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