It is my goal on this project to try as many of the techniques as possible so I can describe it on the blog, in lectures or in an eventual book.  So I gathered up my hutzpah to ask Justin and Kate if I could ‘drive’ the loom.  They were very gracious and helped me in the steps.  Open the shed, grab the shuttle, throw it through (and CATCH), beat it and start again.

As you can see in the pictures – I found this to be much harder than I thought!  It is like chewing gum and rubbing your head while hopping on one foot.  Opening the shed by pushing on the foot petals took strength as I am shorter than Justin.  But the hardest part was throwing the shuttle.  I thought it would fly out the other end and I would have trouble catching it.  NOT a worry!  The shuttle kept getting stuck between the two layers and I would have to stick my fingers in between the warp to scoot it along. Justin made it look so easy and fast.  You can see me looking close after beating down the weft to see if the weave was tight enough there.  I don’t want that ‘defect in the weave’ to be because of me!

You can see the wonderful length of woven silk at the bottom take up – he estimated it to be between 1.5-2 yards at that point.  I can only take credit for maybe three or four passes – not even an 1/8″ of it!  Working on the sequence, it was really physically demanding and I can’t imagine doing a piece of fabric that is wider.  You need some wingspan for that!

Tricia

I need to take a small break from my description of the weaving going on at Eaton Hill Textile Works for the jacket and let you know about a important change regarding the symposium.

We have been hearing from many of you asking about early registration for the symposium that was being planned for September 2009 around the project.  I am disappointed to have to let you all know that the economic conditions we are all experiencing have resulted in the need to delay the symposium and have us look at alternative time frames and plans for a revealing of the project and gathering to go over the results.  Unfortunately as we are working on those options at the moment, I don’t have definitive news to give you and we had been waiting to notify the speakers first.

As we have been receiving daily emails wanting to register – I know many of you were excited to come to Plimoth.  We too are disappointed that funding and the economy have made the need for such changes.  As soon as we have a better picture of the plans, we will post them here.

Here you can see Kate and Justin at the hand loom where the 17.5 inch wide silk is being woven.  Lovely view too of the Green Mountains of Vermont in the background. Very calming to be in the workshop.  Kate told me that the loom was 19th century and there is even an older loom in the workshop – 18th century!  Justin is holding the shuttle he had just re-spooled on a spinning wheel to show me more of the process.  I was amazed to watch him re-spool, he said he has to be very careful to form the cone of thread on the spindle (I think) so it will pull off just right.  There is no going back and rewinding.

In an effort to continue to expand our database of existing jackets, I went looking at a few sites again to see if new photos had been posted.  The interest in this project and the book under development by Susan North (woman’s fashions of the period) has resulted in more of the photos being added to collection databases.  A few to note are:

• A waistcoat at the Art Institute of Chicago in a very simple coiling vine pattern without flower motifs.
• A waistcoat at the V&A which is full of red slip type motifs arranged in a diamond pattern and worked in wool.
• An informal jacket at the V&A worked in a highly stylized and symmetrical pattern on silk.
• A waistcoat at the V&A worked in drawn thread and pulled thread with silver oes as an embellishment.

I hope you enjoy the eye-candy for the New Year!  Wonderful to see the variety in the jackets and the techniques used.

Tricia

I had the honor of attending the opening of the new embroidery exhibit ‘Twixt Art and Nature‘  on December 10th.  The exhibit is a collaboration between the MET and the Bard Graduate School of the Decorative Arts.  If you look back at the comments for December 8th, one of our lacers, Devon, was also at the opening and did a nice review also.  Devon is a volunteer in the textile department at the MET and has provided us with valuable information on metal laces during the project.

I am bringing this exhibit up a few times as it has an intimate connection to the Plimoth Jacket project which I will detail in the next few blogs.  Also, it may be one of the only times you will see an embroidered jacket similar to ours that will be on display in the United States.  The exhibit runs from December 10th to April 12th, 2009 and it is located at the Bard Graduate School on West 86th Street at Central Park West.  The exhibit has three floors of the most amazing embroidery from 1580-1700.  Almost all the objects are from the MET’s collection and are some of the finest examples of their type.  As Susan Brown, Assistant Curator of Textiles at the Cooper-Hewitt, said that night – “I always think we have nice things, and then I see what they have at the MET!!”

If you want to see a few pictures of the jacket on display and a slide show of some objects in the exhibit, click on this review of the exhibition in the New York Times on-line.

Tricia