Here are a few pictures of Lacey fixing Rebecca’s hair.

In the early 17th century working-class women (like the Plymouth Colonists) wore their hair up and covered with a white linen coif. Modern female interpreters may or may not have “period-correct” hair, but either way they have to get their hair under a coif with no bangs or other bits showing. Rebecca has gorgeous period correct hair, by which I mean long and unlayered.

Some women with long hair put their hair up in a simple bun, some braid it. Here Lacey is braiding Rebecca’s hair in a style thoroughly illustrated in The Tudor Tailor. This book shows Jane, one of the authors, braiding ribbons into her hair starting about halfway down each of two braids. The ends of the ribbons hang down beyond the end of the braids. You then use those hanging ends to tie the braids up over your forehead.

The first time I tried to do my daughter’s hair that way, the ribbons pulled right out of her slippery fine braids. I thought about it for a minute, then cut a long ribbon, folded it in half, and placed the fold at the back of her neck. I began to braid one end into half her hair. The other end got in my way and I pushed it forward over her shoulder, saying, “here, hold this end”.

Then I had a flash of insight – in the book Pride and Joy: children’s portraits in the Netherlands 1500-1700, there’s a 1596 portrait called “Hilleke de Roy and Four of her Orphans”. Hilleke de Roy was the matron of an orphanage. In the portrait she is combing a girl’s hair. One half of the girl’s hair is already braided, and you can see that a ribbon is braided in. Hilleke is combing the other half of the girl’s hair, the unbraided half, and the girl is holding the end of the ribbon, which goes up and around the back of her neck – just as I asked my daughter to do. I love when stuff like that happens.

One of the interesting things about the original jacket is the mistakes or variances we keep finding on the piece. One of the most intriguing is the butterfly heads. All of the heads on the jacket are done in a golden brown tone using trellis stitch, EXCEPT the ones on the outer left sleeve. These are all done in a bright blue satin stitch. For easily a month I assumed that it was the result of either bad conservation or an addition at a much later date. That was until I looked closely at the photograph of the piece at the Embroiderer’s Guild collection which was worked in the same workshop with the same pattern. Low and behold, the worm heads on that piece were all in bright blue satin stitch!

I imagine that the workshop was full of pieces underway – a few jackets, a coif, some panels, and others. Embroiderers were getting up and working their specialty on different pieces and some guy forgot that the lady who ordered the piece didn’t like the blue heads and had opted for the golden brown ones! Maybe it wasn’t discovered until the jacket was sewn together. Further circumstantial evidence that the workshop was full of similar pieces and embroiderers may have been moving around.

So we are stitching the left arm butterflies with the bright blue satin stitch as seen here!

Tricia

This is a question the role-players hear often in this season and the answer is, Yes. Very.

It is deep summer here in Southern New England, and today was the fourth (or was it fifth?) day of +90-degree temperatures with smothering humidity.

The role-players, dedicated to their craft and to portraying the Plymouth colonists as accurately as current research allows, are wearing at least two layers of clothing plus wool petticoats for the women. They hear this question a lot.

It is hard to answer it while in character. The colonists had to protect themselves from sunburn and biting insects without liquid sunscreen and insect repellent, in which case it makes sense to cover up. They also had a mortal, almost pathological fear of cold, which is excellently illuminated in Susan Vincent’s Clothing the Elite. Add to all this the evidence of a letter written by colonist Francis Higginson in the late 1620s in which he marvels to his friends back home that he, formerly always so cold, goes now as lightly clad as any, wearing only a cassock and unlined stuff breeches and only one cap upon his head. Nearly nakey. (By this time the practice of wearing a linen shirt next to the skin was so widespread that we assume he was wearing one under his cassock [Margaret Spufford, The Great Re-Clothing of Rural England] which means two layers of clothing and one hat.)

In addition, every society has standards for appropriate dress in particular situations. The colonists clung to their standards in the face of extreme conditions partly as a way to express their Englishness and maintain what they considered to be civilization in opposition to the perceived wildness of their surroundings.

The funny thing is that the modern visitors toiling around our outdoor sites on such days in t-shirts and shorts (often without sunhats and water bottles) aren’t really any more comfortable than the layered staff.

Even though in modern America our standard for fully dressed in the summer involves much less clothing than the 17th-century colonists wore, there are lines we won’t cross either. Besides which, at a certain point removing more clothing isn’t going to make you any more comfortable.

I realize I uncharacteristically threw a bunch of references in this post without complete citations. I will get them for you when next I’m in the office. I’m home for a couple of days, and have been much of last week (sick kids, husband away, not a REAL vacation) but the fact that my home computer does not like this heat has made my posting erratic. Apologies for that.

