Here’s Emily’s first project this summer, a cassock for an interpreter portraying a sailor on Mayflower II.

When I sat back and looked at that sentence I realized I’ve opened the proverbial can of worms. What is a cassock? What makes this one particularly for a sailor? What is a non-sailor cassock? Where is Emily? Who is that behind the cassock?

Let me see what I can do. Cassock in the early 17th century seemed to refer to rather a lot of garments, including one that’s part of a priest’s vestments, something that soldiers wore, and any of a number of loose upper-body garments that were as long as the hip or thigh or even the knee. These last ones were worn by working men and maybe sometimes women. More questions than answers there.

This sailor’s cassock is based on one in a woodcut by the 16th-century Italian Cesare Vecellio labeled “the English sailor.” As you can imagine, a picture with a label is a precious commodity in historical dress research. We happily make these for our Mayflower II sailors. Not-sailor cassocks are also loose-fitting upper body garments, but the sleeve is a uniform width from armhole to wrist, not wide at the armhole and narrow at the wrist as here. The non-sailor cassock, also called by the wardrobe department “landsmen’s cassocks” (totally modern nomenclature) does not flare at the waist and often has buttons at the neck. These are based on images from memorial brasses as reproduced in one of the Cunningtons’ books of costume (they did a bunch, father-daughter team; I think the one I’m remembering is their 16th century costume one).

And I tried for a week to get Emily, the cassock, and the camera all in the room at the same time while simultaneously remembering to take a photo and finally gave up in disgust. The sailor needs his cassock, and he’ll get it tomorrow morning. The cassock-holder is one of our soon-to-be child volunteer interpreters, in for a fitting today.

Regarding the comments - I’m with you, Margaret, on the not-seeing-the-columbine thing. For a minute I sort of thought if you turned the stitched one upside down….but no. I think that’s why I’m so fascinated with the columbine motifs.

Thanks, Marjorie, for the compliment on the Needle Arts article. It was all Cheryl’s (the author) good work. I saw it but didn’t have a chance to read it. Penny showed me the copy Cheryl asked the EGA to send us - it’s full of excellent pictures and hopefully it’ll encourage a few more people to join us in the stitching.

This came from Justin today:

Here’s the latest jacket lining update-

First off is a shot of the scarn holding all of those spools Kate and I have been winding. From here we’re able to warp nine ends at a time, not as many as we would have liked, but the skeins of silk were exceptionally difficult to work with. More on how the scarn works and how the warp is made in a minute.

Here’s Kate winding spools. We made the warp at the barn in Marshfield, Vermont where Kate and Eaton Hill Textiles is based. The ground level of the barn houses Kate’s dye studio where the silk was dyed, and the calendaring press for hot and cold pressing fabrics. Upstairs are a dozen looms and other equipment; antique barn looms, small modern looms for tapes, two warping boards, several scarns, a great wheel, a quill wheel, a dobby loom with a jacquard head for pattern weaving, and too much more to mention.

Ok, back to the warping- Here you can see the warp running on the warping board to the left, and the spools held on the scarn on the right. The width of the board is six feet/two yards, so each horizontal pass adds two yards to the length of the warp. As you can see, the warp makes four passes and runs half a yard down to make the lower cross. Thus, the warp is eight and a half yards long. The jacket will require around six yards of finished cloth so why the extra? Some of this will be lost to the loom, and whatever is left over will be peace of mind. Better too much than too little especially on a project like this!

I’m going to attempt to explain how all of these threads are kept in order and become something useful. The scarn divides the spools into two sets, in our case vertically, left and right. When making a warp, each and every thread needs to be kept in its proper order, and this is done by crossing them while the warp is made. If you look at the picture, you’ll see that the top horizontal beam of the board has two additional pegs. Imagine that we’ve taken a single thread and tied it to the top left peg of the board, where the warp starts. That thread then passes over the top of the first of the two extra pegs, and under the second, before making the four passes down the board. Once at the bottom, the thread loops around the last peg and returns from the bottom back along the four passes to the top. At the two extra pegs, this thread now passes over the top of the second peg and under the bottom of the first peg. These two threads cross now at the pegs and when pulled off the board will stay in just the order they were put on in, since they can’t shift over each other and out of order with the cross in place.

