Tricia’s Blog #4 on the Plaited Braid Stitch. When Tricia sent me these blogs she copied Linda so she’d be prepared for your calls and emails.

We have had a lot of requests for the plaited braid directions. As of yet, I haven’t made my set of directions for this stitch. So we won’t be putting them on the internet yet and I am not sure if I will get to it before the project is done.

Fine Lines is out of print and the parent company is bankrupt, so you can’t purchase back issues as far as I know. That said, Leon’s website (I looked for this website to post a link but couldn’t find it. Mary sent it www.leonconraddesigns.freeserve.co.uk/pbs.htm Thanks, Mary) has some information on it and Linda Connors will sell you a set of her color directions (6 pages). I recommend that if you are interested in trying them out, you can email her at: calxrds@aol.com.

She is aware that a flood of email would come someday when I was ready to blog on this. (You can also order online, like I did. www.calicocrossroads.com I clicked Hand Embroidery, online searchable catalogue, and put in plaited braid stitch. Email or call if you have trouble.)

The next secret is using the right thread and needle to do the stitch in gold. If you are interested in this, we could put together a little spool of thread (the one we will use on the jacket) and the needle (japanese #9 or #10) and sell it to benefit the project. Drop us a line or place a comment in the blog. I expect the thread in about a month and could have it reeled into smaller amounts.

Tricia

I am smiling in a bemused fashion here. Did she say “IF you are interested”? That’s pretty funny, Tricia.

Tricia’s Blog #3:

There are several sets of “Plaited Braid” directions out there. Excuse me if I don’t mention one you are aware of, but please let us know as it will help us solve this mystery!

The first is a set diagrammed by Mrs. Archibald Christie (Samplers & Stitches, 1920) that is often duplicated in other publications. I and others have found it difficult to understand and very difficult to work. To date, I haven’t been able to make it work without pins and an extra elbow.

The second is a set decoded by Elizabeth Creeden and diagrammed by *** (JILL PLEASE PUT HER NAME HERE mmm. not as easy as it sounds. I found the directions – but no one is credited for the illustrations. I think it was either Die Hoxie, Joanna Kline Cadorette, or Joanna’s father, Mr. Kline) and published by Plimoth as part of a coif pattern. I have used this set in many of my pieces. It has a lot of strength in that it works fast and easily. I mention this because a stitch used across a large piece would have to be relatively easy to work and not require any extra steps to make the stitch look uniform. But the stitch doesn’t look like the one on our jacket.

The third set was published by Leon Conrad in Fine Lines (Summer 2003). Another stitcher, Linda Connors, took Leon’s directions and expanded them using more pictures and additional graphics to make it even easier to read. This version results in a stitch which is indistinguishable from the gold embroidery on the jacket we are attempting to reproduce. These directions also “truck”, as I am apt to say in the workroom. They work fast once you get going. And as we have found during the project, that is an important distinction when trying to determine the stitch order. If it moves and flows naturally, it is most likely good. Time was money in that workroom.

This last set of directions will be the ones that we will use for the project. They are also the ones that were used to produce the stitch in the picture.

Tricia

Yes, as mentioned in the comments, Fine Lines is now defunct. jmh

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

Tricia writes today:

If you remember, months ago we were trying out gold threads for the plaited braid stitch. Bill Barnes of Golden Threads had made a silk core wrapped with gilt strip for us. When it stitched, it was just too stiff to use, which was a surprise to me. When I gave him my comments, he responded that he had used three ends of Soie Ovale for the core and would I wait a few weeks for another sample using just two ends. He was sure it would work. Well – always trust the master!

We finally got the sample two weeks ago (another one of those international shipping dramas delayed it). Shown here is the sample alone and also stitched next to the previous samples that I had done. The thread is thinner but it still gives a nice and dense plaited braid. More importantly, it stitches easily. Well, as easily as a gold thread can! So I gave the green light to have miles of it made.

A big thanks goes out to Access Commodities who have been coordinating this for us. They are the distributor of Au Ver a Soie thread and supply the silks that Bill is using for the thread. Lamora’s expertise with international shipping is one of the prime reasons we can make this happen!

Tricia

Hi Mary, I’m glad it made you laugh. jmh

Thanks for all your encouraging comments. I will photograph more motifs tomorrow at the office and post them.

About the plaited braid stitch, I know Tricia is working on a set of instructions with great photos that can be posted here and downloaded, like she did for all the other stitches we’ve been doing.