Marilyn, a frequent contributor to the comments and embroiderer on the jacket as well as a student of Japanese embroidery, recently asked me if any weaving was going on in Plymouth Colony as early as the 1620s.

The answer is no, we have no evidence that any was and lots of evidence that there was no fiber processing or textile production happening in Plymouth Colony until the late 1630s. There are several reasons why not, mostly that the point of having a colony was for it to provide raw materials and a market for finished goods to the mother country. The Plymouth colonists were under agreement to work for the betterment of the merchants who put up the seed money for the colony, not to become self-sufficient.

Many people expect that these colonial foremothers were self-sufficient, though, especially in a textile sort of way. That whole myth (which annoyingly has a grain of truth in that some colonial housewives in some places at some times were doing it all) is explored and explained in Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s The Age of Homespun. I “reviewed” and recommended it last summer, August 19 to be exact (thanks, Lyn). Maybe it isn’t beach reading but it is well worth a look.

Ahem. I owe an apology; Tricia sent me this information to post way back in February and I don’t think I ever did post it. I was looking for something else in my emails and found it. As a poor defense, the cover note mentioned that her sons had just come down with what my son was just getting over – a virus with high fever – and I must have still been boggled. I included a photo of Tammy working on the forehead cloth; it clearly shows the slate frame. Tammy was here about the same time Tricia sent this note; it was one of the snow-shortened sessions. Seems a long time ago now. I haven’t heard anyone say with certainty that they know the reason they’re called slate frames, by the way. Anyway, Tricia wrote:

Several people have asked where to get slate frames. As we talked early in the blog, we had a great deal of trouble finding slate frames in the USA for this project. There are one or two small makers in England but they wouldn’t export to the USA and we didn’t have the budget to fly there to get them! The frames that are pictured were a really nice product line that was manufactured in Europe for Access Commodities. A combination of factors resulted in these frames coming off the market a few years ago – the rising Euro, some manufacturing problems, and a brief intro of a lower quality copy by a vendor ended up resulting in the product line being taken off the market.

Access was great to take all the leftover on their shelves, seconds, and a list of what stores had formerly bought from them to allow me to find enough for the project. (What Tricia then did was call all the stores to see if they had anything left of their last orders. She usually leaves out the part about her tedious legwork.) We combined this with some long slats made by Plimoth staff and my entire vast personal collection (note again that STASH comes to the rescue!) and a wonderful stitcher’s stash (this generous stitcher has long-term loaned us a few essential frame parts) we found through the list from Access to complete the sizes we needed.

Recently Access has made a test run in-country to see if this product line can be brought back as a favor to me and because of interest in this project. I am testing out the new frames next week with a class I am teaching. (Since this post is so old, that test-run happened in February. It sounded like it went well. Norma B brought her nightcap project from that class to a show & tell at one of the sessions, all drawn out and laced into the frame.) If things go well, the frames might come back to market. I am sorry I can’t give a simple answer to the question of ‘how do I get a frame’. The good news is if everyone out there who wants a frame, requests it of their local shop , maybe you can help the push to get these back again as momentum is now in our favor.

This is again an example of how fragile the needlework market is. Fundamental products come and go off the market very easily. I made a friend years ago who was the retired R&D head of a major needle company in Germany and founder of a museum of needle technology. Germany and England had been the centers of the needle trade since the time our jacket was made. Today there is one English vendor and a French vendor. Between them they make 80% of all needles and brand them with different names. My friend
showed me hundreds of different types of needles that were made prior to WWI by dozens of companies. Needles that I knew must have existed to do embroidery I couldn’t do today because I couldn’t find the right needle. He showed me how the governments of England and Germany had restricted the product lines during the war to divert steel to munitions. When the war was over, women’s lives had changed so much that the demand wasn’t large enough to reintroduce the large variety again. Hence those forms of embroidery are now gone from our lexicon,effectively extinct. Today most needlework manufacturers are very small entities, entire product lines can disappear just because someone retires or there is a medical emergency in the family and the business owner needs to find a ‘real job’. I wish every stitcher knew the background on the products they use and understood the economics of the situation. It would stop all chart copying, sharing, and buying cut rate floss from big craft stores in a second. Unfortunately it is the big secret that no-one wants to talk about. While not everyone can afford to fill their closets – there are small everyday decisions when shopping for our craft passion that make or break the industry.

