Tricia sent me this post:

As you can see in this picture, the gold threads have arrived. Remember earlier this summer the second trial of gold-silver-copper on silk arrived and was a slight bit thinner than the first trial. It worked well for stitching plaited braid. I excitedly called Lamora at
Access Commodities and let her know that using two silk plies for the core worked and we could go ahead and ask Bill Barnes to make a full run. If you check back in your blog a long while back, you will remember our rough estimates of how much we would need. Over 1000 meters. Well, I was surprised that Bill was able to turn it around as fast as he did – and nothing got caught in customs this time!! Customs has been the enemy #1 of this project. I can’t tell you how any times our supplies have gotten delayed there!

So I have more than 1500 meters in my hot little hand right now. Well of course I had to have extra! Some for me and some for you stitchers out there! Give me a few weeks to get my act together and we will have a little kit for sale to benefit the jacket with a needle and
gold thread and maybe a few instructions thrown in too.

Just in time. Next week the workroom will be a hub of activity. My son is going to summer camp at the Plantation and so I have a great excuse to be there all week. I will be starting the gold work and working on attaching detached pieces. Then we have a session starting
at the end of the week (still have spots if you are in the area for a day). Some lucky ladies may even start couching gold and doing reverse chain with this new limited edition material. Cool.

Tricia

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

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.

Thanks for the positive comments on the divided carriers from Orleans Carpenters on Friday’s post. We’re grateful for their generosity, and pleased to be associated with them. By the way, there is a treat on the way to go with these carriers. It’s in development now and should be ready by the end of May. More later.

Last embroidery session was in the Wardrobe office. Several embroiderers have mentioned that one of the side benefits of being in the office is the chance to see the behind the scenes work going on – interpreters in period dress frequently come up for a pair of mittens or a fitting or to ask if anyone can help them with the fax machine. This was a little surprise on the last day of the April session, tiny Rebecca Prence stopped by with her grandmother, Mary Brewster. The pink peeking out of her gown is a knitted wool undershirt, based on the tiny one in the collection of the Museum of London. Thanks to Wendy for this photo.

Lyn from Canada was here last weekend embroidering on the jacket. She’s a veteran, she has worked on the jacket a couple of times before. On one of those trips last fall (before the snow set in) Lyn mentioned to Wendy that she’d be touring around Cape Cod for a few days before she headed back to Ontario. Wendy said, well, you have to stop in at Orleans Carpenters, Beth and Paul Dixon’s workshop on the Cape, where they make gorgeous Shaker boxes and some awesome needlework accessories. So Lyn did. And while there she told Beth all about the jacket project, and how she had come from Canada, and others from all parts of the US, and how fun and special it is.

Of course, I didn’t know about any of this. A couple of months later, I got a box with a lovely letter from Beth, and two of these:

I was overwhelmed. Beth, in her note, said that the jacket project sounded like a wonderful way to bring people together to serve a project that would add joy and beauty to the world and she wanted to support it somehow (I’m paraphrasing, because of course I’ve left the original at the office….). I was overwhelmed. The box, really a divided carrier, is just beautiful.

Beth and Paul’s original gift to the jacket has morphed into an even bigger gift to the jacket. The Dixons are selling these carriers for a limited time, and are donating $10 to the Textile Conservation Fund for each carrier sold. Go to their website, Orleans Carpenters, scroll down to the bottom of the left-hand list, and click on the Plimoth Plantation link. Even better, browse around for a while. They do beautiful work.

Thanks again, Beth and Paul, and thanks to Lyn for sharing our story, thanks to Wendy for helping Lyn and Beth meet, and thanks to you for supporting the Jacket!

Note to Susan, who in the comments asked if anyone was thinking about charting a reproduction of the EC sampler – YES! Elizabeth Creeden, noted expert in the field of historic needlework and popular teacher, is doing just that. I expect it won’t be ready for a bit, it’s a pretty big project, but you’ll see it here when it is. Thanks for asking!

Here’s the other half of the jacket’s left sleeve. You can see the concave curve at the top which goes under the armpit.

And a detail of foxgloves, showing the “speckling” which is done, as Kimberly mentioned, in running stitch. I agree, the GST doesn’t show up well in a still photo. It shows to best advantage when you move the frame slightly, letting the light, especially sunlight, play over it. Which makes sense, when you think of it being used on clothing, so the best effect is when the wearer moves and light, in that case probably candlelight or lamplight, plays over the surface, not only of the GST but also the sequins, the gold vines and the metal lace with the dangling spangles. Oh.

And here’s a motif photo, this is columbine. We’ve got a few columbines with just this blue bit in the middle done, Tricia has been working on directions for the rest, determining which stitches are used where. On more than one occasion we’ve found there was more going on with a motif than at first appeared, like when Tricia and Susan North found at least four different variations in how the pansy motifs were worked.

Norma answered Carol’s question as to why the trefoils are “dreaded”. There are just so very many of them, and with the three leaves and the color changes they take a long time to do. That, and though no one has said so out loud they’re also done in plain silk, not the glamorous Gilt Sylke Twist. Poor trefoils.

Tricia is checking on how the acorn caps were made in that 17th-century raised-work picture. I’ll ask her to check her notes for the other elements, too, and she’ll give us a post with the answers.

We’ve added a couple of embroiderers for tomorrow. I’m delighted – the more the merrier, not to mention the more progress, but we may be a little cozy here in the Wardrobe office. Shaina and Penny have turned their excellent spatial-relations skills to how to arrange the room most efficiently, so we’ll be in good shape. I’ll remember to take photos.

Tricia has some exciting news:

Other than a few spools that Access Commodities has given out to shops and designers to promote the up-coming release of Gilt Sylke Twist, Thistle Threads bought the entire manufacturing runs made for the jacket, knowing that not all of the thread would be needed for the jacket. Part of horse trading. We have calculated the needs of the jacket based on our stitching use so far and used what was needed for the Nightcap class. We have extra!

The extra was first offered for sale two weeks ago to those stitchers who had already attended a session as a thank you for generously giving of their time and effort to the project. We still have some extra of five colors – but not copious quantities.

Several of these colors are limited edition, to be replaced in the next set of manufacturing runs by a permanent color series. The blues and pink will not be the same going forward. So if you have a large project in mind, you might want to wait. From last contact with Bill, there may be some thread coming over in the next six weeks. He is currently on travel again and was trying to get one or two colors to Access before he left but wasn’t sure that was going to be possible.

If you are interested in any of the Gilt Sylke Twist and can’t wait until later to get your hands on some, please email Tricia at tricia@alum.mit.edu with your request. The available colors are: Redde, Carnacion, Bisse, Graie Blewe, and Grene. The price is $25 for a 35 meter tube with $5 of each tube going to Plimoth as a donation to the jacket project.

Tricia

Please note: These photos show all the colors, some of which are not available for sale right now.