Tonight Tricia finishes the story begun in yesterday’s post of how the pattern for the embroidered jacket was drafted. This story is just one example of the many things we’re learning by doing that might not have been discovered just by studying existing examples.

Well, after a long day of trying to come up with the right master pattern, Denise and I called it quits. I took the materials home and was to start again with a fresh vine tracing. As you can see in the photo, I covered the dining room table with pictures and kept staring at the sleeves, front, and back trying to work out what was going on with the piece. All of a sudden I could ’see it’ - a nice 3 x 4 coil block. The repeat leapt out at me and I quickly sketched it out. Then I took the motifs and cut them from our xeroxed tracings. Even though I assumed that I would have to totally redo the vine tracing because we had taken that from the EG panel, I placed the motifs in order on top of it. To my amazement it worked perfectly! I was stunned. Not only did the two historic pieces share many motifs and a very close stitch/color vocabulary - but they seemed to be built on the same coiling stem pattern. This is another piece of circumstantial evidence which leads to a conclusion that these pieces were worked from the same professional workshop.

From the experience, I conjecture that the following MIGHT be how some of these pieces were designed. A master coiling stem pattern would be drawn up by a draftsman on staff and would reside at the company. A set of standard motifs would then be available to choose from to place on this vine depending on the purpose of the intended object or the whim of the customer. That way some customization was available with with very little original design work.Something I had seen before seemed to support this hypothesis and a well timed business trip through Washington, D.C. provided the opportunity to check a rare book again. A very expensive and rare modern reproduction of The Great Book by Thomas Trevilian (1616) resides at the Folger Library in Washington, D.C. I have been viewing this and its original cousin (1608) by the same author for years everytime I am in town. Thomas Trevilian is thought by scholars to have been a draftsman of pattern for the decorative arts - woodworkers and embroiderers primarily. In any case, he certainly had access to many patterns. It seems late in his life he sat down (twice as he didn’t expire too quick)
to record in one place patterns he knew, had in his possession, or invented. We many never know which. He also recorded well know plates from other earlier publications in his manuscripts. Plate no. 947 in The Great Book (1616) is a coiled stem design which resembles closely those used for jackets such as our source and the Laton jacket. The one
thing that had always bothered me about this plate on other visits was that it was incomplete. This was unusual as the other hundred or so plates for embroidery in the books were complete and could easily be traced and repeated. This coiled stem was missing many of the leaves and small bugs that fill the voids.

Well, after the experience of making the master for our jacket, I wonder if the Trevilian plate is closer to what the professional workshop may have used. A master vine with many motifs which could be moved around and a few of the filler leaves/fauna that could be repeated where needed. Just enough to allow the draftsman to customize the pattern for a customer.

I will leave you with those thoughts and a few answers to some questions that were posed in the comments. A reader was interested in if we would publish the pattern on the web for download. The answer is no. We have been very fortunate to have such cooperation from the many institutions which house the historic embroideries, therefore we must respect their ownership of the intellectual property and design. We have been granted a one time use of the pattern at this point. That said, if many write in with such interest, we will explore a royalty relationship with theV&A and might publish the manual we are developing to stitch the jacket complete with the patterns. What I can say now is that Thistle Threads has entered into a contract with the V&A to adapt the jacket pattern into a series of kits using the same materials. These pieces will range from smalls to a larger piece that uses much of the repeat pattern. The kits will come out sometime in the early fall and will help to support both the V&A and Plimoth Plantation with part of the proceeds.This is the same reason why there aren’t any non-public domain historical pictures up yet on the blog. We are negotiating with the institutions for permission to use the photos we took of their collections on the blog. We really hope we will be able to do that in the future. Until then you may need to find a referenced book to see some of these beautiful images.

Tricia

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