Tricia

Several of the stitches we’re using on the jacket have been diagrammed and illustrated by Tricia. Her directions and photos are fantastic, I think. They really helped me understand these stitches, none of which I’d ever tried before last summer.

Tricia hasn’t done up her own version of the plaited braid stitch instructions, though, and likely won’t for some time. Fortunately, Linda Connors of Calico Crossroads has, and has made them available through her website for a very small fee. Here’s a link to the searchable catalog for Calico Crossroads. Put in plaited braid stitch and it should come up; if not email Linda for help.

If you want to see images of the two original jackets we’re using for this project, go to the V&A website, to the collections page. Go to the ’search collections’ feature. In the search box type “Laton jacket” for many pictures of this jacket and the portrait of Margaret Laton wearing it. This jacket is the source of the garment pattern and the lace that we’re reproducing. To see the jacket bearing the embroidery pattern, put “1359-1900″ in the search field. There are fewer pictures of this one available, but they’re gorgeous.

Emily is guest-posting today. Send her comments. We love comments. JMH

My mother and I shared several squeals and a victory dance this New Year’s Eve Day. This was the day I first opened the door of Plimoth Plantation’s intern house, standing under the colonnade in the freezing cold of the December afternoon. I was immediately overtaken by the strong urge to let fly with a loud, self-congratulatory expletive, but my mother came up to me, my bags in hand, and beat me to the punch with a grin on her face. Cursing thus achieved and dispersed of, we moved all of my stuff up the stairs and into the two-bedroom apartment, wondering at what were going to be my proverbial “digs” for the next six or so weeks. I appreciated the house entirely, but to be very honest, all I wanted to do was get to work. I had a few days to wait, so I hunkered down with a book and some coffee to wait out my anxiety, to wait for the day that my internship with the Wardrobe Department began.

To appreciate the abject form of costuming geekery that dwells within the tiny body of one Ms. Emily Woods Hogue, or yours truly, there really is only one thing to understand.

Sarah Morton’s Day was my favorite book kindergarten-second grade.

For those of you unfamiliar with the book that planted the seed for what would become a history/ costuming double major, it was published in 1989, and it features a young girl going about her quotidian activities on Plimoth Plantation in 1627. Pages 6-7 feature Sarah getting dressed, putting on petticoat after petticoat, along with everything else that made up a young girl’s garb in the seventeenth century. I was the kind of little girl who wore overalls like it was her job, so this fascinated me. I had one “twirly skirt”, but as a general rule I wore what was best for kicking around the back woods of my New Hampshire home, i.e. pants. This era in which women wore more than one skirt and men wore pants that often did a darn good impression of a skirt befuddled me, and I vowed to learn more.

So I learned more. And more. And more.

As my majors might tell you, I have made it my business to continue learning more about not only the social history of dress, but also construction of clothing through the ages. Hence, the amount of time that I have spent in the Plimoth Plantation Wardrobe Department makes a great deal of sense. I am incredibly glad to be back this summer… so glad, in fact, that when Jill asked me to return, I danced an impassioned victory dance and cursed an ecstatic blue streak, just like I did upon my initial arrival.

If you have any questions about what it is like to be an intern at Plimoth, in the wardrobe department, living in the intern house, or really anything else, just ask. I will be more than happy to receive your queries.

Also blooming in my garden are two kinds of columbine. I see them as purple and purple & white, but the color of the plain ones could be called dark blue. They look dusty, but it’s pollen. The pollen this year seems to have been extremely heavy and when I took these photos it hadn’t rained for several days.

Gerard, whose 1633 Herball we consulted the other day about pinks, also has an entry for Columbine. He says that each sprig of the stalk brings forth “one floure with five little hollow hornes, as it were hanging forth, with small leaves standing upright, of the shape of little birds. These floures are of colour sometimes blew, at other times of a red or purple, often white, or of mixt colors, which to distinguish severally would be to smal purpose, being things so familiarly knowne to all.” The name columbine comes from the Latin word for dove, columba, and the OED says that the flower “has some resemblance to five pigeons clustered together.”

While I was taking the pictures last week I wondered if my columbines are modern hybrids, and they may be; they were here in the garden when we bought the house. But Gerard’s description and his engravings match my flowers pretty well, especially if you think the purple might be called blue.

In an email, Melinda asked if I was familiar with another 17th century herbal, one that has separate and detailed entries for gillyflowers, carnations and pinks. I’m not, in fact I didn’t recognize the name (and now can’t remember it), but I will definitely try to find a copy and I’ll let you know whatever of interest I turn up.

I think the stitched columbines are definitely of the “mixt colors” sort.