Tricia’s writing tonight:

When we were initially working on the jacket planning, we had to have a physical pattern for a jacket to apply the design and embroidery to. Since many of the jackets in collections are now mounted for their own conservation, taking the pattern (how is a mystery to me!) from the chosen jacket would be impossible. So we looked to the extraordinary research by Janet Arnold to guide us. She was fortunate enough to view
and work with two well known examples previous to their most recent conservation and mounting. In her book, Patterns of Fashion – The cut and construction of clothes for men and women c 1560-1620, she diagrams a jacket in the collection of the Museum of Costume at Bath, England and the Laton jacket at the V&A. Which to choose?Plimoth uses the Bath jacket as the base pattern for the costumes used by the interpreters. They have extensive experience modifying the pattern for individuals. The Bath jacket as it is now does not include lace. We decided to use the Laton pattern and to include on the final jacket the ‘extras’ that help to define it as an example of over-the-top fashion for this culture. That includes the lace and the ribbon ties.

With that choice made, Denise (formerly a tailor with the Colonial Wardrobe Department) drafted the pattern from Janet’s book onto dressmaker’s paper using the 1″ grid as a guide. She then made up a jacket in muslin. She found that she needed to make modifications to the arm areas to get the armholes correct. She unpicked, corrected, and then sewed again until the pattern was perfect. Then she unpicked the muslin one last time and used the fabric pieces to transfer a new pattern to dressmaker’s paper. That’s the pattern we’ve been using.

Tricia

Here I am again. Thanks, Tricia, for writing up this entry.

A few notes: Years ago, we drafted the Bath pattern to life-size and then drafted four sizes from it: women’s small, medium, and large, and one child size. These patterns were transferred to brown paper and then laminated. We use these patterns, making alterations on the fabric as we cut, to make jackets for the female colonial interpreters.

This photo shows the pieces of the child size pattern laid out for cutting. This fabric will be the lining of a jacket for one of the child volunteers in the 1627 English Village.

Today Tricia Wilson Nguyen is guest-writing. The actual pattern development was carried out by Tricia and Denise Lebica, a former tailor with the Colonial Wardrobe Department, with help from Johanna Tower, who worked with us as both an intern and a tailor.

Tonight we will start a discussion of how the embroidery pattern for the jacket was developed. One of the considerations when we were choosing a jacket for the adaptation was how to draft the embroidery pattern. Our first choice jacket, the Laton jacket at theV&A museum, was behind glass and wouldn’t be able to be accessed for photography from all sides. A quick review of the available photos from scholars, the auction house and the V&A did not result in all the jacket being viewable, especially the all important back. It is on the back of the jacket where a photo can often be taken that shows much of the repeat of the pattern and has the least curvature. Many of you will realize that tracing a motif from a picture of a curved object won’t give you a true shape.

The eventual choice (V&A acc. number 1359-1900) kept coming to the top of our list as it has a close cousin in the collection of the Embroiderers’ Guild. Housed in Hampton court, and called both a cushion and a coif in different references, is a panel which is unmistakably related to the jacket design. The panel (EG acc. number 1982.79) has been photographed flat and contains nine of the twelve motifs that are on the jacket. The existing photography could be used to trace the related elements and give us a start, as well as the photography of the jacket itself. If you would like to see this piece, there are two publications which show it. The first is “Raised Embroidery” by Barbara and Roy Hirst. It is pictured in its entirety on page 9. A slightly cropped version of the photo is shown in “Treasures from the Embroiderers Guild Collection” edited by Elizabeth Benn. The panel is shown on page 15.

So to start, we referred to the on-line information on the jacket measurement, divided by the number of coils vertically and came up with a coil height of 4 inches. This matched our measurements on the jacket at the MET and so we thought we were off and running. We enlarged all the photography of the V&A jacket and the EG panel so that the coils matched this number. A week later, we had to rescale when costume curator Susan North (as a double check) pulled the jacket from storage and gave us specific measurements we requested. In fact the coil height was 2 5/8″. We were glad we checked as the published measurement was from the tip of the sleeve to the collar and not the bottom of the jacket to the collar!

