As it happens when researching these things, one ah-ha leads to many questions. I am blogging all this so I don’t forget anything and so please forgive my rambling from one subject to another. So after I went “oh crud”  and joked about a lot of stitching in front of American
football to make those covered seams, I started to think about the order of
things. This was great as I verbalized it to Susan and she went and got a
colleague of hers who is working on the pattern book and had been thinking
about exactly these questions about the Laton jacket.

So the back
seam on the arm would have to be joined and then embroidered upon. Also
the godets or gussets would have to be installed on the fronts and backs
and then embroidered. Also the fronts would need to be joined to the back
along the side seams and then embroidered. Then the rest of the seams could be made along with the cuffs, collar and wings being installed.
Again the vertical integration idea came up.  Well, I asked, then who sewed
the initial seams? A tailor on-site with the embroiderers or the
embroiderers themselves? Or could the tailor embroider plaited braid. Susan and her colleague felt that the well known tailors guild and
embroiderers guild meant that the people were separate and the pieces would
have been turned over. The implication was that the initial seams were done by the embroiderers and then the partially completed jacket was turned over to a tailor’s shop who finished it.

They brought up that
the bespoke (English for Custom-Made) nature of the jackets meant that the
tailor had made a muslin for the person or had modified a general pattern
they had using measurements they had made of the person. They mentioned
that measurements weren’t like we make them, in inches, but more like
positions on a tape. The order would then have been to draw the outline of
the pattern pieces on pieces of linen to then send to the embroiderer’s
workshop for design application and embroidery.  They mentioned evidence
from inventory books that the commissioner may have supplied the linen
themselves to the tailor.  (This brought up the question about suppling
embroidery threads too). Certainly we can see on many jackets that the embroidery was worked to the pattern outline and stopped and that on many jackets the outline is visible and so hasn’t been altered. I had asked if they thought that there could have been an industry supplying partially completed jackets for final construction after purchase. I mentioned this in light of the comment in ‘The French Garden’ about embroidered jackets for sale in the Royal Exchange, implying ‘Ready-Made’. Susan and her colleague really felt that the jackets were commissioned bespoke. And certainly there is plenty of evidence from the garments themselves to support that along with the great cost we now know in making them on risk of having a buyer.

More tomorrow
about the linen and pattern making.

Tricia

Another question we had was how the lace was applied to the jacket and what happened at corners when the lace had to change direction (think front edge corners).

Well, the lace is whipped down with a white thread in a very fast and crude fashion.  Susan and I joked that we would need to replicate the haphazard way it was done – maybe enlisting someone who couldn’t sew.
Was the lace applied by the wearer herself?  Maybe.  When the lace turned around the corner of the front of the jacket, it was eased in place.  No folds at all.  Just a small amount of bunching of the straight edge to help the lace turn the corner.   This was consistent with a nightcap in the MET collection that I had studied earlier this summer.  The lace was whipped into place on the internal edge of the cuff on this nightcap and the join was rough as I saw on the jacket.  On the jacket, the lace edge was whipped to the front of the jacket, on the linen edge.

As we talked further, I asked Susan if more was known about the Laton jacket.  Certainly the portrait and jacket survived and ended up together.  Were there any contemporary family papers, an account book perhaps that survived?  Sadly, no she said.  The pieces had surfaced in the early century with auction houses and no papers have been found.  There are so many questions we have about the commissioning of
jackets and price that one good account book could give us answers.  I also told her that if we had a price for the embroidery or jacket we could make all kinds of calculations based on our work to give order
of magnitude answers to so many questions.  Again, the day put ideas in our heads of info we needed to  be on the watch for in the future.  I put it out there for all of you reading – if you come upon any of
this – let me know!

Tricia

When Jill emailed me questions about the Laton jacket, many of them focused on the lace details which were too hard to see from the photos taken outside the case. The lace was applied to the jacket later in
its life, but shows in the portrait and thus is contemporary. We know that it was added later because there are remnants of the silk ribbon ties sewn into the seam which was removed to add the lace.

One of the big questions was how the lace was started or ended. Was it folded back and by how much? The answer was surprising to me. There was no fold finishing or tacking of ends under the seams. The lace was cut and the pairs looked to be tied (I will let the lace experts look at the photos to confirm this) and then applied directly to the wings with that cut edge just hanging there. For the other pieces (cuffs and the one piece that runs all around the fronts, collar, and back edge), the lace comes back and meets itself and so
they tied the pairs of the opposite ends together. The join was in the ‘V’ opening in the sleeve for the cuff lace and the join was just under the right ear area of the collar for the largest piece.

The amazing thing was as crude as the joins were made, it took Susan and I awhile to locate them. Especially around the jacket edge. We had to turn the jacket around a bit to find it. Just goes to show that when there is so much going on visually, these rough spots just don’t show up!

I add a picture of our lace here to show an end. To me, this is very nicely finished compared to what I saw on the jacket – but again, I can’t wait to her Carolyn’s comments once she looks at the photos.

