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.