Melinda is working on the narration for the video of our project for her exhibit. She asked, how many hours of embroidery have been done so far?

In the fine old tradition of passing the buck, I asked Arianna to go through the heap of time sheets from over a year’s worth of embroidery sessions. She patiently, and painstakingly, combed each one, totaling the minutes, figuring hours, totaling hours, checking, double checking, walking away for coffee ….

After a couple of days, she gave me a little yellow post-it with the total so far -

2183.5

Very nearly 2200 hundred hours. This is, as Tricia says, “time spent moving the needle”. This isn’t shopping, or chatting, or even practicing on the doodle cloth. This includes time spent on the coif and forehead cloth, but not Tricia’s hours or some of Wendy’s, so it probably all evens out. Of course we still have the gold and sequins to go, so the final, grand total may top our original estimate, but we’ll continue to keep good records so we’ll be able to report back.

I’m amazed and humbly grateful. Thank you all so much for your dedication to this project.

Because a number like that deserves some eye candy to go with it, here’s a photo of show & tells waiting their turn. I love this; it’s such a heap of riches, of time and skill and precious needleworked beauty and usefulness. Included here are items by Sandye, Jennifer, Sharon and Catherine.

Catherine, Laura and Jen joined us for last weekend’s embroidery session. All of them have been here before and so are considered “veterans.” They certainly showed their experience; they all accomplished a great deal.

Catherine was working on the unwieldy back piece, and stitched three complete roses along with a few odds & ends here and there. Laura mostly worked on the collar & cuffs frame, finishing the cuffs to the point that they are ready for goldwork. She also stitched the detached butterfly wing piece, and then sewed it to the collar, which made the collar done-done-done.

Jen was working on an equally unwieldy front, and did some of everything, including fancy worms. Fancy worms are composed of two parallel rows of ceylon stitch, in two different colors, with the head stitched separately in a third color but also in ceylon stitch. These worms also get black back stitched antennae (thus making them not technically worms, I know) but are not wrapped like the plain worms.

Here are all of them with their frames. They were friends from before this project, and traveled here together sort of like a girls’ weekend away. They have such fun together, it makes the atmosphere of the weekend sort of like a party. A few different times we’ve had friends meet here both to enjoy each other’s company and to work together on the project. It puts me in mind of all the different sorts of women’s gatherings to work and talk, like quilting bees or houseraisings (OK, there the men are working I guess but if you don’t think it’s a lot of work to feed timberframers, I’d like to introduce you to a couple of cooks I know…..)

Since the very first embroidery session, Tokens & Trifles has been donating a small commemorative needlework project designed by Wendy White to each new embroiderer. The back of the needlebook, which is stitched on Thistle Threads’ perforated card with cotton floss, has the date of the session the embroiderer attended. Many participants have completed their needlebooks; our 2007 summer intern, Laura, stitched hers as her very first needlework project.

Carli was here for the first time two weeks ago, and this time she brought her completed needlebook for show & tell. Carli didn’t just stitch as written, though, she made improvements. First off she chose different, more vibrant colors. You all know how different the same design in a different colorway can be.

She was afraid she’d smash up the corners of the perforated card, carrying it around with her, so she decided to protect them with – - detached buttonhole stitch. Yes, really.

There is no end to the ingenuity, creativity and ambition of needleworkers.

For Susan, who wrote in the comments asking about stitching on the ‘oes’: yes, thank heaven, we can carry the thread. They are sewn on with a fine silk, and it doesn’t show. I’m so relieved – tying off each and every oe would have been a nightmare.

(There is, however, an end to my patience with this program. I’m having a lot of trouble with the newest version of WordPress; anyone out there know how to wrap text? What am I missing? Send me a note at jhall@plimoth.org if you can help. I have tried the WP documentation page, but I’m not finding the secret key.)

Sometimes we all come by some book and decide to buy it and later think that you may have been crazy to have done it. Years ago I bought a modern copy of The Besler Florilegium, which was originally published in 1613. It is huge and used to hold my computer up. But I have used it many times on this project to look up the flowers on the project to help confirm that it is what we think it is or some
detail. It came in handy last night on the borage.

When we made the pattern for the embroidery, we traced the existing embroidery and the borage looked like there were just two rows of black in the center. We worked it yesterday as we can see it on the piece. But the placement of the pistils just didn’t look right to me. As I was working on the instructions for the books, I pasted in pictures of the original and noted that some of the borages had a few more rows. Hmmmm, I thought. Might the center have been filled entirely with black and did it degrade over time? I have been working on another project with a blackwork nightcap and have been studying where the black threads cleave from the surface of the linen and so the pattern I was seeing on this borage made sense that there may have been more. Hence looking up of the borage in the Besler Florilegium. It isn’t a flower I am familiar with and I wanted to see how a period interpretation of the flower looked. As you can see here, the center is a cone of ivory and black framed by the pistils. There was the answer, our borage is a funny projection and I needed to go back and add more black trellis stitches immediately! Here you see our new ‘finished borage’. Much better.

Tricia

I like that term, when Jill said it the other day to describe what we were doing it gave me all the validation I needed to go buy myself an Indiana Jones hat and bring a whip to the next session!

What she really meant was that we were listing all the means we could imagine to get the results we were seeing from the photographs of a particular detail on the jacket and then trying all of them on the side to see what results we got and comparing them to the original. It often takes more than one person to do this as you feed off each other to come up with various options that the embroiderer of the past may have tried.

