Tonight we have two more sets of stitch instructions: trellis stitch and spiral trellis stitch. Remember, you don’t have to be perfect at every stitch; you don’t even have to do every stitch on the sample. If you have one stitch you love and are great at, just do that one.

And another book review:

King, Donald and Santina Levey. The Victoria & AlbertMuseum’s Textile Collection: Embroidery in Britain from 1200 to 1750.New York: Canopy Books. 1993.

This volume is almost entirely color plates. The few pages of text form a brief overview of British embroidery, and because it covers 350 years it is very much an overview. The book also contains a glossary and diagrams of some common stitches. The diagrams are nice to have but are not really instructive in that these alone won’t enable one to reproduce a piece of embroidery. But that isn’t the point of this book. The point is the many color reproductions of embroideries in the V & A collections excellent for reference and inspiration.

And, if you have this on your shelf, you can turn to page 63 and see a larger-than-life image of the embroidery pattern we’ll be using on our recreated jacket. See, right in the middle there, where we took the pattern for the embroidery on the header for this blog.

I’ve gotten a couple of questions about this sample piece lately, so I thought today I’d tell you how it came to be. Once we determined that we wanted to do this jacket thing, we needed to create a plan, including a budget. In order to do that we had to know how long it would take to create this jacket. At the same time (this was late fall, 2006) Plimoth Plantation was working with a Marketing consultant to create a packet of information and images that we could use in applications for grants and other funding proposals to support the planned exhibit (of which the jacket would be a part). We needed to include images of a sample of the embroidery that would be on the jacket.

Fulfilling the two needs in an extremely efficient fashion, we traced off a bit of this pattern from V&A 1359-1900 (later we discovered it is reproduced on this page larger than the original). At this point we had not even begun to talk about what jacket, what embroidery pattern, or anything like that. It is purely a coincidence that the sample piece is from the same pattern we ended up choosing for the real jacket. Tricia made her most educated guess at the stitches used, based on close examination of this picture and having studied other 17^th century embroideries in person, and worked the sample accordingly.

So after she had taken it away to work on, our consultant asked what color it was. Well, I said, there’s a blue flower and a bird, in green and yellow, I think (not having the book at the meeting). Red, he replied. Something has to be red. Red is good. Red is attractive. Okay, I said, let me see what I can do. I hustled right out of that meeting and phoned Tricia who fortunately hadn’t started stitching the flower.

Our estimate of 2000-2500 hours to accomplish the embroidery comes from Tricia’s timing of the stitching of this piece. And the photographs came out so nicely (thanks to the talent of the photographer, Ed Nute) that they’ve been used and used and used.

But that’s why what clearly ought to be a blue borage flower (fairly common on embroideries of this period, and a familiar friend to those who study them) is red, red, red. The fact that red is my favorite color had absolutely nothing to do with it, I swear.

AND, the borage flowers on the real jacket will be their proper blue, but more on that another day.

Bad news first. There’s nothing new on the linen front. Despite all efforts, the linen is trapped until a government official gets to it, which might be tomorrow and might be six months from now.

We’re working on contingency plans, one of which involves choosing a completely different linen from a different manufacturer, one whose US distributor has a piece large enough for us in stock. The second, and now the favored plan, involves buying up all the remnants of the chosen linen in the US and trying to get the whole jacket from the biggest piece. I’m a little concerned about dye lots, but have an idea for compensating should we have to use two pieces from separate bolts. I’m not hugely worried; too many things have fallen into place in order to make this project work for this to derail us now.

Now the good news - treats! Tricia sent instructions for reverse chain stitch and Ceylon stitch, two stitches we’ll be using on the jacket (more stitch instructions over the next days). Rummage out some cloth, needle and thread and give it a try. (You’ll need Adobe to open these.)

Great strides were made today on the schedule for the June embroidery session. We’ll have a presentation by Kathleen Curtin, Plimoth Plantation foodways historian and author of Giving Thanks: Thanksgiving Recipes and History from Pilgrims to Pumpkin Pie. She’s an entertaining speaker, and knows more about the foodways of the 1620s English Colonists than just about anybody. We’ll also have a tour of Plimoth Plantation’s collection led by Karin Goldstein, Curator of Original Artifacts. Karin will show us Plimoth Plantation’s two 17^th century samplers and some sewing-related items. And, Tricia has generously offered to teach a small project. I’m working on more fun activities for the non-stitching time.

So hopefully the progress I made on the schedule excuses me for never making it out of the office. The gravitational pull of the telephone and email were just too much for me. I humbly offer you a picture of fitting a jacket to one of the role-players. This was taken in the fall of 2005. This pink wool jacket is cut from a pattern taken from an embroidered linen waistcoat in the Burrell Collection in Glasgow, Scotland. The shape of the pattern pieces is very similar to that of the Laton jacket at the V & A. On page 121 of Janet Arnold’s Patterns of Fashion: the cut and construction of clothes for men and women 1560-1620, are the patterns for both jackets, drawn on graphed paper.

