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

Ahem. I owe an apology; Tricia sent me this information to post way back in February and I don’t think I ever did post it. I was looking for something else in my emails and found it. As a poor defense, the cover note mentioned that her sons had just come down with what my son was just getting over - a virus with high fever - and I must have still been boggled. I included a photo of Tammy working on the forehead cloth; it clearly shows the slate frame. Tammy was here about the same time Tricia sent this note; it was one of the snow-shortened sessions. Seems a long time ago now. I haven’t heard anyone say with certainty that they know the reason they’re called slate frames, by the way. Anyway, Tricia wrote:

Several people have asked where to get slate frames. As we talked early in the blog, we had a great deal of trouble finding slate frames in the USA for this project. There are one or two small makers in England but they wouldn’t export to the USA and we didn’t have the budget to fly there to get them! The frames that are pictured were a really nice product line that was manufactured in Europe for Access Commodities. A combination of factors resulted in these frames coming off the market a few years ago - the rising Euro, some manufacturing problems, and a brief intro of a lower quality copy by a vendor ended up resulting in the product line being taken off the market.

Access was great to take all the leftover on their shelves, seconds, and a list of what stores had formerly bought from them to allow me to find enough for the project. (What Tricia then did was call all the stores to see if they had anything left of their last orders. She usually leaves out the part about her tedious legwork.) We combined this with some long slats made by Plimoth staff and my entire vast personal collection (note again that STASH comes to the rescue!) and a wonderful stitcher’s stash (this generous stitcher has long-term loaned us a few essential frame parts) we found through the list from Access to complete the sizes we needed.

Recently Access has made a test run in-country to see if this product line can be brought back as a favor to me and because of interest in this project. I am testing out the new frames next week with a class I am teaching. (Since this post is so old, that test-run happened in February. It sounded like it went well. Norma B brought her nightcap project from that class to a show & tell at one of the sessions, all drawn out and laced into the frame.) If things go well, the frames might come back to market. I am sorry I can’t give a simple answer to the question of ‘how do I get a frame’. The good news is if everyone out there who wants a frame, requests it of their local shop , maybe you can help the push to get these back again as momentum is now in our favor.

This is again an example of how fragile the needlework market is. Fundamental products come and go off the market very easily. I made a friend years ago who was the retired R&D head of a major needle company in Germany and founder of a museum of needle technology. Germany and England had been the centers of the needle trade since the time our jacket was made. Today there is one English vendor and a French vendor. Between them they make 80% of all needles and brand them with different names. My friend
showed me hundreds of different types of needles that were made prior to WWI by dozens of companies. Needles that I knew must have existed to do embroidery I couldn’t do today because I couldn’t find the right needle. He showed me how the governments of England and Germany had restricted the product lines during the war to divert steel to munitions. When the war was over, women’s lives had changed so much that the demand wasn’t large enough to reintroduce the large variety again. Hence those forms of embroidery are now gone from our lexicon,effectively extinct. Today most needlework manufacturers are very small entities, entire product lines can disappear just because someone retires or there is a medical emergency in the family and the business owner needs to find a ‘real job’. I wish every stitcher knew the background on the products they use and understood the economics of the situation. It would stop all chart copying, sharing, and buying cut rate floss from big craft stores in a second. Unfortunately it is the big secret that no-one wants to talk about. While not everyone can afford to fill their closets - there are small everyday decisions when shopping for our craft passion that make or break the industry.

Tricia

Tricia writes tonight:

To answer the questions posed by Jill’s blog last night, here is the Glittering Nightcap. Remember back when I wrote about the development of Gilt Sylke Twist and mentioned “horse trading’? Well the Nightcap was part of that deal. To make sure that we could get the thread made, I offered to design a teaching piece and several kits/magazine projects that would use the thread so the volume of thread would be enough to get it off the ground. The Nightcap is the first of these projects. It used every one of the eight colors made (that is the seven for the jacket and a purple). It was taught three weeks ago at A Gathering of Embroiderers in Williamsburg. Thirty lucky and trusting ladies took the class and were able to get some gilt sylke twist. I say trusting because they all signed up for the class sight unseen as the project was finished only a few days ahead of time. Normally I don’t cut it so tight, but since the thread didn’t come until a month ahead, I had to embroider around the clock to get it done.

