I had the honor of attending the opening of the new embroidery exhibit ‘Twixt Art and Nature‘  on December 10th.  The exhibit is a collaboration between the MET and the Bard Graduate School of the Decorative Arts.  If you look back at the comments for December 8th, one of our lacers, Devon, was also at the opening and did a nice review also.  Devon is a volunteer in the textile department at the MET and has provided us with valuable information on metal laces during the project.

I am bringing this exhibit up a few times as it has an intimate connection to the Plimoth Jacket project which I will detail in the next few blogs.  Also, it may be one of the only times you will see an embroidered jacket similar to ours that will be on display in the United States.  The exhibit runs from December 10th to April 12th, 2009 and it is located at the Bard Graduate School on West 86th Street at Central Park West.  The exhibit has three floors of the most amazing embroidery from 1580-1700.  Almost all the objects are from the MET’s collection and are some of the finest examples of their type.  As Susan Brown, Assistant Curator of Textiles at the Cooper-Hewitt, said that night – “I always think we have nice things, and then I see what they have at the MET!!”

If you want to see a few pictures of the jacket on display and a slide show of some objects in the exhibit, click on this review of the exhibition in the New York Times on-line.

Tricia

I thought you might like to see the left front and how close to being finished this
piece is.  Impressive is all I can say about it.  There are areas where the spangles
are now being filled in between the embroidery.  We had some extra visitors on
Friday to help us.  Actually, they came to talk about a possible visit by their
organization to the project.  But since we are all about inclusion and getting this
project done, we sat them down with needle and thread and had them start to
embroider on the pieces, adding spangles (also called paillettes or oes).

A few weeks ago we were going to have some close photos taken of the motifs and
so needed to add our first spangles with multiple stitchers.  So we were faced with
the question – where and how many per inch.  With spangles, its not a question of
too little or too many, but the number per inch.  We wouldn’t want to have one part
of the jacket have a much higher density of spangles than another.  So to make
sure that didn’t happen, we took the master pattern repeat and drew red dots in all
the places that we wanted spangles.  That is to be used as a guide to sew them on.

A few months ago, staff from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Bard Graduate School of the Decorative Arts came to visit the project and film the stitchers, lace makers and spangle maker.  The product of that film footage will be part of the exhibit ‘Twixt Art and Nature‘ opening in the Bard Graduate School on December 11th.  The exhibit will also showcase a spectacular jacket which was studied as part of the preparation work for this project.  I highly recommend the exhibit if you are in the NYC area.  You will be able to see a real jacket and also footage of our project along with some discussion about the relationship between these objects.

The exhibit website can be found here. For some eye-candy, here is a glove I brought for show and tell the other day.  This is a project for the public program at the exhibit on December 12th.  It uses several threads developed for the jacket project or those that were developed as an offshoot of the relationships developed during the project.

Tricia