We have to thank Judy Laning for her week of Indentured Servitude to the Jacket (or Waistcoat). We have given her a ‘certificate’ as the human who has worked the most plaited braid to my knowledge. Well, that title will last until at least Friday when the next Indentured Servant might upstage her. We will let you know on that.

Judy did beautiful work. She is looking a bit tired in this photo as it was about 11pm and we had handed out a bunch of candy and the house was buzzing with little kids with costumes on. Judy worked through the whole Halloween thing and had driven back from Plimoth where we had gotten a group working for the long weekend on plaited braid, handing down our experience from the week. We learned a lot from plowing through a bunch of plaited braid. Some of which I will have to do some detailed blogs on next week. We noted an important maneuver that allowed us to pick up incredible speed in working the stitch and gave me new insights on these gold stitches. Let me take a series of photos to try to illustrate this for you. When you work only a few inches for a sampler here and there – you never get proficient enough to make statements and conclusions.

I also learned an important thing. The indentured servant will go crazy after three straight days of working on plaited braid from 8am – 11pm. We took a mental health break on Thursday at lunch to see a bunch of samplers at Skinner that were being auctioned off. That was enough and then back to work!

Tricia

really IS gold, in this case.

The gold thread for the coiling vines is real gold, and, like the gilt sylke twist, was purpose-made for this project by Bill Barnes of Golden Threads in the UK. It is a gold wire wrapped around two ends of yellow silk thread. I know the next question is whether any is available for sale, and the answer is, maybe. Right now we’re tracking how much thread it takes to embroider the coils and counting spools of thread. If there’s any left over, it will certainly be made available. If there isn’t, and there is huge demand, well, look what happened with the GST. Every time I check, new colors have been added to the line, and two sessions ago there was great excitement when Tricia brought out spools for sale. Not one person around the table said “I want this color”, or “I’d like to have this one”; it was all “I need this one. And this one. And … this one.”

So.

This past weekend’s experiment was exceedingly successful. Judy, who worked mostly at Tricia’s last week, arrived on Friday not babbling incoherently from too much gold work. She was still smiling and stitching and enjoying. Lyn J from Canada, Debbie A and Carli D from the NYC area all stepped up to the guinea pig table and took instruction from Tricia before practicing, comparing, and practicing some more.

Debbie reported that the gold is Not a pain to work with, in fact it is quite durable. She used one length for practice and was able to pick out mistakes several times and reuse the same length without trouble. The end you have to thread through the needle frays a bit, but Wendy reports that if you chew on it a little you can shape it up to re-thread.

Even after four days of coiling vine after coiling vine, Lyn, Carli and Debbie were still enjoying the work. I asked them if it seemed to take forever, because just watching them, to me, it seemed to go much more quickly than I’d thought (feared). They said that in the working it seemed to go slowly, but whenever they sat back to look, more was done than they expected, and less time expired. Lyn claimed to be Princess Slow-poke, but she accomplished several coils and none of the rest of us thought she was going slowly. I think she’s just accustomed to working more quickly than most and so this felt slow.

Here are pictures of Debbie and Carli’s pieces. Lyn was working well past the final bell on Monday, and Wendy didn’t remember to photograph her piece before we put it away. We will take a photo to post on Thursday, when we’re taking some studio photos of individual motifs. I think Carli was working on the right front and Debbie on the back.

Do you want to work some of the coiling vines? Our test group did so well we’re going to do it again. If you’re free the weekend of 11/21-24 (this is the weekend BEFORE Thanksgiving – I offered to run a session over Thanksgiving, pointing out that Pen and I will be here anyway, but got no takers), either have practiced the plaited braid according to Leon Conrad’s instructions as amplified and illustrated by Linda Connors, and are willing to work on matching gauge and stitch density, send me a note jhall@plimoth.org We can take 3-4 people to work vines, and a couple more to work silk or GST on the coif & forehead cloth.

We are “pushing” the jacket to completion this winter, in time for display at the beginning of May. I am worried about the winter weather too, look at last year! but look for more sessions in January and February. If you want to suggest dates, send me a note.

