Here are a selection of the foxgloves stitched on the Left Front.  The game again is to try to figure out how many people stitched these four flowers.  Answers in a few days.  I am happy to report that this job isn’t so easy.  Something we had worried about a lot at the beginning.  We have been careful to critique the reverse chain of the stitchers who come to work on the project as it is the single most important factor in determining the guage of stitches for the detached buttonhole that is built upon it.  I think that this has been pretty successful.  Not to say that there still aren’t areas where some linen shows through or the stitching is very dense, but the range is acceptable across the jacket pieces.

Tricia

A few weeks ago I spent some time trying to figure out how many hands had worked on the jacket at the MET.  I could clearly see that there were several – but how to prove to others that there were different people.  I realized that we have the types of evidence we need on the jacket to answer this question or at least start to provide a framework for others to use.  I when I returned, I started taking pictures of all the same flowers on the Left Front of our jacket.  Here are the borages from this piece.  I am not going to tell you today how many people worked these borages.  I will let you look at the pictures and come up with your own conclusions.  But we have signatures on the master pattern for each piece.

Sometimes as we progress on the project and these ‘questions’ come up – I am sooo glad that we decided early on that more data was better than less.  The kind of analysis that all this data allows is really exciting.

Tricia

Here you can see Kate and Justin at the hand loom where the 17.5 inch wide silk is being woven.  Lovely view too of the Green Mountains of Vermont in the background. Very calming to be in the workshop.  Kate told me that the loom was 19th century and there is even an older loom in the workshop – 18th century!  Justin is holding the shuttle he had just re-spooled on a spinning wheel to show me more of the process.  I was amazed to watch him re-spool, he said he has to be very careful to form the cone of thread on the spindle (I think) so it will pull off just right.  There is no going back and rewinding.

In an effort to continue to expand our database of existing jackets, I went looking at a few sites again to see if new photos had been posted.  The interest in this project and the book under development by Susan North (woman’s fashions of the period) has resulted in more of the photos being added to collection databases.  A few to note are:

• A waistcoat at the Art Institute of Chicago in a very simple coiling vine pattern without flower motifs.
• A waistcoat at the V&A which is full of red slip type motifs arranged in a diamond pattern and worked in wool.
• An informal jacket at the V&A worked in a highly stylized and symmetrical pattern on silk.
• A waistcoat at the V&A worked in drawn thread and pulled thread with silver oes as an embellishment.

I hope you enjoy the eye-candy for the New Year!  Wonderful to see the variety in the jackets and the techniques used.

Tricia

If you happen to attend the exhibit ‘Twixt Art and Nature‘ you will be treated to footage of the Plimoth project in the video which is on the second floor.  The story of how our project was added to such an important exhibition is an interesting one, and starts with the sorry state of many blackwork objects.

During the planning stages of the exhibition, Melinda Watt was having conversations with Susan North and Mary Brooks about blackwork and how degraded the pieces which are in collections are usually and how the viewer may not understand the glory of the originals.  Thoughts developed about using digital techniques to restore an object and therefore be able to show what it looked like originally.  Mary knew that the person who would need to do it would need to be both technical and knowledgeable about needlework technique to be able to deduce what each needle hole meant.  That’s how the project got to my door steps – would I apply my engineering and needlework skills to digitally restore a blackwork nightcap where more than 80% of the blackwork was missing? Obviously from this jacket project – I can’t resist a challenge.

So while working on the exhibit, conversations would also turn to the jacket at the MET and why it was so intriguing to me.  That stitch for the gold coils came up again and again.  Melinda then decided that the public might not understand how complex the objects they saw were and so a case study might help them comprehend it.  Would I consider animating the stitch?  The answer was yes – but only because I have been working with Charles Wilson of Smudge Animation for years to try to animate difficult stitches.  You might recognize the last name – it is always useful to have a professional animator in the family!  See the final stitch diagram here to get a feeling for what Charles animated. To complete the case study of the jacket for the video, Melinda traveled to Plimoth with Han Vu from Bard to video the techniques we were using and overlay the video with discussions of the statistics we had gathered from working on the project.  The completed effect with their jacket, the close-ups, animation of the stitch and views into the professional workshop of the 1600’s afforded by our work were very compelling.

As I stood at the opening and listened to the gasps and comments, I knew that the narrative had worked.  Kudos go to Han Vu for the fantastic videography and editing for dramatic effect. The blackwork nightcap was finished also and features in the video.  The cap is displayed next to the video so as it is restored to its former glory on screen it is contrasted with its sad losses of thread on the original.  The interesting part is that the restitching digitally is impressive, but the crowd really gets excited when the badly corroded blackened silver and silver-gilt thread becomes sparkly and metallic before their eyes showing the blaze this piece was in its original state. Tricia