see where I had worked. Oh NO I screamed!  Yup – I was beating the shed so hard trying to keep from leaving a really loose weave that my section was extra tight.  He unrolled the silk and there it was – a 1/8″ stripe across the fabric.  I am sure Jill will be able to cut around it in the end when she lays down the pattern pieces.

Who knew weavers have ‘hands’ too!

Tricia

Justin made a special delivery this week – the completed silk lining!  What a happy day to see it in its glory, all 6 yards of hand woven silk.  It was like giving up a baby – he gingerly handed it over. Justin promises me that he will write up his experience dying the piece and he has a few pictures of the scouring to show.  Apparently he had such a difficult time letting go of the fabric into the dye pot that he forgot to take a picture!

I loved how the sheen of the fabric was so soft and pretty when we unrolled a bit of it.  The piece is about 17th in width.  It seems to have been a common width for hand weaving in the 1700’s too – I spent a day looking at pieces at the Connecticut Historical Society yesterday and 20″ was the selvage to selvage for many of the silk ground fabrics.

Thank you Justin!!

Tricia

While in NYC for the symposium held in conjunction with the exhibit, “Twixt Art and Nature” I had the privilege to accompany Tricia on a visit to the Textile Conservation Department of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. We met with Conservator, Cristina Carr and were wowed with the opportunity to view several bags, pairs of gloves and an unmounted set of sleeves. Cristina uses a large microscope with tremendous magnification, the picture or image shown on a large computer screen, that enables you to see the individual fibers, that make up the strands of a fiber and anything else that the lens is focused in on. In short- mind blowing.

So when she unveiled the set of unmounted sleeves it was an opportunity to look at the reverse side (wrong side) of the stitching to see how the ending of threads was handled and to see if our “production” method of working the Borage was reflected there.  The Borage repeats twice in our pattern so there are a lot of them on the jacket and each Borage has 5 pointy petals, a horseshoe shaped inner ring and a two-color trellis fill. In order to get the point nice and crisp, the reverse chain begins at the top of each petal and is stitched towards the main body of the flower, to complete the other side of the petal; the stitcher must go back to the top of the petal and stitch down the other side. All of this makes for a LOT of stopping and starting.

In the workroom progress was slowing down as the stops and starts took their toll. Examining the stitching paths and overall coverage of the petals led to the decision to discontinue the stopping and starting and to instead take running stitches from the petal base back up thru the petal itself to the tip to continue stitching. This decision resulted in increased speed and reduce the amount of GST that was being used as a result of all the stopping and starting, additionally the bulk in the stitch edges was reduced and made the actual stitching of the buttonhole much easier because the reverse side of the chain stitch was no longer heavily encrusted with the tails having been wrapped thru it.

When Cristina turned over the first sleeve for examination my heart jumped, there on the sleeve in the Borage was evidence of the same approach and issue!

Wendy

(Note from Tricia:  The borage on these sleeves had the same funny horseshoe shaped detached buttonhole that ours does.  We saw the same excessive amount of dragged thread on the back on the sleeves as ours.  This is in contrast to the thread-less backs of the rest of the motifs on the sleeves – same as ours too.  Seems that the problems we ran into were the same 400 years ago.  See our examples here).