Tricia writes:

Today we took a deep breath and started the goldwork on the jacket. I am in town all week working and couldn’t wait to start putting the gold to the jacket and making it come alive. I picked the collar as the silk work was all done on it. Here you can see part of a line
worked and on the second photo, you can see the coil done and a few tendrils worked in reverse chain.

To get going, I had to do a few tests to figure out what spacing we would use between repeats of the plaited braid. On the original jacket, the “v” is deeper than our version. I find when working with this stitch that the stitch width can be modified and the V is either
shallow or exaggerated. While one of the tests was able to get the same elongated V as the original piece, it seemed a bit sparse but worked faster and easier!. We don’t know exactly how thick the original thread was but I suspect it was thicker than what we are working with, which would have covered better even when worked with a larger spacing. I also suspect that it was more ductile and their needle had a larger eye but thinner shank. We had to change parameters on the thread to get it to work well and couldn’t use such a thick thread. We will work ours more shallow to get a nice coverage with our (I think) thinner version of the gold thread.

Jill said it was much more bright and sparkly than she had imagined!

Tricia

To answer Robbin’s question, there will Not be plaited braid stitch instructions in the needle-gold thread kit, so go ahead and order Linda’s from Calico Crossroads. There’s a link in the upper right portion of the blog home page. Go to her searchable catalog and look for plaited braid stitch. That should bring up the $6 + shipping packet of full-color instructions. If you have any trouble you can email Linda through the contact page on her website.

Thanks for the note about the comment box being overrun by text. Unfortunately we’re between Webmanagers right now; I sent Rich a note about it on his last day. I don’t think he laughed, but only because he’s not that kind of person. He did say that issue was already on the list for the interim guy to work on, but I have a feeling the interim guy had a lot more on the list….cross your fingers that another talented webmanager wants to work here and we find him/her soon.

Here are two tantalizing pictures of the excellent stuff Penny, Emily, Lacey, and two volunteers from the Landmark program did here on Tuesday and Wednesday. I know Pen, Emily, and Lacey want to blog about the whole experience, so I hopefully won’t be treading on their toes by posting these two. The first is their cushy setup outside the Crafts Center. Chairs! And a tent! It looks comfy, but it was scorching hot those two days.

The second is some yarn gently simmering in madder, I think.

They all had an excellent time, worked really hard but said it didn’t feel like work; the visitors loved it, the other Crafts Center artisans loved it, and Penny’s so pleased she’s already talking about doing it again in September. That much makes it a ringing success. But they also got loads of gorgeous yarn out of the deal, and that’s just gravy. They all three looked really tired on Thursday, though.

Tricia sent me this post:

As you can see in this picture, the gold threads have arrived. Remember earlier this summer the second trial of gold-silver-copper on silk arrived and was a slight bit thinner than the first trial. It worked well for stitching plaited braid. I excitedly called Lamora at
Access Commodities and let her know that using two silk plies for the core worked and we could go ahead and ask Bill Barnes to make a full run. If you check back in your blog a long while back, you will remember our rough estimates of how much we would need. Over 1000 meters. Well, I was surprised that Bill was able to turn it around as fast as he did - and nothing got caught in customs this time!! Customs has been the enemy #1 of this project. I can’t tell you how any times our supplies have gotten delayed there!

So I have more than 1500 meters in my hot little hand right now. Well of course I had to have extra! Some for me and some for you stitchers out there! Give me a few weeks to get my act together and we will have a little kit for sale to benefit the jacket with a needle and
gold thread and maybe a few instructions thrown in too.

Just in time. Next week the workroom will be a hub of activity. My son is going to summer camp at the Plantation and so I have a great excuse to be there all week. I will be starting the gold work and working on attaching detached pieces. Then we have a session starting
at the end of the week (still have spots if you are in the area for a day). Some lucky ladies may even start couching gold and doing reverse chain with this new limited edition material. Cool.

Tricia

Wendy stitched this borage as the model. She sent me a photo, labeling it “borage - done”. Which of course it is not. I’m trying to be careful about that now. Borage needs some black and white in the middle, and then the little spiky leaves done too.

But this is the big part, and for the next session (officially 8-11 August, but any time the week of the 4th can work as Tricia will be here working on GOLD) we’ll have borage directions. This is good, because in the master pattern borage is the only motif that repeats.

