Tricia’s Blog #4 on the Plaited Braid Stitch. When Tricia sent me these blogs she copied Linda so she’d be prepared for your calls and emails.

We have had a lot of requests for the plaited braid directions. As of yet, I haven’t made my set of directions for this stitch. So we won’t be putting them on the internet yet and I am not sure if I will get to it before the project is done.

Fine Lines is out of print and the parent company is bankrupt, so you can’t purchase back issues as far as I know. That said, Leon’s website (I looked for this website to post a link but couldn’t find it. Mary sent it www.leonconraddesigns.freeserve.co.uk/pbs.htm Thanks, Mary) has some information on it and Linda Connors will sell you a set of her color directions (6 pages). I recommend that if you are interested in trying them out, you can email her at: calxrds@aol.com.

She is aware that a flood of email would come someday when I was ready to blog on this. (You can also order online, like I did. www.calicocrossroads.com I clicked Hand Embroidery, online searchable catalogue, and put in plaited braid stitch. Email or call if you have trouble.)

The next secret is using the right thread and needle to do the stitch in gold. If you are interested in this, we could put together a little spool of thread (the one we will use on the jacket) and the needle (japanese #9 or #10) and sell it to benefit the project. Drop us a line or place a comment in the blog. I expect the thread in about a month and could have it reeled into smaller amounts.

Tricia

I am smiling in a bemused fashion here. Did she say “IF you are interested”? That’s pretty funny, Tricia.

Tricia writes today. This is the second of four blogs she sent me before she left for Europe for two weeks. I tend not to read ahead when she sends me a few at once, but this time I’ve checked, and she answers most of your questions in the next three entries. I was going to skip tomorrow as it is a holiday in the States, but I can’t do that to you . . . look for Tricia’s #3 tomorrow and #4 Saturday. I’ll take a stab at the unanswered questions on Sunday. She sent no photo with this entry; I’ll repost the one from a couple of days ago. I believe all the different lines of stitching are the same stitch with different gold threads. Before you wonder where that nearly completed book is, blame the jacket - I think some of the time she had set aside to finish that book on gold stitches was actually spent on this project. Mea culpa.

Well, we have been asked a million questions about Plaited Braid over the last few months. And there has been a very lively set of exchanges between Jill, myself, other teachers, and readers of the blog who have been doing trials of their own. So I guess it is finally time to summarize this topic!

There are many people who have been on the trail of ‘Plaited Braid’ for years. I will try to recognize as many here as I can dig up in my memory! That said, there are two subjects to talk about. First, when we say ‘Plaited Braid Stitch’, what do we identify as that stitch? The second is how to do it.

On the first topic, I have been working on a book of gold stitches taken from 16th and 17th century English samplers and embroideries for years. Nearly complete, I have found almost 40 individual stitches worked in gold with different mechanics. Very few of them are identified in stitch anthologies. Even more frustrating is the
existence of several ‘braid’ stitches. Because they are difficult to decode, they have always ended up on the back burner. Now I have been going through my research photos trying to answer these questions.

What I have found is that there seems to be at minimum two stitches which can be called ‘plaited braid’. For awhile I thought that maybe we were looking at stitch density differences or maybe a bad stitcher here and there. But I have located one spot sampler where a queen stitch motif is filled in with both of the variants. Even more compelling is that one is worked in silver and the other gold. They repeat along the pattern in the same positions, implying that the stitcher identified them as distinctly different stitches. While I can’t share the photos from the museum here, one has a single V going down the middle and the other looks more woven like a herringbone.

So I believe that there was a family of ‘braid stitches’. In this family I also place stitches with related stitch mechanics such as the knot stitch (often called Braid Stitch). Now this creates difficulty because when you examine the published diagrams for “plaited braid”, the authors haven’t identified the objects they worked from or shown pictures. Therefore it is hard to say if any one set of directions is
“CORRECT” or “WRONG”.

Tomorrow I will talk about the directions I am familiar with and which ones we will be using.

Tricia

Tricia writes today:

If you remember, months ago we were trying out gold threads for the plaited braid stitch. Bill Barnes of Golden Threads had made a silk core wrapped with gilt strip for us. When it stitched, it was just too stiff to use, which was a surprise to me. When I gave him my comments, he responded that he had used three ends of Soie Ovale for the core and would I wait a few weeks for another sample using just two ends. He was sure it would work. Well - always trust the master!

We finally got the sample two weeks ago (another one of those international shipping dramas delayed it). Shown here is the sample alone and also stitched next to the previous samples that I had done. The thread is thinner but it still gives a nice and dense plaited braid. More importantly, it stitches easily. Well, as easily as a gold thread can! So I gave the green light to have miles of it made.

A big thanks goes out to Access Commodities who have been coordinating this for us. They are the distributor of Au Ver a Soie thread and supply the silks that Bill is using for the thread. Lamora’s expertise with international shipping is one of the prime reasons we can make this happen!

Tricia

Hi Mary, I’m glad it made you laugh. jmh

And let Linda V from Arizona write tonight’s post. Linda came to Plymouth last summer to work on the jacket. She also offered to work at home on a project for us. She’s reproducing a red silk double-running stitch-embroidered handkerchief from the V & A (where else?) that we can use either in the upcoming exhibit or in some of our living history programs.

The first picture is the front, with a dime for scale. The second is the back. Linda wrote:

It’s an interesting project and I’m enjoying working on it. At 55 count it’s a new experience for me to have to use magnification to do the job! It is a slow go however. What you see in the photos is roughly 30 hours of work. About 10 hours of work per flower/repeat. I’m going forward, but it will not be a quick project.

Lyn from Canada taught Linda a nifty technique for anchoring the thread without a knot. Linda writes: Nan Euler’s Surface Anchoring method is working well. It is a little challenging to do it at this scale, but I love that you hardly see the beginning or ending of the threads.

Elmsley Rose did a whole blog entry about the S and Z twist that we’ve been talking about. Check it out HERE.

Here, courtesy of Wendy, is a photo of the stitched columbine motif. In my opinion, it is the wackiest of the motifs on the jacket. It sort of resembles a columbine to me, but not much. And it looks crazy. Several columbines were embroidered this session; Norma B from Connecticut stitched this one.

It not only has the first bit of green GST on the jacket, but it also has blue, and pink, and red GST, not to mention a little plain pink silk. It’s the kitchen sink motif.