It’s been pretty hot and humid here in southeastern Massachusetts, and it feels like everything has sloooowed down accordingly. As a consequence, there isn’t a great deal to report.

The frames are slumbering quietly behind the office door, each one neatly encased in its canvas bag.

On the way from England is some special “sparkle” thread. This sort of silk was used extensively on the jackets and other embroidered items in the early 1600s, but has been unavailable for decades, if not centuries. Tricia, armed with her formidable powers of persuasion and the fact that, if developed, we’d be instantly buying enough to make it worthwhile to produce, convinced one of the Artisan Manufacturers she mentioned yesterday to bring it back into production. I hope I’ve piqued your curiosity. That’s all I’ll say here, except that if the customs agents are benevolent the thread will be debuting during the August stitching session. I know Tricia is planning a blog entry describing the research, development and testing process, along with some photos.

I mentioned the log sheets that Tricia created to enable us track the exact amount of time spent and thread used for each motif. The other day Tricia whipped them out and did a quick bit of math to figure out how many stitching hours our June session yielded, and what sort of pace that worked out to.

We’ve decided to add two small sessions, one in November and another in early December, intimate gatherings, 6 stitchers maximum. Are you interested? We can set the dates to be most convenient to those who are able to come. Email me with your availability.

Tricia made these amazing instruction manuals for each stitching station. They contain the stitch instructions that were posted on the blog; step-by-step photos of the stitches being worked; a ‘master repeat’ of the embroidery pattern with each motif element numbered; full-color pictures of the original jacket (1359-1900) for color placement reference; and blank log pages. The photos of the original jacket are beautiful; they were taken by Curator Susan North especially for our use in this project. These manuals are really amazing, and if there’s enough interest, we’ll look into obtaining permission from the V&A to publish a limited number for sale.

The log pages are brilliant in themselves. Each embroiderer fills out a page as he/she works. There are spaces for motif number, stitch, thread color & length, and time. At the end of the project we’ll have a permanent record of who stitched what, how much of what color thread was used and how long it took to do each bit. We’ll be able to compare thread use from one stitch to another, from one color to another, and compare time of working for the various stitches. I’m sure completing the log pages was one more thing to remember for the embroiderers, but their diligence in completing them is crucial to the information gathering.

One sample arrived today, from Martha D.

I’m going to skip tomorrow in order to (hopefully) write the knitting thing. Be back Thursday.

…opened with a flurry of getting settled, again. Thursday night we brought everything up to the Wardrobe Department work room, but didn’t set up. Friday morning everyone found a table, chair and frame stand to suit and we ran extension cords and power strips again. A few stitchers found the overhead daylight fluorescent lights so bright they didn’t need a task lamp.

We weren’t able to accommodate every stitcher in the department’s big workroom, so we spilled over into the adjacent large office. That was where we’d planned to set up the snacks and lunch, so the food had to be pushed back to a small alcove. We also set up the invisible barrier which prevents food & coffee-carrying people from crossing through the doorway into the work rooms.

Late morning, everyone walked over to the collections storage area, where Karin Goldstein graciously gave the group a show & tell talk about the sewing-related artifacts in Plimoth Plantation’s originals collection, and displayed the two 17^th-century samplers we have.

Another guest, Joanna, a textiles conservator, had brought a special treat for everyone to see: a 17^th-century stumpwork picture. Some pictures posted here (click on the image for more views).

So where to have lunch? It was a gorgeous clear sunny day, so Laura swept the courtyard and put tablecloths on two picnic tables. I was going to take a picture, but decided to eat first. Just as I sat down (one of the last), a dark cloud blew in. “Hey, it’s getting pretty dark” someone remarked. “Is that rain?” The words were hardly out when a clap of thunder opened the floodgates. We finished lunch standing around in the hallways, squished as far away from the frames as possible. By the time the stitchers were settling down to work again, the sun was breaking through. No picture of happy embroiderers lunching al fresco.

After lunch the stitchers began finishing their work for this session. Tricia’s organized mind has established an amazing record-keeping system. We’ll be able to track and analyze all sorts of data based on the notes the embroiderers are keeping as they work.

One element of the system makes it possible to record exactly which elements are worked by whom. For this, Laura photocopied the master embroidery pattern. Each embroiderer then signs the individual motifs she has worked. The first picture is Pat, carefully matching the worked motif to the pattern (it’s easy to get turned around, with all the swirls). The second picture is Ann (in the background) and Carol sorting out what they stitched on the sleeves. Another part of the plan has two embroiderers with similar hands working on the mirrored pieces, like sleeves and fronts, and switching frames partway through the session to further meld the styles. Ann and Carol were both working on sleeve pieces this week.

We had little thank-you gifts for the embroiderers who participated this time. Everyone received a copy of Plimoth Life, Plimoth Plantation’s magazine. This issue contains an article about the jacket, as well as others on the 50^th anniversary of Mayflower II’sarrival in the US, and Plimoth Plantation’s mission to become a bicultural institution. Thanks to the skilled Kristen, one of the Crafts Center’s potters, we also gave everyone a hand thrown cup. My daughter’s hand is in the picture for scale.

The hard part of this day was the farewells. In only a few days we’d formed a team, a community. Some renewed old friendships, others made new ones. We all enjoyed the company and conversation of others who are passionate about embroidery.