It’s a three-across, four-down repeat, and borage appears in the middle of the top row and at the left end of the bottom row (as Tricia drew it - it’s a repeat so theoretically you could start anywhere and repeat outward). So twice as many borages, sort of. Lots of opportunity to use the spectacular dark blue gilt sylke twist. See you soon?

To address the questions in the comments about comparing the lace gold thread to the embroidery gold thread, and how the embroidery gold thread is made, and the needles, and that, we’ll have to wait till Tricia comes back from vacation and can let us know. I’d say maybe towards the end of next week? I know she’ll get us the information as soon as she can.

I think there will be plenty of goldwork to do aside from the coiling vines, too. I was thinking, the tops of the foxgloves and pea pods are gold. The vine has many curliques (which it may be should be worked as you come to them, but maybe they’re separate, I don’t know) which will be gold. Most of the leaves have gold veins. The rose, strawberry flower, pansy and honeysuckle all have gold centers. The straight lines that stick out of the columbine and honeysuckle blossoms might be gold. (No, I don’t mentally catalog the work left to do, over and over. Why do you ask?) So we may well have goldwork available to those who either don’t want to or can’t match the established stitch density of the plaited braid. All of which to say, don’t worry, there’s plenty work to go around.

The other day I heard from some embroiderers who hadn’t sent in a sample or signed up to stitch because they were nervous about having their work “judged”. We’re really not using the samples to judge, or to keep anyone away. No one’s been refused. The samples let us take advantage of everyone’s strongest skill, and give Wendy and Tricia a starting point for helping to improve everyone’s stitching. Even those very experienced with this kind of embroidery have reported that after a few pointers and two days of practice, their work has improved and they go faster. Several have called the embroidery weekends a kind of ‘master class’, with individual attention (Wendy & Tricia usually have 20-25 students in a class and here we never have more than and lots of time to practice.

So don’t let that keep you away. Come stitch. This chance won’t be here much longer. I swear.

Tricia writes today. This is the second of four blogs she sent me before she left for Europe for two weeks. I tend not to read ahead when she sends me a few at once, but this time I’ve checked, and she answers most of your questions in the next three entries. I was going to skip tomorrow as it is a holiday in the States, but I can’t do that to you . . . look for Tricia’s #3 tomorrow and #4 Saturday. I’ll take a stab at the unanswered questions on Sunday. She sent no photo with this entry; I’ll repost the one from a couple of days ago. I believe all the different lines of stitching are the same stitch with different gold threads. Before you wonder where that nearly completed book is, blame the jacket - I think some of the time she had set aside to finish that book on gold stitches was actually spent on this project. Mea culpa.

Well, we have been asked a million questions about Plaited Braid over the last few months. And there has been a very lively set of exchanges between Jill, myself, other teachers, and readers of the blog who have been doing trials of their own. So I guess it is finally time to summarize this topic!

There are many people who have been on the trail of ‘Plaited Braid’ for years. I will try to recognize as many here as I can dig up in my memory! That said, there are two subjects to talk about. First, when we say ‘Plaited Braid Stitch’, what do we identify as that stitch? The second is how to do it.

On the first topic, I have been working on a book of gold stitches taken from 16th and 17th century English samplers and embroideries for years. Nearly complete, I have found almost 40 individual stitches worked in gold with different mechanics. Very few of them are identified in stitch anthologies. Even more frustrating is the
existence of several ‘braid’ stitches. Because they are difficult to decode, they have always ended up on the back burner. Now I have been going through my research photos trying to answer these questions.

What I have found is that there seems to be at minimum two stitches which can be called ‘plaited braid’. For awhile I thought that maybe we were looking at stitch density differences or maybe a bad stitcher here and there. But I have located one spot sampler where a queen stitch motif is filled in with both of the variants. Even more compelling is that one is worked in silver and the other gold. They repeat along the pattern in the same positions, implying that the stitcher identified them as distinctly different stitches. While I can’t share the photos from the museum here, one has a single V going down the middle and the other looks more woven like a herringbone.

So I believe that there was a family of ‘braid stitches’. In this family I also place stitches with related stitch mechanics such as the knot stitch (often called Braid Stitch). Now this creates difficulty because when you examine the published diagrams for “plaited braid”, the authors haven’t identified the objects they worked from or shown pictures. Therefore it is hard to say if any one set of directions is
“CORRECT” or “WRONG”.

Tomorrow I will talk about the directions I am familiar with and which ones we will be using.

Tricia