YAY! This is just what I was hoping this blog could be. PF left a comment to let us know that some records of the Embroiderers’ Company DO survive from before the fire – see below.

“Some of the records of the Embroiderers’ Company of London (called “Broderers’ Company”) do survive from before the great fire. The minute books don’t start until 1679, but the receipt books include some records from 1557-1640. The Family History Library has these London records on microfilm, (FHL BRITISH Film 1068861) and they can be ordered from Salt Lake City to be viewed at your local FHL (the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints).”

I had read in more than one book that ‘the records were lost’ and never looked into it, which just goes to show you shouldn’t just believe everything you read. Has anybody read through them?

To keep on this bibliographical theme, I’m going to offer a review of one of the books we’ve consulted as we researched this project.

Epstein, Kathleen. British Embroidery: Curious Works from the Seventeenth Century. Austin, TX: Curious Works Press and Williamsburg, VA: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. 1998.

This volume was created as the companion to an exhibit of the same name which was displayed at Colonial Williamsburg in 1998-99. It is thoroughly illustrated, with many color plates, but it is more than an exhibit catalogue. The text is an excellent introduction to 17^th-century British needlework. Not only does it describe the different sorts of embroidery but it explains who was embroidering, how they learned the skills, and begins to plumb the depths of the importance of embroidery to this society. The only defect, really, is that it is too short. I wished for more information on the materials of embroidery and where they came from. But that’s just quibbling with an excellent book, well worth reading.

This squirrel is from the same coif as the bluebird. The coif was designed and worked by members of the Colonial Wardrobe Department in the mid 1990s. It was a tour de force at the time, and we were justly proud of it. However, I’m also proud to say that we’ve come a long way, baby, since then. I wouldn’t do that project the same way now, we’ve learned too much in the mean time. But it remains a beautiful object, full of the skilled work of human hands.

Several months ago, in the planning stages of this project, we decided we wanted to replicate an actual surviving 17^th century jacket, if at all possible, rather than create a new piece inspired by the originals. We outlined several criteria for the ‘perfect jacket.’

We wanted a jacket with a wide variety of motifs and different stitches, both of which would help to camouflage the fact that the embroidery was done by many different hands. We also wanted a pleasing color palette. Tastes change, and some of the color combinations used in the 17^th century are attractive to modern viewers and some aren’t. As long as we had a choice, we thought we’d go with one that is; after all, the finished garment would be part of an exhibit and we wanted people to like looking at it.

Maybe most importantly, we’d need to find a piece whose owner (institution or individual) was amenable to such a project. Fortunately, the Colonial Wardrobe Department had a prior relationship with Susan North, Curator of 17^th & 18^th Century Fashion at the Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A) in London, England. Ms North had helped us on a few previous reproduction projects, providing details of pieces in the V & A’s collections, and generous with her expert advice. She had encouraged our efforts in recreating historic garments, asserting her belief (which we share) that you can gain insights through recreating a garment that won’t be obvious when studying an original.

We were inclined to look carefully at the Laton jacket, in the V&A, because it had been examined by the late costume historian Janet Arnold. She published not only notes on construction details but also a pattern, drawn on graphed paper, in her volume Patterns of Fashion: the cut and construction of clothes for men and women c.1560-1620. Having the pattern pieces would save us the time and trouble of drafting a pattern. Unfortunately, the Laton jacket (accession # T.228-1994) has a narrow stitch vocabulary – mostly detached buttonhole stitch – which is tedious to work, time consuming and requires a great deal of thread per square inch. Even worse, it is a treasure of the collection (that’s not the bad part) so it is permanently on display behind glass (that’s the bad part). We wouldn’t be able to get the detailed photos of the embroidery pattern that would be essential to the project.

We turned to another jacket in the V&A’s collection, 1359-1900. This one has a beautifully colored pattern, a huge variety of motifs, and is not permanently on display, so it could be photographed from all sides. We decided to combine the Laton pattern pieces with the embroidery pattern of 1359-1900.

I haven’t posted links to these jackets as I’d first like to get permission to do so. They’re easy to find, though. On the V&A website (www.vam.ac.uk), click ‘collections’, then ‘search collections’. For the Laton jacket, put in either the accession number or ‘Laton jacket’. For the other, put in the accession number.

On our way to settling on these two jackets, we considered several others, and traveled to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, MA and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City to look at two surviving examples. I’ll post more about these in the future.

This photo is just eye candy. It comes from an embroidered coif (a kind of head covering worn by women in the 17^th century) designed and worked by several former members of the Colonial Wardrobe Department.

Here’s the information on how to join the team of embroiderers.