I have been reading ‘Dressing the Elite’ by Susan Vincent and wanted to share a quote she included in the text with you.  She writes of Francis Bacon’s advice (1561-1626) in his Essays on the costuming of masques with regard to embroidery.

“The Colours, that shew best by Candlelight are: White, Carnation, and a Kinde of Sea-Water-Greene: and Oes, or Spangs, as they are of no great Cost, so they are of most Glory…As for Rich Embroidery, it is lost, and not Discerned.”

I love thinking about that quote when looking at certain areas of our jacket in low light.  I so want a time machine!

We met Susan last week at the Bard Symposium.  A delight she is.  After hearing her speak, I very much wish her book was on tape as her cadence, prose, and pauses make the material dance off the page.  She let us in on her next project, a book on period costume from a very unique perspective of anatomy.  At first I was confused as to how this structure would lend itself to the discourse but after her sneak-peak talk at the symposium on dress accessories – starting with an in depth review of the cod-piece – I can’t wait for the volume!  She brought the mindset of the Tudors alive and at the same time our human frivolity with fashion and function was ever so apparent.

Tricia

We are doing a bunch of needed tasks as we are experiencing our lull in embroidery effort.  All of them are much needed and too long in coming.  I hope to get to re-lacing the slate frames soon.  Many of them have had their lacing threads break over time and they all need a good strong thread again.  One of the things I have been working on is getting together a comprehensive list of the data and ‘collateral’ we have generated and putting it all in one spot.  Karen, the Head of Collections at Plimoth is helping me with this task and will assign numbers to them so we can track them for the future.  When you are working feverishly from session to session you don’t realize how spread all the ’stuff’ gets.  I laugh because soon those two pencils I shaved down with my husband’s wood plane and taped together to allow us to draw the coiling vines with have some important museum number attached to it.

Also, interacting with the rest of the museum community has made me realize how important it is to get our documentation done and in order so we don’t loose anything that scholars will want in the future.  We have cutting patterns, muslins, sample books, time sheets, photographs (galore!), video, spangle waste, articles, tools, etc that all might be useful for the future.

We have started to enter the raw stitcher data into our databases and have been trying to make sure we have the correct lists of people who stitched, laced, contributed, and made samples.  I will be posting some of these lists periodically to have you all help me make sure there are no omissions – when we are working fast – things do slip through the fingers.

On that note, we realize that many of the stitchers or visitors have taken photos of the progress and general workroom shots.  In the interest of having one major collection of photos to use in the future exhibit and for scholars to review, we would greatly appreciate it if those who would wish to share their photos would burn us a CD of them.  To make it easier for us to use them in the future, could you place the photos in a folder with the date taken and place your name and address on the CD itself for photographer credit.  In the future, we might need to contact you for permission to use the photos in publication on the rare chance.   If you have a CD to send, email me at tricia@alum.mit.edu to get the address to send it to and so we know to monitor the mail!

Tricia

We have learned over the last two years that making progress on the jacket from Thanksgiving to the thaw is tough.  Between the holidays and the threat of snow, getting groups together is difficult.  Here in New England, we have had an unusual string of big weekend storms all through December and January so I am glad we didn’t plan sessions for those months – especially since I have to drive over an hour to get to them myself.  Allot of people have been emailing and asking about sessions (thank you, thank you!).  We will be looking to start getting together big sessions in either late February or early March when the snow hazard starts to die down.

That doesn’t mean we can’t accommodate the occasional embroiderer under special circumstances.  Kris Andrews was in the area last week and was able to  carve out a day to work on the jacket.  Her plaited braid is shown here.  We are almost done with the gusset frame entirely.  We need to add a few spangles and we can take it off the frame and celebrate.

The lace is also progressing under Carolyn’s hands and Justin has let me know that the silk is off the loom!  I hope he can hear the cries of delight from hand weavers (and those who wish our wingspan was big enough) everywhere.  He and Kate will be indigo dying it soon and he promised me a bevy of photos of the process for the blog. Mark is reviewing the photos of historic hooks and eyes and figuring out how to make them to close our jacket on the museum form.  We have also been making plans on how the jacket will be mounted on a form with Joanna Hill, a textile conservator.  I have learned much about carveable mannequin forms.  I never knew they existed!  So progress continues, slow with the weather but I expect to speed up toward the finish line in a few weeks.

Tricia

It was fun last week to read all your comments on how many hands may be represented in the photographs of the same elements.  This is a very important question and I was happy to have all you as ‘reviewers’ of the process.  I will give you the answers below, but beforehand, a diversion.

Last week Jill and I were honored to be invited to participate in a scholars forum at the ‘Twixt Art and Nature’ exhibit at the Bard Graduate School of the Decorative Arts.  It was an exciting day to have so many experts in 17th century textiles in one place wandering the exhibit together and discussion the objects and the larger framework.  Of course, questions of ‘who and how long’ come up all the time.  Jill and I had many an opportunity to bring up the lessons we have learned on this project to support certain hypothesis about the answers to these questions.  We had a long discussion as a group in front of the MET jacket and discussed how we expect to mine the data we have been generating on this project.  Never before have we had a large object where not only the length of thread, number of minutes stitching, and individual can be matched with an exact motif on a piece.  Certainly the group was intrigued with the possibilities.

I put forth that for freeform embroidery, the average gauge (stitches per inch) for a person is like a fingerprint.  This is an observation from years of observing students in class and is a function of tension, distance, etc.  Certainly, as a person becomes more adept, their gauge distribution plateaus.  Also, there is always a distribution of stitch gauge for a person as a consequence of needing to fill in small, tiny areas such as petals.  My theory is if you were able to measure their work over the time frame of apprentice to master, you would find a curve such as this.  (Sorry for the math, but its my nature and high time it was applied to this field).  I enjoyed the comments to the blog as you allowed me to vet the idea without putting it forth yet.  Now I hope you all comment again on this idea from your own experience as stitchers working on detached buttonhole.

The one thing this doesn’t capture is the highly skilled professionals and how close their work might overlap.  I know this from experience of having Kris Andrews help me at times finish pieces.  We worked together on my nightcap and it is hard to see who was who, although I did not measure anything yet.  There is antidotal evidence from later periods of professional embroiderers being paired (left handed and right handed) to work on the same frame and how painful it was when your partnership was divided.  I don’t know if that was because each knew the others moves and therefore didn’t rock the frame or if the seamlessness of their stitching was the cause of the dismay.

So the idea is to first take our jacket pieces and measure the gauge distribution for individuals and then see how much unique variation there is.  This would result in a set of graphs which could show how sensitive the measurement is to identify # of people or even individuals.  It might not be sensitive enough to distinguish between the battle hardened professionals, but maybe we can see the apprentices versus the master group.  The data will tell.  Then on to the actual historic work and it will be exciting to see what ghosts we can tease from the embroidery!

Now the answers!  I only considered the actual flowers and not the other embroidery in the photos.  So for the Borage, there were three stitchers for five motifs.  On the foxglove, there were 2 stitchers for the 4 flower motifs there.

Tricia

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