The details in question were the veins on the leaves. Since a portion of the embroidery pattern was traced from the Embroiderers’ Guild (UK) piece, we had their veins on our linen. But as comes up constantly on this project, you can see the forest but don’t notice the grass until you need to walk through it! The veins on the EG piece all have a main vein and all the nice off-shoots. We noted that the veins on the jacket in the V&A collection only have the main vein. Disappointing at first, until you realize that we have to do about a hundred or more of them. As we looked at them, we were confused. I have to admit that my ‘forest view’ had told me that they would be couched down and so I had carefully selected a couching thread the night before and brought it with me.

They didn’t seemed couched, in fact they looked like two twisted gold threads. But how was it secured? Options were a) can’t see couched thread, b) it is one long stitch that is wrapped on itself after coming back up through the fabric, c) the gold is used to couch itself, or d) a loop of gold is twisted and held down at the tip. In the next two photos, you can see all these options worked except that with a couching thread made of silk. We discounted that option until all others failed. These embroiderers were going for speed, remember.

If you want to see the original, there is a nice close-up on the V&A website that shows these veins. You can compare to our work and see if you agree. In the end, the easiest method worked the best and looks just like the original. We come up at the base of the leaf and down near the tip. Go back up again near the needle hole and wrap the laid gold thread three-four times and back in at the base of the leaf. Very fast.

Tricia

If you want to see the close-up on the V&A website, remember you have to go from the V&A main page to the “collections” page, and use THAT search function – the “search the collections” one; NOT the search box that appears on the upper right corner of the main page. Once you have the search-the-collections box, put in 1359-1900 to see the embroidery pattern jacket. jmh

One of the interesting things about the original jacket is the mistakes or variances we keep finding on the piece. One of the most intriguing is the butterfly heads. All of the heads on the jacket are done in a golden brown tone using trellis stitch, EXCEPT the ones on the outer left sleeve. These are all done in a bright blue satin stitch. For easily a month I assumed that it was the result of either bad conservation or an addition at a much later date. That was until I looked closely at the photograph of the piece at the Embroiderer’s Guild collection which was worked in the same workshop with the same pattern. Low and behold, the worm heads on that piece were all in bright blue satin stitch!

I imagine that the workshop was full of pieces underway – a few jackets, a coif, some panels, and others. Embroiderers were getting up and working their specialty on different pieces and some guy forgot that the lady who ordered the piece didn’t like the blue heads and had opted for the golden brown ones! Maybe it wasn’t discovered until the jacket was sewn together. Further circumstantial evidence that the workshop was full of similar pieces and embroiderers may have been moving around.

So we are stitching the left arm butterflies with the bright blue satin stitch as seen here!

Tricia

Tricia writes:

Today we took a deep breath and started the goldwork on the jacket. I am in town all week working and couldn’t wait to start putting the gold to the jacket and making it come alive. I picked the collar as the silk work was all done on it. Here you can see part of a line
worked and on the second photo, you can see the coil done and a few tendrils worked in reverse chain.

To get going, I had to do a few tests to figure out what spacing we would use between repeats of the plaited braid. On the original jacket, the “v” is deeper than our version. I find when working with this stitch that the stitch width can be modified and the V is either
shallow or exaggerated. While one of the tests was able to get the same elongated V as the original piece, it seemed a bit sparse but worked faster and easier!. We don’t know exactly how thick the original thread was but I suspect it was thicker than what we are working with, which would have covered better even when worked with a larger spacing. I also suspect that it was more ductile and their needle had a larger eye but thinner shank. We had to change parameters on the thread to get it to work well and couldn’t use such a thick thread. We will work ours more shallow to get a nice coverage with our (I think) thinner version of the gold thread.

Jill said it was much more bright and sparkly than she had imagined!

Tricia

Another thing I’ve found, now that I’m working on the embroidery with something approaching regularity, is that once I get going, feeling the work is just as important as seeing it.

I was wondering if working in the Crafts Center would slow me down a little or a lot; most of the point of being there is to engage the museum’s visitors in conversation, after all. I thought looking up and down would cause me to lose my place and focus and impede progress. What I’ve found, though, is that people are quite happy to watch the work and don’t always need eye contact to keep the conversation going, for one thing. For another, feeling with the needle where the next stitch goes is really effective – both the detached buttonhole and trellis require you to loop the next row of stitches through the previous row. If you’re encountering resistance you likely haven’t got the right spot. I don’t mean to say I’m stitching without looking, only that looking up frequently doesn’t slow the work and is probably better for my eyes anyway.

Tonight, Tricia’s directions for the detached buttonhole needlelace. This is what she named the stitch for the completely detachable pieces, the pea pod covers and the butterfly over-wings. These three stitches (this one, trellis and detached buttonhole, links to which I posted earlier this week) are the most important right now. If you’re practicing, work on these.

See Robbin’s note in the comments about working trellis stitch up vs down; Tricia will send us a note too I’m sure and I’ll post that when we get it.

About the symposium conflicting with Rosh Hashanah, could someone let me know which parts of the weekend specifically conflict with observing the holiday? Linda left a comment about whether a person could attend the parts that don’t conflict, and in order to answer that or arrange things that way I’d need more information. Thanks. ETA: the symposium dates have been changed so as not to conflict with Rosh Hashanah. The New Dates are 24-27 September. jmh

Lace sample received from Linda K and embroidery sample from Nicole R. Thanks to both.