Let Down Your Plaited Braids.

Tricia’s writing again tonight, but first I want to mention the receipt of two more lace samples, from Carolyn W and Mary D.
Here you can see the trials stitched in plaited braid. What I found was that the 371 Gold Wire was the most flexible and easiest to stitch with. This made the line of plaited braid the fastest to stitch.

The Gilt No 5 Passing and 2% WM No 5 Passing were the second best to stitch with, but took almost 50% longer to work with. It is hard to say why this is. The thread is stiffer which might make the bend at the needle larger and therefore harder to pull through the fabric. Also, when working with the tight plaited braid, the stiff threads don’t separate as well when placing your needle under stitches to make passes.

Unfortunately the silk-cored Gilt No. 5 Passing took the longest to work with (two times the 371 gold wire time) and was the most difficult. The needle and thread didn’t go through the fabric as well as the others. It seemed very slightly larger – almost like a No 5.5 Passing. When we reported back to Bill, he asked if we could wait for a sample with one less end of silk in the core. We will wait.

The Leoni thread needs to be looked into a bit more. The thickness of the thread was thinner than we were looking for. It also seemed to be damaged in the spooling process with the wrap rubbed off in many places.

The good news was that we could use a real metal wrap; the bad news so far is that it takes longer to work and the silk core needs tweaking.

Tricia

Tricia writes tonight, beginning a “thread” about gold threads for the vines on the jacket. I’m most grateful, as we’re opening the museum two weeks from Saturday and the Day Job is insisting on more of my attention. I’ll try to take some photos tomorrow of that busy-ness. But tonight:

How I wish I could spin straw into gold these days! We are working on the gold thread for the vines on the jacket and we are closer to an answer, but not quite to a decision yet.

Bill at Golden Threads took a light yellow silk (Soie Ovale from Au Ver a Soie) and spun gilt strip onto it for us to try. We would love to use silk-cored gilt No. 5 passing for this jacket to be as close as we can get to the original historical thread within the economics of the project. We could use 2% WM gold strip, but since the project is funded mostly from your sample kit purchases at this point, that might be too rich for us.

I took a series of gold threads and stitched plaited braid at the same scale as the jacket close to each other to see which one could form the stitch well and how easy it was to form the stitch. One measure I used was how long it took me to stitch about 1.5 inches of the line with the thread.

Five threads were tried:

- #371 Gold Wire by Benton and Johnson. A great faux thread made by evaporating metal onto a plastic sheet and slitting it to wrap the core thread.
- The experimental thread by Golden Threads, three ends of Soie Ovale wrapped by gilt (electroplated) strip.
- Gilt No. 5 Passing by Golden Threads. The same gilt strip as above, but around a cotton or poly-cotton core
- 2% WM No. 5 Passing by Benton and Johnson. A higher amount of gold on the strip that results in a richer color. The threads of the time period were around 2.5% WM gold.
- A thinner gilt passing thread by Leoni in Germany

Here you can see all of these threads very close up. One of the things that distinguish western gold threads from Eastern (Asian) gold threads is the width of the wrap, these are very narrow. Also most western threads are wrapped with 100% metal instead of a foil on a strip of paper or plastic. The faux thread (#371) is an exception to that rule. Tomorrow the stitched plaited braid samples.

Tricia