Leaves of tracing paper were placed over sections in the photographs and 2 x 2 repeats were traced off both pieces until all the elements were captured. This required us to scan the pieces and check off motifs and their repeats until we had no more to scratch out. As you look at photos of the jackets, think about how confusing they look to the eye. The repeat in the pattern only shows up if you have a yard or more of the embroidered fabric to look at. But ours was cut up and reassembled in a jacket shape!

These tracing papers were then xeroxed in multiples (as well as rescaled to 2 5/8″). We used the mirror function on the xerox to get matchbook facing patterns, as they are on the front right and left. Now coming up with a vine was all that was left before we could cut and paste! Since a large area of the jacket wasn’t available to trace, the vine pattern that was available to us was the one on the panel. But it was mirrored down the middle of the panel, and we could tell that the jacket didn’t have this flip. So we traced the 3 x 3 vine to the right and then tiled it along a big piece of dressmaker’s paper. You can see Denise tracing the vine to extend it in the photo. At this point we had a large piece of paper with a vine all over it.

For our first attempt, we cut the motifs out of the paper and tried laying it over the vine (here you can see that in process). In some areas they fit well, for some we had to cut the vine out. We continued to refer to the photos of the panel and the jacket to try to put motifs in what would appear to be the correct order. At this point since we were mixing tracings from two different embroidery pieces, we were resigned that our pattern would be an adaptation of the original. Denise and I conferred on the placement of motifs and struggled to make sure that we didn’t have red flowers next to other red flowers and details like that. We never guessed that we might get to the ‘real pattern’…but more on that tomorrow night.Tricia

Bad news first. There’s nothing new on the linen front. Despite all efforts, the linen is trapped until a government official gets to it, which might be tomorrow and might be six months from now.

We’re working on contingency plans, one of which involves choosing a completely different linen from a different manufacturer, one whose US distributor has a piece large enough for us in stock. The second, and now the favored plan, involves buying up all the remnants of the chosen linen in the US and trying to get the whole jacket from the biggest piece. I’m a little concerned about dye lots, but have an idea for compensating should we have to use two pieces from separate bolts. I’m not hugely worried; too many things have fallen into place in order to make this project work for this to derail us now.

Now the good news – treats! Tricia sent instructions for reverse chain stitch and Ceylon stitch, two stitches we’ll be using on the jacket (more stitch instructions over the next days). Rummage out some cloth, needle and thread and give it a try. (You’ll need Adobe to open these.)

Great strides were made today on the schedule for the June embroidery session. We’ll have a presentation by Kathleen Curtin, Plimoth Plantation foodways historian and author of Giving Thanks: Thanksgiving Recipes and History from Pilgrims to Pumpkin Pie. She’s an entertaining speaker, and knows more about the foodways of the 1620s English Colonists than just about anybody. We’ll also have a tour of Plimoth Plantation’s collection led by Karin Goldstein, Curator of Original Artifacts. Karin will show us Plimoth Plantation’s two 17^th century samplers and some sewing-related items. And, Tricia has generously offered to teach a small project. I’m working on more fun activities for the non-stitching time.

So hopefully the progress I made on the schedule excuses me for never making it out of the office. The gravitational pull of the telephone and email were just too much for me. I humbly offer you a picture of fitting a jacket to one of the role-players. This was taken in the fall of 2005. This pink wool jacket is cut from a pattern taken from an embroidered linen waistcoat in the Burrell Collection in Glasgow, Scotland. The shape of the pattern pieces is very similar to that of the Laton jacket at the V & A. On page 121 of Janet Arnold’s Patterns of Fashion: the cut and construction of clothes for men and women 1560-1620, are the patterns for both jackets, drawn on graphed paper.