Now, if we were to progress in this manner, I would have to repeat this whole process over 1,100 times to create all of the individual threads needed in the warp. Thankfully, somebody, at least six or seven centuries ago, (probably longer), figured out that you don’t need to go through all of this trouble. By setting multiple spools on a scarn, you can warp multiple ends at the same time. We’re only using nine spools, but you could do as many as 48 with the scarn we are using. In this picture you can see how we pick the cross in all of these ends at once. It starts by splitting the ends vertically with the right arm and then holding that split with the let thumb. Now the right hand picks out every other thread by starting at the top right end. Under the first thread on the right, and picking the left thread, then under the second end down on the right and picking the second thread down on the left, all the way down. In the next picture, every other thread on the left has been picked through every other on the right and pulled to the side.

There are two more posts with pictures from Justin to come over the next couple of days. Thanks, Justin!

Here, as promised, are our summer interns.

The first one is of Lacey signing away her photo rights. Actually, she’s giving me permission to post her photo on the blog. This fall she will be a junior at the University of Mary Washington in Fredricksburg, Virginia. The next picture shows Lacey working on her first project, hand sewing a coif. She’s stitching the casing for the drawstring.

Turns out Emily isn’t the girl she used to be. She added this awesome, and totally topic-appropriate, tattoo. She’s ironing some fabric for a lining for a sailor’s cassock she’s making. Emily will also be a junior this fall, at Bennington College, in Bennington, Vermont.

I’m delighted to welcome Emily back, and to have Lacey with us for the summer. Stay tuned for their projects and progress.

I’ve recently started thinking about the sewing-together part of this project. Thinking about logistics, I mean. By a happy coincidence, Laura brought her embroidered jacket as part of her show & tell this session. I mentioned that I’d been comparing the original paper pattern pieces to the tensioned embroidered ones and that some stretching has occurred. I wondered aloud how much “spring back” we’d have when all the pieces are cut out of the frames.

Laura, who has actually done quite a bit of this work herself, said she thinks most of the stretching/distortion will remain, because the stitching will help to hold the piece in that position, even when the lacing that ties the piece to the frame is gone.

This started an in-depth discussion of construction techniques and choices. I wish we’d started earlier in the day - this was just as we were cleaning up to go for supper, and all very hungry and Laura with a severe headache that couldn’t have been helped any by delaying her meal. Laura showed me her jacket and described how she put the pieces together, and Robbin and Jen, who were still there too, looked up photos in various books and helped compare details between the Laton jacket and jacket 1359-1900 (the embroidery pattern jacket).

Here is a detail of the inside of Laura’s jacket, showing the center back seam. Laura folded in and hemmed down the raw edge of the pieces before stitching the hemmed edges together with extremely tiny overcast stitches. (Does that make sense written that way? She turned in the edge of the embroidered back and hemmed it down; turned in the edge of the side that should be seamed to that piece and hemmed that down, then overcast the two together. Then she did the same with the linings for each piece. This detail shows the linen lining. Each half was hemmed and then the hemmed edges were stitched together.) You can see from the right side that she also chose to apply a braid of silk over the seams and around the edges of her jacket. The Laton jacket has embroidery over some of the seams (but not all), and of course has the lace trimming the edges; 1359-1900 doesn’t have embroidery over the seams.

Before we talked, I had already decided to sew a trial jacket, cut out of the same linen we’re embroidering, and sew it up with a silk lining. This will of course only be a distant approximation of the real thing, but it will allow me to practice setting in the gussets (more on that another time) and work out how the cuffs and collar should be sewn (among other questions I have) before I’m dealing with all the embroidery etc. In fact that was why I was comparing the paper pattern pieces to the embroidered pieces in the first place.

Yesterday I cut out the linen for this trial piece. I’m thinking about which, if any, other construction methods to try (aside from the one Laura used) and I’m also thinking about whether we should embroider over some of the seams. Mmm. More embroidery.

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.