I think my home computer is looking for a little (hopefully little) monetary expression of our affection. It’s refusing to open or edit pictures, or just about anything else that requires any thought. Maybe its jealous of all the time I’ve been spending with the laptop at work.

At any rate, instead of pretty pictures tonight we have just text. The end of the May session went fine, as I found out yesterday, except for my brain cramp regarding notifying Marcia about allergies. Sunday’s lunch covered just about every allergy possible but thankfully everyone realized it in time and there were no trips to the ER. Luckily there were some super-yummy leftovers that stepped in to cover my mistake.

Saturday night Laura and I had a hugely profitable discussion about construction techniques for the eventual sewing-together part of the jacket project, ably assisted by Robbin and Jen who quickly hunted up every photo we wanted to look at.

Kris A came in on Monday after five days in a Japanese embroidery class, and continued to work on the jacket Tuesday and Wednesday. Yesterday I asked her if she wasn’t tired of embroidering. “This is what I do,” she replied “well, what I’d do all the time if I could, anyway.” Yep, the whole eating and sleeping thing wicked gets in the way of my fiber time too. Pictures tomorrow.

Today’s pictures are all courtesy of Robbin. (Thanks again, Robbin.) She and her camera captured several events I missed, all of which occurred on Day Three (Thursday, for those of us who are having trouble keeping track…).

First, here’s Laura the Extreme Costumer, in her embroidered jacket, and the rest of her ensemble, working at a frame which I think wouldn’t have been that foreign to a real 16^th or 17^th century embroiderer. Laura and Jennifer flew in to join us for Thursday and Friday. It was a treat to meet them and see their work. On Friday, Laura shared with us some of her sketches of items in the V&A collection – her drawing is as beautiful as her needlework. While waiting for an open embroidery frame (at times on Thursday and Friday we actually had more qualified stitchers than we had frames for them to work at), Jennifer made ties for a forehead cloth out of sewing thread by the fingerloop braiding technique. Another guest, Marilyn, was knitting and conversing about Japanese embroidery techniques. It was like a smorgasbord of fiber arts.

Our next special guest was Shay Pendray, who couldn’t escape being set to work. I came back into the room just as she was leaving the frame, and forgot to ask if she made any stitches? I hope so.

Today I attended the Patuxet Strawberry Thanksgiving at Plimoth Plantation, a really special event. The weather was gorgeous and we had a great time, but it did involve walking from one end of the museum to the other, more than once. And after this busy week, I’m too tired to think. Tomorrow we’ll finish up the story of Session One.

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