The nightcap is about 50% sized and fits over a needlework tools etui pyramid made from silk. It was fun to see the gold thread added to the gilt sylke twist and see how they play off each other. I add a few extra fun pictures here of a ‘family member’ wearing the cap before the last side seam was finished. My two sons also wore it to model for mommy. These embroideries were originally stitched with these threads to ‘move’ and so it was fun to see how they looked when worn.

So if you hear a rumor that ’someone’ has some GST, you know how. I was honoring my horse trading agreement!

Tricia

Jill here. Not only did Tricia use all the colors of GST, she also twisted two colors of thread together to transition between green and yellow in some of the leaves. This project is just too beautiful.

First, Gail J’s lace sample arrived safely.

The sharp-eyed reader award goes to Catherine K, who noticed Tricia’s completed “nightcap” in the photo on Friday. Tricia’s going to write about it so I didn’t photograph it for the blog, but I saw it in that picture and wondered if anyone else would notice. It is so beautiful and sweet and rich with color and texture. I kept turning it round and round in my hands admiring every bit. It is a preview of what the jacket will be, and I’m glad to say I couldn’t stop looking at it.

I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to tease you all about the spangle meeting. I know that Tricia took lots of photos and is planning to blog on the process so I don’t want to steal the questers’ thunder. But I will clarify: here’s a picture of Mark, Tricia, Wendy and Geri, Tricia’s mom who was a special guest on Friday, examining images of historical spangles (many times enlarged) on Tricia’s laptop. Tricia’s dad, who was also a special guest for the day, is out of frame photo-documenting the research. They were comparing the silver that Mark has had electroplated with gold and then rolled flat to the historic examples. They weren’t entirely happy, so Mark is getting more silver and fine-tuning the process. We don’t have a little heap of spangles, and I’m sorry if I misled you to thinking we were at that point, but we are a big step closer to figuring this out.

Thanks to Carolyn H for bringing some concerns to my attention. Many lacers are worried that we will give up on the lace because the whole process is sliding later and later into the spring. I’m afraid I don’t have a carved-in-stone road map of how the rest of the project is going to unfold. On the other hand, I didn’t have one so far and we’ve made a remarkable, fantastic amount of progress. Lots of our assumptions coming in were guesses, including how long it would take to create the jacket. I feel confident that our estimate of person-hours will hold up, but what was less definable (and still is) was how many months it would take to put in that many person-hours.

All of which to say, I posted a list of possible sessions for the spring/early summer. I avoided Mothers’ and Fathers’ Day, and Memorial Day, thinking folks would have other plans. I threw a bunch of other weekends up on the wall to see what would stick. If none of those weekends work for you, don’t assume you can’t come. Assume, instead, that I don’t know what would be most convenient. Send me a list of dates. Maybe there are half a dozen embroiderers/lacers who think the perfect Mothers’ Day would be to spend a long weekend indulging their favorite hobby. I’m flexible, and will adapt to further the mission.

Several times already we’ve endured setbacks and/or delays. All (the linen in customs, the development of Gilt Sylke Twist, the long wait for the second set of colors of GST, the search for appropriate metal threads, etc) have caused us to rethink, regroup, refocus. None have derailed the project, or even delayed it very much. If all of a sudden no volunteers wanted to work on it anymore (perish the thought) we would regroup and forge ahead with a different game plan. We can’t stop now, it’s too late, and besides, this jacket wants to be made. It’s out of our hands.

We also, right now, don’t have an immovable drop-dead date by which we’ll have to abandon the spangle quest. I know the delays are really frustrating, but we’re nowhere near the point of going to our spangle back-up plan (yup, there is one). If we ever get there, we’ll go to the back-up plan and begin lace production right away. This jacket wants to have lace.

So please don’t worry. If you have an idea or a question or a concern, please let me know. jhall@plimoth.org This will all work out, not the way we thought at first, I’m sure, but how we can best make it work for everybody.

Here’s a fun picture. The bag and book come from Wendy’s collection. She got the bag first and found directions for how to make it, or something so similar they must be related, in this book. Pretty neat.