Tricia

Before I get into details, I must thank the people who helped me immensely by taking time to host me for the appointments. First, Lynn Szygenda, Senior Curator at the Embroiderers’ Guild and Chris Berry, Past President of the EG.  Chris happened to be down in London on business this week and took time out to join me in the examination of the panel.  Chris is an expert on Tudor embroidery stitches and I was very pleased to finally meet her.  Having more experts at the table examining a piece is fantastic because you can both look at the same detail and debate them.  Sometimes your first conclusion will be wrong or there might be other data that one of you is aware of that can help make a new hypothesis.  Chris volunteers in the collection at the Burrell Collection and has a wealth of knowledge to share.

We had a lot of fun; I had my laptop full of my research photos next to the piece.  Lynn and Chris spent hours poring through the photos, including ones that we had from the V&A of the 1359-1900 jacket which Susan North had provided us with.  We could compare and contrast the
two pieces some.

My second thank you goes to Susan North, Curator of Costume at the V&A.  Susan took a great deal of time to help me move the jackets for photography.  As we discussed and debated what we saw, she would bring out other items to prove her point or to help answer the questions we had jointly proposed.  Susan is working with colleagues to produce a pattern book based on clothing of this period.  While it won’t be completed in time for this project, she and another colleague have been examining the Laton jackets and others (yes they were also on the table) for evidence of construction techniques.  This is the reason Laton was out of the case.  They were very generous to share their thoughts and to show me the evidence on each of the jackets to support it.  Because multiple professionals (embroiderers vs. tailors and/or other professional craftsmen, as well as multiple embroiderers – jmh) were involved in the process of making a jacket, we had a lively debate on which parts were performed by each and how the money/work may have transitioned.  I will comment more on this in a future blog.

I am sorry that I have very little eye candy that I can share with you on the internet from this trip, but here you can see Lynn (back), Chris (foreground) and me with the panel.

Tricia

I’ve only ever seen photos of the panel with no context – I was surprised how small it is. jmh

I got this from Tricia this morning:

I am writing this blog on the plane on my way back to the states from London. What can I say but “WOW”. I’ve been to London before and seen many embroideries in wonderful museums. This time was different, I was able to view the pieces up close that we have been working from since November 2006. It is a significantly different experience to examine period embroidery from a research view, as I normally do, and then from the new perspective of having tried to accurately reproduce the pieces. You come to them with the challenges you faced in organizing the work and having gotten inside the head of the embroiderers who worked on the original. You don’t see the forest anymore, but the leaves on all the trees and immediately the variations between them. You have an enhanced knowledge of it so you aren’t numbed by its sheer beauty, but can take a real critical eye and SEE things.

Before the readers of the blog wonder why we haven’t seen them before, because it certainly should have been the first step in mounting the project, I will explain. Through a series of circumstances, the project has been unfunded and therefore there was never any money to travel. This was my own personal odyssey and tacked onto a trip that I had planned for other reasons.

I spent Wednesday at the Embroiderers’ Guild viewing the panel which we believe was worked by the same workshop as the jacket. Then Thursday at the V&A viewing our jacket, 1359-1900. But I had the biggest surprise of my life, the Margaret Laton jacket had been taken off display and had been unmounted for research for an upcoming book. We placed the two jackets side by side and I took 750 photos. Maybe Jill* will blog about her surprise when I emailed from the storage room frantically hoping that they would get it before I was done. I emailed Wendy too – and she called Jill direct to let her know. A once in a lifetime opportunity to get pictures of the construction and lace before it is remounted. “What do you want to know??” I asked. A flurry of email came back with tons of fantastic questions. Thank god for the mobile devices of today!!

I think I will have easily a week of blogs for you. I so wish I could share the pictures, but I will describe what I learned and saw.

Tricia

*Jill here. My son and I have been playing a sort of (unintentional) roulette game, seeing how late we can get out of bed and still get him on the bus. Earlier this week the phone rang in the middle of the quick-quick-get-your-backpack-and-run routine. It was Wendy. She sounded sleepy. I know I sounded sleepy. She said she’d just opened a message from Tricia “the Laton is unmounted on the table in front of me! What do we want to know? Make sure Jill sees this!” Wendy had found the note about an hour and a half after Tricia sent it, so she wasn’t sure if Tricia was still in the room with the jacket. She sent off a note with what she could think of, then called me, which was very smart, since I never get around to opening emails until about 9:30 or 10, which would’ve been another hour at least. I mentioned as many things as I could think of, fretted that we must be forgetting something, and needlessly, I’m sure, said, tell her to take pictures of everything! “I hope she has extra memory cards,” Wendy replied, then hung up to send off another email. Luckily they both reached Tricia while she was still in with the jacket. 15 minutes later the Boy was on the bus and I was on my way to work, thinking the whole way about what she might be discovering. I can’t wait to see and hear all about it.