Lace sample arrived from Bryce W.

Several lacers have asked this question - when you send back the sample, we only need 3 repeats of the lace motif, that is 3 scallops of the lace, not 3 of the gold + silver repeat, or 6 scallops overall.

I had an update from Mark yesterday. He’s been busy, traveling to different places to seek help from other skilled metalworkers. Next step is to confer with Tricia and Wendy regarding how much or how little the current trial looks like the original spangles (the teardrop shaped kind). He thinks it is possible that we’ll be ready to make lace at the end of March. The living history exhibits will be open again by then. We’ll all know more after the Spangle Questers have met, hopefully on Friday.

Kathleen Wall, Plimoth Plantation’s Colonial Foodways Manager (which doesn’t begin to capture all she does), attended the 2007 ALHFAM (Association of Living History Farms and Museums) annual conference, which was in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Seems in Santa Fe, they have patron saints for everything, and have plaques, or tiles, or pictures, or MAGNETS honoring these many saints. Kathleen thoughtfully brought us a magnet of St. Rose of Lima, the patron saint of Needleworkers, Embroiders (or Embroiderers) and Quilters, just in case we might need some patronage. I was just delighted – not only by the thought but by the attractive, colorful image. Right now St. Rose is stuck to a metal desk in the office, but next week she’ll move with us over to Accomack. Just in case. Thanks so much, Kathleen.

One sample today – Judy L’s. Laura’s out of town with her family and Kathy suggested I might want to process the sample (Laura’s got a system of filing and recording, and all sorts of efficiency). I decided to take some pictures instead. Here’s Judy’s worm. Don’t you just love the worms?

Here’s a question for you. We have embroidery bees scheduled for August, September and October. We have to skip November; we get kind of busy around here in November, (massive understatement) what with Thanksgiving and all. I’ve been wondering about December. Would anybody be interested in a bee in December, or is it too close to the holidays with all the travel and visiting and other activities? We could skip December too and schedule the next ones for January & February. Let me know.

That’s about it from here today.

Here’s Tricia continuing the story:

For the last two entries we have been talking about the sample embroidery we worked and the insights we have gained. Another insight is that of the pattern drafting.

Remember that Denise drafted the sample pattern from the photos and I worked the embroidery. Well, I had difficulties with some of her drafting as just the perimeters of some of the shapes were taken. When examining the photos and trying to apply the same stitch to the piece, I often had to add lines so I had anchor places for my detached stitches. Take a look at the photo. The borage flower can’t be worked as one piece as the direction of the detached buttonhole has to change for each petal. So each petal needed to be drawn separately. Looking at the close-ups of this flower showed that there were ’seam lines’ if you might call them that, which were visible in the flower.Because of this, our original plan to have Denise draft the pattern and trace it to the linen had to change. An embroiderer needed to draft the master pattern to take into account the lines which needed to be added (or subtracted in the case of the butteryfly’s detached wings). Unfortunately, Denise left Plimoth before she was able to transfer the pattern to the linen - so I got to do that too…but more on that in a later blog entry.

When looking at the numerous stumpwork or tent stitch pictures worked by girls and young women, you often see pattern lines that have not been covered. If the girl bought the piece with the transfer and then chose what stitches to use, the draftsman cannot decide what lines to omit or place to aid the stitcher. In the case of the jackets, I don’t recall seeing yet any lines that are uncovered. The exception of course is where a black thread has degraded, but the needle holes are still obvious. I wonder what this says about the relationship between the draftsman and the embroiderer. We do know from primary sources that these two professions could stand alone and were not always one and the same.

As we have been surveying the jackets and coifs with coiling stems, a pattern is starting to emerge about stitch choices for particular motifs. At this point I have seen numerous birds worked in trellis and spiral trellis. Trellis also seems to be the often chosen treatment for a butterfly body. This may have been more general than at first glance and may have been a constant in a particular workshop. If a draftsman was part of the staff, he may have been familiar with the code in the shop and able to transfer a very workable pattern for use. This is just a thought - a conjecture from a limited amount of data and our own observations. A fresh look at pieces in many collections would help to build a case for these and other hypotheses that are being developed as part of this ‘living history’. We put them out there to start to solicit comments from the collective memory of the readers of this blog.

Tricia

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

Tricia’s been a whirlwind these past few days, tracking down frame parts from the four corners of the known world; figuring, refiguring, and figuring again how to most efficiently fit the pattern pieces onto the linen and the linen into the frames; not to mention generating fund-raising and product development ideas and answering all the questions I shoot over to her. On top of that, she’s written out some detailed explanations of the different “research & development” steps we’ve gone through but so far mentioned only briefly. This is not only interesting for you to read about, but accomplishes two of our stated goals – to thoroughly document all our work and to share that information as widely as possible. I’m also glad of the help with the blog this week; it gives me space to focus on getting all the details arranged for our June session, and to dress the final 2 new role-players (3 are all set and will begin work as Plymouth Colonists on Friday).

Tricia says:

We mentioned the time trials before in the blog, but I would like to give you a little more description of how that process went and what we learned. The completed sample is shown here. The sample was undertaken with many purposes. We needed a photo of something to encapsulate what the project was about. And it needed to be something that Plimoth Plantation ‘owned’. In other words, we couldn’t use a photo (and a good one doesn’t yet exist) of the historic jacket as we would need to get permission every time we wanted to use it. So a new sample was needed. We decided to make an incompletely worked piece to help communicate the ‘working’ aspect of this project.Jill gave a good recap of why at the last second the botanically correct blue borage was changed to red in a previous blog entry (Red, red, red). There was a proposal for the exhibit funding going out and something that attracted attention was needed. But the sample also would provide much needed data on the time to work the project and amounts of thread used so we could begin our planning process. We started with a four inch by four inch section of a jacket from the V&A (little did we know at this point that it would be the same jacket that we would choose to adapt). We chose this section because it had every type of stitch we might use on it. The design was drafted from a photograph and transferred to the linen in ink by Denise, a former tailor at Plimoth.

Using Au Ver a Soie Soie Perlee threads, I embroidered the piece and photographed it along the way. I kept a log during the entire process with entries for motif part, thread type and color used, stitch type, length of thread, and time taken. This data was then entered into a database and could be used for many calculations.

We estimated that the jacket pattern we were going to use by Janet Arnold had 1152 square inches of embroidered surface area. Our sample was roughly 16 square inches and we assumed that the amount of white space in the design was going to be the same for the sample and our final piece. Using the total time to embroider the piece, we could calculate that around 2300 hours would be needed. Assuming that every stitcher has her own pace and that I am on the fast side, we extended the estimate to between 2500-3000 hours. It will be exciting to see what it turns out to be. To help with future research, we intend to keep a log through the entire process.

From this data, the area of each motif and stitch area could be calculated (I used a small grid of 1/4″ squares to estimate area). This data was entered into my spreadsheet. Then it was simple calculations to get information like:

# minutes/sq inch for a particular stitch
# inches thread/sq inch for a particular stitch

This information was used as part of a larger database that is being filled in to give us thread use estimates per color. When you look at the jacket - it is hard to say that you need to buy 100 tubes of red or just 50. And we want to have the same dye lot for all the threads without ordering too much or under ordering.

Tomorrow we will continue this discussion to talk about how this data has given us insights into the professional workshops and the relative value of pieces of embroidery.

Tricia