When considering this project and beginning the planning, I knew it would be a huge undertaking, that it would be at times exhausting, that there would be unforeseen difficulties and comparable triumphs. But I never imagined how personally rewarding it would be to meet so many talented people who are so generous with their time and skill. It was a pleasure getting to know the ladies who participated in session one. I’m looking forward to meeting many more of you in the coming months.

See you here tomorrow.

So how do we know we aren’t crazy for doing a project like this? By finding someone else who is just as crazy, of course! But isn’t crazy just another word for passionate?Seriously, while we had made an estimate of the number of hours to embroider the jacket we weren’t totally sure we were on the right track. But we found a very interesting website that helped us tremendously. It is the site of Laura Mellin and is called “Extreme Costuming” (www.extremecostuming.com). Laura had just finished an embroidered jacket adapted from two historic pieces as we were working on our time trials. What was better was that Laura has documented her experience in extreme costuming and put her ‘lessons learned’ on the site - I won’t recount them here as you should read her experiences first hand. We learned that her adaptation took her 1,947 hours of work, including hand sewing the jacket. Since a typical work year is 2,000 hours - you have to be amazed that she was able to do this in only a year and 4 months. This gave us a good data point that our estimate was on track. Due to the complexity of the embroidery on our jacket compared to the stitches she had used, we gave ourselves at least 30% more time required.

Laura is following our project and we are making plans for her to get involved too. She was gracious to let us use a few pictures from her collection here today. I personally can’t wait to see her work in person! Meanwhile, take a tea break and surf her site. You will be glad you did! She has made a number of reproduction coifs, nightcaps, and the jacket.

Her experience and our calculations also started to confirm to us that it was unlikely that these jackets were the work of just one individual. Even though the jackets were part of a fashionable wardrobe for many decades, fashion did change frequently in the early 1600s. It is unlikely that a person would commission a jacket and then wait for over a year to get it. This is also a long time for a embroidery shop to wait for payment. Using a large number of people could reduce the turn around time of a jacket to maybe as short as a month. We used this assumption to start looking for mistakes or inconsistencies in the stitching on the existing historic jackets. These mistakes (color use or stitch use) or difference in stitch length could help us identify that different people were working on the same piece. After viewing several pieces in person and looking at the photography of several jackets, the inconsistencies have been showing up quite frequently. For example, on the jacket we are adapting, the honeysuckle bud on the back is stitched entirely in red unlike the rest of these motifs which are stitched with both red and pink. The MET jacket showed us a multitude of such evidence from stitch types being inconsistent, stitch length, and color use on particular motifs. This also made us feel a lot better about having so many hands on our project!

Tricia

Tonight Tricia continues the story of how we chose which jacket to recreate. What have I been doing while she’s blogging? Well, taking pictures of Laura, for one. Here’s Laura in her first completed reproduction garment – a man’s shirt, which was basically underwear in the period. She did a great job and is now more than halfway through a cassock (outer garment) to go with. Laura is this year’s summer intern with the Colonial Wardrobe & Textiles Department (which right now consists of just the two of us and some dedicated volunteers). Talk about being thrown in at the deep end! Besides making new clothes, she’s spending a fair amount of time helping Kathy process kit orders, and as of today, keeping track of returned samples! Drumroll….we now have TWO completed samples in hand! I won’t mention last names here, but Wendy & Robbin, your samples safely arrived and are just beautiful.

Here’s Tricia:
A great off-shoot of making all the calculations from the last blog entry was the realization that each stitch type has its own materials cost and labor cost. So if you were a professional workshop of the past, the stitches chosen for a motif can dramatically change the cost to produce the jacket. Therefore, knowing these numbers could give us a ‘yard stick’ to use to evaluate historic pieces for their possible relative expense to one another. As an example spiral trellis takes a lot more silk than detached buttonhole or trellis stitch to work.

This came home to me when we were evaluating which jacket we would adapt. We were visiting a piece at the MET and it was beautiful Jill was struck by the gold thread stitch used for the vine, something I will call here “ladder stitch with zigzag interlacing”. It was dramatic and she was convinced that we should abandon the dreaded plaited braid in favor of this beautiful stitch. Having just taught this stitch on a piece the week before - I was horrified. The stitch consumed an enormous amount of thread, was worked in two passes, and took forever to work an inch. It made plaited braid look like a cake walk. So I convinced her to abandon this idea. (Yes, I gave up the idea, but in my defense, is that not a GORGEOUS stitch? JMH)But then the light bulb went off, why did the professionals use this stitch for this particular jacket? It must have been very expensive to work as it used more thread and more time. So who was the jacket made for? Did everyone who looked at the jacket when worn realize that it was more expensive and so it became a status symbol? When we have the chance some day to show pictures of the jacket, we can discuss why we think the piece may have been made for a child or very young girl. If so, why go to the expense? Who was she?

Another factor to consider was that jackets of this type were made over a 30 year time frame. Was this jacket early or late compared to others? And what was inflation like at that time? The materials and labor costs could be quite different along that spectrum of time, making something less or more expensive to produce depending on when it was made.

This was exciting. I plan to work a sample with rectangle samples and lengths of stitches of the period to measure the relative times and materials costs in the near future to give a more accurate set of data to use for these types of material culture investigations. Part of the purpose of the project has been to examine the past through the eyes of those that ‘did’. I think we are uncovering a lot of insights as we do so!

Tricia