Having been trained as a scientist, I am apt to always question a statement, think about other ways things could have been done and ask for data to back up the statements.  I have to thank Susan and her patience with me all day.  The lack of written records because of the Great Fire in London frustrates us because many of the answers to these questions would have been recorded or derived from the record. But we have to try to derive the answers from the limited number of
embroidered examples.

When Susan brought up that the pattern outline was drawn on the linen by the tailor and then given over to the embroiderers workshop for the embroidery pattern to be applied, I had to question.  Not because I thought she was wrong, but I always need to find the evidence to defend the position.

We had the sleeves in front of us.  So I started looking closely at the inking.  What I saw was that the outline for the sleeve was done in strokes and contained similar errors to my tracing of the pattern outline.  Slight places where the ink was off track and a redo of that area happened a few times.  Also where the ink was thicker where the stroke started and then thin where the ink ran dry.  I asked if they had any evidence of tracing or template using.  We didn’t come to a conclusion on that.

Then the inking of the embroidery pattern.  It was much better done. There were thickenings of the ink and some places I noted where the drawing had elements that overlapped.  Not printed for sure.  The person who drew the pattern was very expert.  The same deviations from the intended line weren’t seen - possibly the difference between a tracing and freehand drawing by an expert.  What I did see that was interesting was an overlapping of motifs.  Let me explain.  On a particular butterfly, the outline of the wings contained stripe and half circle details.  On one wing the pattern of half circles did not overlap the stripes.  But on the other, one half circle overlapped a stripe - as if the drafter was free handing the design and couldn’t make the elements fit.  I don’t know how the embroiderer would have treated this mistake in the drafting.  There were several of these
types of errors when I took a cursory look.

Overall the pattern for the sleeve was custom for the shape and size of the sleeve, not a cut of a repeating pattern like ours is.  It is beautiful and very complex.  I would so love to analyze the ink on the outline and the embroidery pattern to determine if it was from the same bottle or not.  :-)  Won’t happen, but wouldn’t it be interesting to know!

I do agree with Susan that an expert drafter made the embroidery pattern and that the tailor did the outline.  But it was worth looking closely at the piece to support the claim.  Susan suggested that the master embroiderer in the workshop may have been the pattern designer/transferrer.  There is evidence to support that in the practices of today’s workshops.  In the Japanese tradition, the only person who can make a new design is the master.  Here you see me trying to trace our pattern.

Tricia

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

When Jill emailed me questions about the Laton jacket, many of them focused on the lace details which were too hard to see from the photos taken outside the case. The lace was applied to the jacket later in
its life, but shows in the portrait and thus is contemporary. We know that it was added later because there are remnants of the silk ribbon ties sewn into the seam which was removed to add the lace.

One of the big questions was how the lace was started or ended. Was it folded back and by how much? The answer was surprising to me. There was no fold finishing or tacking of ends under the seams. The lace was cut and the pairs looked to be tied (I will let the lace experts look at the photos to confirm this) and then applied directly to the wings with that cut edge just hanging there. For the other pieces (cuffs and the one piece that runs all around the fronts, collar, and back edge), the lace comes back and meets itself and so
they tied the pairs of the opposite ends together. The join was in the ‘V’ opening in the sleeve for the cuff lace and the join was just under the right ear area of the collar for the largest piece.

The amazing thing was as crude as the joins were made, it took Susan and I awhile to locate them. Especially around the jacket edge. We had to turn the jacket around a bit to find it. Just goes to show that when there is so much going on visually, these rough spots just don’t show up!

I add a picture of our lace here to show an end. To me, this is very nicely finished compared to what I saw on the jacket - but again, I can’t wait to her Carolyn’s comments once she looks at the photos.

Tricia

There was a mistake on the panel that was very interesting to me. One of the questions I have been working on for the MET exhibit has been the method of manufacturing gold threads. This also begets the question, who was making them. From the research so far, we see gold and silver wyre drawers making the wire and possibly flattening it. Then it seems to be turned over to ‘Gold Spinners’ who put the wire or strip around the silk core thread. We have not found any description of this process yet and the current processes used are a product of the industrial revolution and therefore don’t provide us clues as to the past.

The mistake was a small leaf under the bird’s tail. The buttonhole had been started with a strand of silk with a silver strip wrap. Then it changed to just silk at about the natural point that a 12-14″ strand of thread would have run out and have to be changed. What was interesting is that both the jacket and panel have only silk leaves. No metal wraps. But here we have a mistake…oops…started with the wrong thread. But they never seemed to take anything out if they could help it. Hardly noticeable in the final effect unless you are overly familiar with the pieces.

The ah-ha moment came when I saw that the thread wrapped with the metal strip was the same two color silk (green and yellow) as the rest of the leaf. We have talked in depth before how they achieved this heathered effect with a two color twisted thread. Our hypothesis has been that, at the frame, they twisted the two colors they needed to blend. But now we see that the blended thread is also wrapped. Chris, Lynn and I had a long discussion on this - repeated the next day with Susan with additional thoughts being added.

The wrapped blended thread implies that possibly someone in the workshop was skilled at spinning the silver strip or wyre onto the silk thread. Susan repeated what we all would have originally thought - that you bought the colors and threads that you needed from a third party as we do today. The vertical integration of gold thread or composite thread making with the embroidery studio has been a working hypothesis of mine for years. I especially see a great deal of evidence on professional pieces where there are multiple composite threads such as flat silk, wyre wrapped silk, and wyre wrapped silk purl that are all the same dye lot. Based on inventory records, the threads were a valuable commodity and thus having the flexibility to make what you need as you need it would be economical. But we do see that gold threads were certainly bought pre-made by the crown and then supplied to the embroiderer. Many new questions came from this discussion. Susan posed an interesting question: if the gold thread was pre-purchased by the person who commissioned the piece and given to the embroiderer, how would they know how much to buy and could they insure that the workshop wouldn’t skim off the top?

We talked at length about how we have gone about estimating thread for this project, a very important issue to make sure that we have silk of the same dye lot and that the threads we are having manufactured will be enough. Susan was very interested in the process. We have a lot to think about and these questions will color how we look at inventory and account book records in the future.

And if we were to think that this was usual, while I was at the EG collection, they thought I might be interested in seeing other pieces and brought out two coifs. On one of the coifs, this heathered thread with metal wrap was all over the piece. Nice.

I’ve added pictures of the two-color thread we used to prove how the heathered effect was done for you to reference.

Tricia