Emily is guest-posting today.

As someone who takes great pleasure in all things weird and wonderful, I am extraordinarily pleased with my blue right thumbnail. That’s right. It’s blue. Navy on the edge, fading to a gentle sort of sunny lakeside-ish color in the middle.

I haven’t taken a nailbrush to it because I tend to be pretty lazy when it comes to general fingernail maintenance (although they all get a good weekly biting), but also because I’m not sure I want it to go away.

I’m not sure I want to go away.

This weekend (August 9^th -10^th ) is the weekend that the intern house bids farewell to two of its six occupants. My counterpart in the Wardrobe Department, Lacey, is one of the young ladies departing, and the whole department is sad to see her leave.

In the past few days, Ms. Lacey, with the help of Tricia, has been making a web of numbers she should call in order to find out what becoming a textile conservator would be like. In this line of work, I am told, a certain amount of chemistry is necessary. Lacey proved her aptitude for working with potentially volatile elements during our dye workshop (See Figure 1) and was pleased and proud to see her work come to fruition. She was fascinated and frustrated by the exactitude necessary to produce both the solution for the madder (See Figure 2) and the solution for the indigo (See Figure 3). You can see the beauty produced by her meticulousness was well worth her effort.

I was just psyched to put bugs in a coffee grinder.

Lacey handed me a little container of dead insects (cochineal bugs), and I crushed ‘em up and boiled ‘em, dumped the wool in, and when I took it out, it was a dashing, daring shade of red (See Figure 4), whereupon I did a little dance of joy.

Through those two days of wool dyeing, Penny (or “Big Grasshopper”) imparted her knowledge of natural dyestuffs upon us, making sure that we had a good handle on what we were doing and surreptitiously checking over our shoulders to keep us on the right track. She was very pleased by the end of the workshop, and it was very pleasing to see her, a fiber artist I love and respect, that pleased. And she brought us chocolate croissants when we were done, too, which was pretty bomb.

Lacey’s farewell gift from Penny was a little hat made out of some of Penny’s handspun yarn, which Lacey had dyed with madder during the workshop. If I were the kind of person who could knit more than a straight line (I make a mean scarf, but anything else? Forget about it), I would be all over this yarn. Seriously. And I’m not just saying that because my second job is in retail.

I’m just thankful that Penny let us make up a second indigo dyebath, exclusively for cotton. With characteristic precision, Lacey dipped and dipped her button-down shirt until it was a stunning shade of midnight blue. I went all art school and dumped my shirt in, relishing the air bubbles that made odd striations and pockets of color all over the garment. We both went into the indigo dyebath after our clothing (and skein upon skein of yarn) with bare hands, hence the blue fingernails.

It has been more than a week since we had our dye workshop, and I am still very happy with my subtly blue fingernails. I am less than happy about the fact that I will be returning to Bennington in three weeks, with a play to costume and a fashion show to complete. It was, however, brought to my attention that I should probably get my B.A. before I’m a contestant on Project Runway. Thus, it is with a brain laden with knowledge and a heart laden with sorrow that I leave the Plimoth Plantation Wardrobe Department. I will keep in touch and will hopefully be back to work on the jacket.

And I’m just going to let the blue in my fingernails work its way out.

~Emily

There’s not a great deal going on with the jacket this month. I decided a while ago to not schedule any work sessions in July, and it turns out that was a very good idea.

I have been spending Sundays in the Crafts Center working on the jacket, but today family concerns prevented me; Emily stepped up on short notice and covered my commitments to the site and the jacket. Thanks, Emily.

Aside from embroidering whenever possible, I’m also working on the mock-up of the jacket. By working on, I mean cutting out a model from the same linen and a similar but commercially woven silk. I wrote to Susan North for advice on the making up, and she wrote back with some notes based on her examinations of the Laton jacket as well as others in the V&A collection.

The two most significant points in my opinion are that several different techniques seem to have been used on both the Laton jacket and the others, and that these different techniques don’t seem to be standard from one jacket to the other. In other words (because those ones were pretty opaque) 17th-century tailors of embroidered jackets seem to have used a variety of methods unsystematically. Good news for me, then, as I’ve got precedent for doing what works.

I’ll keep you posted, of course, but if I’m this nervous about working on the mock-up, how will I feel about sewing the actual thing? At least that will be worth taking pictures of – plain linen and plain white silk make a very boring photo.

Hi everyone, I haven’t dropped off the face of the earth. Husband Away turned into Husband Home but with Appendicitis. He no longer has appendicitis, no longer has an appendix even, but I’ve been a little preoccupied. Distracted. Frazzled, as a co-worker so eloquently put it this morning. And then last night we had the Thunderstorms. Thou shalt not fire up the computer during a violent thunderstorm.