In addition to the gold workers, we had three lace makers this weekend. Sue, Linda and Colleen nearly finished the last short piece – the second cuff, as well as the long piece. Colleen also managed to do some embroidery on the coif. There are two new plans afoot – to develop some patterns for white lace to adorn the smocks, coifs, cuffs, and collars of certain characters on our living history sites, and to develop a smaller spangled lace suitable for trimming the coif and forehead cloth. If you’re a lacer and weren’t interested in working metal but might want to do some white lace, let me know and I’ll keep you apprised of progress.

I don’t have much news on the symposium, mostly because I’ve been focusing on getting the interpreters what they need to finish the season. I have a couple of firm commitments from speakers, one probable yes, and I have to get back to the couple I haven’t heard from; the biggest news is that the registration will open first to those who have worked on the piece. They’ll get a 5-week headstart to register and then we will open the registration to everyone. We plan to start this in December, and of course news will appear here and in an email blast to the stitchers/lacers. SO please update your contact information. I know there are some who have changed email/moved etc since coming. If you know someone in that situation, please ask him/her to contact us in order to stay informed. You can update by sending me or Kathy an email or calling 508-746-1622 X 8248 (Penny), X 8119 (me), or X 8114 (Kathy).

As we have moved into the gold work phase of this project we must sometimes evaluate our methods of getting work done.  We had been working with an apprentice system which has served us well.  But now with the vast amounts of plaited braid in front of us, we need to consider learning more from the past.

I propose a new means – Indentured Servitude to the almighty PLAITED BRAID.  Yes, I am joking.  I think that after two full days of working this monster stitch from 8 am to 11 pm, Judy was getting a little punchy last night.  She quipped to her husband on the phone that she was now an indentured servant to the jacket.  We giggled at what an ad would look like for this.

Judy has been embroidering at my house instead of the work room. Sometimes I bring a frame home to work on the instructions and since I had offered her a room for the week if she would stitch solid, it made more sense to have her work here while I worked beside her.  It saves about 3 hours of driving to Plimoth a day and I can make her work even later!  Thus an Indentured Servant!

Of course, working in my house has its perks.  Such as food, water, a couch and DVDs.  But it has some major detractions.  They are called the “Heathens” and these little children like to get up at 5:30 am and have more energy than comes from an atomic bomb.  Hard to sleep through the little tornados.

Hopefully Judy will get a nice night of sleep once she returns home. But for now she is making amazing progress on the plaited braid.  I’m thrilled.

Tricia

This post was written on Tuesday, October 29.

Some have asked what our plan is for the gold work.  We have had many plans.  Plan A, Plan B, and Plan C.  Mostly every time someone asked me this important question, I would put my fingers in my ears and sing “La la la la -  I can’t hear you!”.

And thus Plan D was born.  We had originally hoped that funding would come through and allow us to hire some fast needles to work the gold. That was Plan A.  Now we are drafting a smaller group of volunteers
and training them.  We are having them work every other coil so the variation of people will be less easy to see.  By the end of next week we will know how that plan is working out as two people are going to work on this one piece for a week each.  Hopefully we don’t have to implement Plan Q.  That’s the one where Tricia does all the plaited braid.

I will also let you know by Friday if Judy is a babbling idiot from too much plaited braid.  Here is her day 2 progress.  You can see how she is skipping every other coil to let another person work in between. We also learned an important piece of data.  About 3 to 3 1/2 coils per spool of gold thread.  I will be counting spools on Friday to see if we will need to order more or if our original estimate is holding.

Tricia

Judy Laning is here working this week on plaited braid.  We choose one of the jacket fronts to work on. She started Monday and worked one whole coil of plaited braid.  Then she started on the second one.

That is when the questions started.  Some of the coils start from another coil in a very shallow angle and some at a very deep angle. So the question was how to do that very tapered area.  And do we start there or from the base of the flower and then finish and taper at the end.  A great excuse to open up the photos and look into it.  The plaited braid forms  a “V” and so you can see where the coil was started and where it ended. We fired up the computer and started going coil to coil.  Towards the flower, away from the flower, away from the flower, towards the flower….