She and I are still thinking about how to marshal the troops to actually do the gold work. The plaited braid is one long motif, so to speak. Each pansy, or rose, or columbine is distinct and separate from every other pansy or rose or whatever. They don’t bump up next to each other, so variations in stitch tension or density don’t show so much. And in the originals we’ve looked at we saw differences like that in different motifs, so we’re not so worried about that. But the vines are like one continuous line. If we have very different hands working on the same sections it will show pretty dramatically.

I’m still hoping for some of our serious fund-raising efforts to result in a chunk of money so we can pay someone to do large sections of the vine, and fill in with volunteers, in such a way that the variety of hands is not so glaring. We do have some proposals out, and we’re working on another packet of materials to send to a bunch of different places, so keep your fingers crossed there.

Even if that happens, though, we’ll still need embroiderers, so don’t worry, you aren’t being put out of a job here. There’ll be miles of chain stitch gold work, little curlicues that spring seemingly randomly from the vine, plus top stitching on leaves that has to be done in gold, too.

We’re close to having another recreated thread to add to the jacket. Tricia did a gold thread series of blog posts a few weeks ago, and the end was that Bill Barns was going to do another sample of gold wrapped around silk, but this time use two ends of silk as the core rather than three, which would hopefully give Tricia the flexibility she was looking for. I haven’t heard that she’s got that sample yet, but we will of course post pictures as soon as she’s tested it.

I don’t know the answer to the question of how the acorn caps in yesterday’s picture were done; but I’ll send a note to Tricia to see if she knows.

Embroidery sample received today from Carolyn W. Also we’ve gotten more stockings! From Susan J, Sarah N, Susan Y, and Carol H. All absolutely lovely.

Tomorrow Penny will be attending the Weavers’ Guild of Boston’s meeting. The members of the WGB have, over decades, been willing hands, knitting and weaving for the living history program. Tomorrow Penny will see if anyone would like to take some stockings that need re-footing (old ones) or gloves to be re-fingered (also old).

Two spinners have volunteered to spin some combed top I had in the closet; I will be packaging that up and sending it out tomorrow, and we’ll see what we’ll see. I’m hoping for some hand spun worsted yarn that we can dye and knit into stockings at a gauge closer to the original 17th century stockings than our current pattern. The stockings on the Gunnister man, who was found preserved in a peat bog in Scotland, were about 7.5 sts/in. Gunnister man is no earlier than the last quarter of the 17th century, dated by coins in his (knitted!) pocket, but they are very close to our time period, close enough to be used as a model for the Plimoth colonists’ stockings.

I guess I still can run on, despite feeling like I’ve nothing new to say.

Pictures of motifs tomorrow, and thanks again for the help.

May be sent to

Plimoth Plantation

c/o Kim Corben, Development

PO Box 1620

Plymouth, MA 02362

Please write on your check or enclose with your contribution a note saying:

“Restricted to Embroidered Jacket Project” or something to that effect.

And thank you so much for asking!

Cheryl asked how much we need. I will sweep together the estimates and let you know in dollars, but here’s a list of expenses.

Every time we have an embroidery session we need to buy food supplies. It is most cost effective, not to mention most delicious to have Marcia cooking for us, we spend much less than if we bought food through a restaurant, but depending on number of participants and number of days we need $200-400.

We need to buy some supplies for the lace making; pins, prickers, cards for the prickings and some other things.

We need to buy the silver and gold for the teardrop spangles.

We need to buy the gold and silver threads for the lace.

We’ll need more GST, especially the first three colors – bisse, carnation and redde.

These are just materials costs; I’ll have to look up the figures on what we allowed (in the grant application) for a hired embroideress for the vines. Plus, I’m sure I’m forgetting something….

Ah, yes, I was just reminded about buying the sequins, the little round bits that’ll be sewn onto the cloth itself. (These were and, I think, still are made by coiling a wire and smacking it sharply to flatten it, Susan. The teardrop ones, though, were punched out of a flat piece of metal, almost a metal ribbon. The historic spangles themselves told us, by the striations visible at high magnification, by the ‘burls’ on the edges of the spangle and the edge of the hole, and by the irregular spangles, the ones punched too close to the edge of the ribbon or too close to their neighbor spangle. That’s the abridged version, but more will be coming soon, and with photos.)

Tricia has promised more blogs, including instructions for the plaited braid stitch and more on the teardrop spangle quest. I have on hand a few more blogs written by Wendy on spangle history, teardrop and other shapes, and I will start with those tomorrow, hopefully.

See you then.