Anyway, Jill H (the lace making Jill H, as opposed to me, the non-lace making Jill H) asked about finding 1359-1900. The key is to search the V&A collections. You can’t use the search function in the upper right hand corner of their website. That searches for things like exhibits and lectures and new books. You have to click the ‘collections’ option (other options on that page are exhibits, things to do, your visit, support us, contact us, etc.). Once in the collections section, you have choices of which collection to look at. There is also a ’search the collections’ box. It’s the top left section. Click on that and you get a screen with a search box on the left. Continue to ignore the search box in the upper right. It does not love you.

The search box you want says ‘all fields’ above it, and below there are two buttons: clear field and search. Put ‘1359-1900′ in this search box and click search. This will get you the embroidery-pattern jacket. If you instead put in ‘Laton jacket’ you will get the garment-and-lace-pattern jacket. Have fun!

Emily and Lacey have been exceedingly busy while I’ve been frazzling. Lacey has made three pairs of canvas breeches and is working on her fourth. She’s also knitting mittens. Emily is making a gown for a small child who soon will be volunteering in the English Village. She’s also making a green canvas suit for one of the interpretive artisans. Emily left me a note saying that yesterday’s late-afternoon fitting with him went “swimmingly. He says the fabric is the same color as his truck. I’m assuming this is a good thing.” Hope so. Penny is taking a well-deserved looong weekend. When she comes back Monday she and Emily and Lacey will be preparing for a two-day dye fest. On Tuesday and Wednesday of next week they’ll be dyeing wool yarn with natural dyes outside the Crafts Center. I’m so excited about this, I can’t wait. If you’re in the neighborhood, come see.

• We entered the dog days not long ago, and I can really feel it. The heat isn’t oppressive, but it is humid, the air quality is sub-par, and I’m suffering from embroidery craving. All I want to do is work on that right front piece, the one that’s less done than all the other pieces because it languished for months in an impossibly wide frame. It’s been re-framed and is marginally easier to work, and I want to stitch a columbine. And a pansy. And a few butterflies. Maybe some honeysuckle buds or a pink split by a gusset. But not the worms. I bear them a grudge for not being what I thought they were. Bah.
• Gilt Sylke Twist is noisy. It’s thinner than the soie perlee, but because of the gold wire wrapping it’s almost ribbed. The first time I pulled it through the linen I gasped at the noise. The more experienced stitchers in the room chuckled, oh, yes, it IS noisy. After you work with it a while you forget, mesmerized by its beauty.
• Thanks for the note about the symposium, Cate. We’ll be holding all the events at Plimoth, and the capacity is about 200. Which seems like not a lot unless you’re actually planning it and still aren’t sure if anyone will come. Then it seems like quite a lot indeed. Those dates are 24-27 September, 2009.
• Lacey’s experience with the hot dog buns rang a bell for lots of transplanted New Englanders who miss the familiar buns of their youth. Isn’t it funny what you miss? Years and years ago I spent a year in England and missed Oreos. Like crazy. When I can have them any time I almost never do. And yes, I’m sure while there I saw The Jacket at the V&A, but alas I had no idea how important it would become in my life and so wasted the chance to really SEE it.
• Who doesn’t want to come to Plymouth in August? Carolyn W has a free weekend and will be coming to make lace 22 – 24 August (Fri – Sun) so we decided to make a party of it and invite everyone. Have a few days? Want to come to the sea? Actually, by that time it usually isn’t so hot and humid anymore. And, at least we won’t have to worry about having to cancel for snow, like last winter. email me jhall@plimoth.org
• The credit for the plaited braid stitch illustrations in Plimoth’s embroidered coif kit belongs to Oliver Kline and Joanna Kline Cadorette. I heard from Joanna that she drew the initial sketches and her father cleaned them up on the computer and made them all nice and easy to understand. Thank you, Mr. Kline.

Lacey guest writes today:

This is Lacey here. I am the other intern here at the wardrobe department and I have a story about my experience here at Plimoth that just needs to be shared.

To begin, I am very much a girl of the south. My mother is from the northwest, but she’s the oddball there. My dad is from Deep South Texas and my brother and I were born in Georgia. I then lived in Heidelberg, Germany for my formative years, where the culture is of course not American, but that southern American hospitality still reigned in my home. When we moved back to the US it was again to the south, though most southerners would argue that Northern Virginia is not, in fact, the south. Needless to say coming here to Plimoth is the first time I have ever been in New England.