We had our answer. Where you start the plaited braid didn’t matter. So either at the coil base or at the flower, which ever was easier and allowed the tapered coils to be worked.  I have included pictures of both types of intersections of the coils and how Judy worked them. She is doing lovely work.

Tricia

A few weeks ago we finished all the detached butterfly wings (sans one).  I wish we had the knowledge then that I have now.  The wings are one color and then have a rim of a separate color at the tips. From the earlier photography we couldn’t tell if the detached buttonhole changed color or if there was an edging added after the wing was finished.  Since we didn’t know, we tried both and mixed it up.  From examining the jacket, I now know that the added edging is the answer.

We still have one more butterfly wing to work. The hardest, and it is waiting there with my name on it.  The wing in question has two colors, but instead of being an edging, the wing was split into two (see the picture here) and worked in two colors.  But the question was how to work them and join them – detached.

I didn’t come up with the exact answer from examining the jacket, but clues were there.  It seemed as if the smaller of the wing segments was attached to the linen on both sides with only the tip detached.  Then the larger of the segments also seemed to be stitched on the join edge with the tips and other side freely detached.  I think I will stitch two separate pieces and sew them on
as just described.

Tricia

The title of this post was Wendy’s reaction to my email that the Laton Jacket was sitting in front of me ready for inspection.  I loved it.

Back to the jacket, Wendy had a number of questions for me pertaining to the embroidery on 1359-1900.  They all centered around one issue – “did we figure it out right????”  The great thing was that I didn’t find many elements that we had been mistaken about.  Phew.  But there was one which really surprised me.  The carnation (or pink) calyx was actually stitched in trellis stitch on most of the jacket and not detached buttonhole like we did.  It took awhile to figure out how we
were wrong about that one.  But then I noticed that the two carnations/pink calyx (so what is the plural of calyx?) on the back of the jacket were stitched with detached buttonhole and this was the only photography we had at the time.

My goal when I entered the storage room for both the V&A and EG was to photograph a close up of every motif on the piece so I could go back later and look at this type of detailing which I wouldn’t have time to systematically do at the piece.  I achieved that goal with over 1000 pictures total. Thank heavens for digital!  I think it will take months to review the data as questions come up.  But I am trying to record what I learned immediately in the blog while it is sharp in my mind.

Here is our calyx.  Even though we are wrong on some…we aren’t taking them out now!

Tricia

We haven’t worked the birds on the piece yet as we had questions about some of the detailing and were awaiting my trip to examine the EG piece closer. The birds on the EG piece are in yellows and greens with blue beak and feet. The jacket has red, green, pink and yellow as the color scheme. But the left over silk that had degraded from the beaks and feet were in a tan color.

The one bird on the EG panel has a complete set of feet and beak. I was happy to find a combination of reverse chain and stem stitch on the feet and a heavy ceylon for the beak. All set, I thought. But when I saw the jacket the next day, there was a beak on one bird. Worked in trellis stitch. The legs were a little different too. Reverse chain and satin stitch at the top to help give the impression of a thigh.

Another thing I noted was the use of the blended thread for the motifs. It shows up in the bird to make transitions between the stripes of color in the body and head. The body is worked in trellis
and the head in spiral trellis. The wings were another spot where we had questions. The wings are made of of segments of stitches worked in different colors of silk and silver gilt thread. The segments are outlined in black. Two birds were worked with heavy chain and ceylon, but the third had more variety with plaited braid and a fly stitch thrown in.

On the EG panel, the wings segments were worked with plaited braid and heavy twisted chain all in silver gilt and silver threads. It is interesting to see how the same overall scheme is used on both pieces and motif to motif but there are slight variations. I am not sure if this is hand differences or just bored embroiderers. The black outline seems to be a combination of stem stitch and reverse chain. Hard to tell if one or both were used as the black thread gets brittle and pieces snap away, leaving just holes in many areas.

To give you some eye candy – here you see the time trial piece I stitched from the book photos of the jacket.  From afar, the stitches on the bird wings appeared to be the braid stitch/knot stitch. Now we know it is different. For all of you who slaved over learning this stitch in the sample kit, sorry!

Tricia