Working here as an intern is more than I had ever dreamed of, even after I turned in the application earlier this year. That being said, I am finding it incredibly hard to live on air and sunshine, money definitely has a certain appeal. (we were able to offer Emily and Lacey internships with housing but without stipends – jmh) When some of the other girls and I were offered a job working the Plimoth Cinema in the evenings and on weekends we snatched at the opportunity. Its not a lot of money but it makes my mother’s frugal child feel a little bit better about her bank account.

Now we move to the meat of the story. On Saturdays the Cinema has a concession stand with popcorn, candy and hot dogs so the moviegoers can make an event of it. This past Saturday I was to work the concession stand by myself for the first time. When the time came to sell the first hot dog, which by the way are two for three dollars, I came upon a dilemma. The hot dog buns were like nothing I had ever seen before. To me they looked something like an excessively fat slice of bread that had been shortened about three inches.

I held it like one would a normal, to me, hot dog bun and tried to find the slice. Failing to find the slice I looked all over the places I would have thought to find it. Now those of you northerners reading this who have never seen what constitutes a normal hot dog bun for the rest of us, its something like a mini sub roll and opens on the side of the bun. Never finding the slice on those first buns, I mangled the poor man’s hot dog buns to the dissatisfaction of my poor confused brain.

Three dogs later I realized these buns did in fact have a slice, and that it was in the top of the bun. I was mortified that I had missed this. Later, between the two showings I mentioned it to my boss who commented that when she had gone to college somewhere outside of New England, she had not known what to do with the sub roll buns and had her mother keep her supplied in hot dog buns.

Jill again. When Lacey told me this story, I decided to get some pictures of the buns in question. A thousand words and all. I just happened to have some New England hot dog rolls at home. My daughter prefers them because they’re more stable on the plate. I checked the grocery store yesterday, and the ones like this with the slice on the top say “frankfurter buns” and the ones Lacey knows, with the slice on the side, are called “hot dog buns.” There’s no end to what you can learn from the Embroiderers’ Story. Thank you for all the comments, and I’ll be posting answers as well as three more posts from Tricia over the next days. I am having BIG computer troubles at home so if you’re waiting for an answer from me on something – Carolyn and Robbin – I’ll try calling you. Thanks for your patience. ETA: that is my horrifically messy kitchen table around the edges of those pictures. The housecleaning fairies are on vacation this week.

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.

Come stitch on the jacket

Friday August 8 – Monday August 11

Friday September 12 – Monday September 15

Friday September 26 – Monday September 29

Wendy left a note in the comments. I was too distracted by the news that done does not mean done to listen to the explanation of what exactly the funny wrapping is. Debbie explained this morning that it is an under-over-wrap-around the horizontal lines of the ceylon stitch. Debbie compared it to a straight-line spider rose type thing; Penny said that maneuver is a stitch used in tapestry weaving. Speaking of Penny, she’s answered the Earl Grey tea cupcake question for us:

Hi there! The Earl Grey cupcake has the tea as an ingredient. Originally, the recipe called for green tea powder, but Emily is a big fan of the Earl of Grey tea combined with chocolate, thus the cupcakes. The recipe comes from the bookVEGAN CUPCAKES TAKE OVER THE WORLD by Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero.

Linda H came all the way from Pennsylvania to work on the jacket this weekend. Here’s a picture of Linda pointing out one of the motifs she worked, a butterfly.

Linda brought some of her needlework for show and tell, which was today. Here’s a picture of some of her stitching, which will be part of a beautiful needlework accessories book.

Linda was inadvertently part of a very rude awakening I had today. Wendy was showing her some of the frames, and pointing out what remains to be done. I had thought that the plain worms were stitched in ceylon stitch, like this. Ceylon stitch period. Stop. Done.

So Wendy was saying, “and then the worms get this funny wrapping thing.” And I said, “The Fancy Worms.” And Wendy said, “No, the plain worms.” And she started telling Linda how the wrapping is done. And I said “The Fancy Worms. The plain worms are done.” And Wendy said, “NO. The Plain Worms.” “WHAT?” So apparently the plain worms are NOT DONE. They need wrapping, like this. And I am getting used to that idea.

A couple of updates – Robbin explained in the comments that Laura didn’t have a name tag yesterday so we gave her a spare. Her grandmother’s name is Irene so she picked that one.

I ran into the interpreter whose stays Lacey altered over the last couple of days, and she was all appreciation. Her stays fit so much better and she is much more comfortable. The only problem now is her waistcoat is too big! We can fix that – over her next weekend.