I got a note from Tricia today. She’s in the UK, on a special birthday trip with a couple of friends. In addition to sightseeing and spa visits, she spent some quality time with the EG panel.

The Embroiderers’ Guild in the UK owns a flat panel of embroidery which has sometimes been called a coif and sometimes a cushion. Either way, it is the same embroidery pattern as our jacket and as the V&A jacket #1359-1900. Because this panel is flat, studying photos of it back in the winter of 2007 helped Tricia to see the master pattern repeat of the jacket, which then made it easier to transfer the pattern to the jacket pieces. The panel helped, but the process still involved several hours at least of staring and thinking and comparing and considering before the master repeat revealed itself.

She said that she’s got some great photos of the bird beaks and feet, and she’s ready to start work on the birds when she gets back. She also said that the flowers on the flat panel are stuffed, and she’s curious to see if they are on the jacket also, which she’ll be visiting tomorrow (today by the time you read this, I expect).

She’s already taken over 350 photos and will have lots to share with us when she gets back to an internet connection (this note came from her iPhone). I can’t wait to hear what she has to say about the jacket.

Here’s a photo of one of Sharon’s needlework treasures, that she shared at show & tell this last session.

From Marty, via the comments:

What would they have kept in their knitted pocket? Also, were these pockets made in other ways, such as quilted or of leather?

We surmise that the colonists kept small personal items in their knitted pockets, also coins, although there was little use for coins during Plymouth Colony’s early years. We guess perhaps a comb or a thimble, a handkerchief, a letter, or ? I recall one interpreter who was portraying the mother of a five year old son. She always kept two or three little pebbles in her pocket as if he’d brought them to her. I thought that was kind of weird, this being long before I was the mother of a small son. Years later, I thought of her whenever I emptied my pockets at the end of the day and found pebbles.

Our interpreters keep all of those things in their 17th-century pockets, plus marbles, or a steel striker and flint and tinder (for period fire starting) and reproduction 17th-century coins. I know they also keep bent nails, bits of twine, yarn or rope, books of matches (for non-period fire starting), hard candy/cough drops and cigarette butts. These things I have cleaned out of pockets prior to washing/dry-cleaning.

If you look carefully at 17th-century paintings, especially crowd scenes, you can find many shapes and sizes of personal bag/pouch/pocket. They seem to be made of a variety of materials. Some look sewn of cloth or leather. Of course quite a number of embroidered “sweete bags” survive in modern museums, but these would have been beyond the means of most of the Plymouth residents. The V&A has a book called Bags, written I think by Valerie Cummings. Most of the examples are post-1650 (alas) but it is worth a look.

We have two or three kinds of small-to-medium-sized leather pockets/pouches represented on our sites as well as the knitted ones. There several more kinds I would like to have, but have not yet developed either the methods to make them or sourced all the components we’d need.

I like that term, when Jill said it the other day to describe what we were doing it gave me all the validation I needed to go buy myself an Indiana Jones hat and bring a whip to the next session!

What she really meant was that we were listing all the means we could imagine to get the results we were seeing from the photographs of a particular detail on the jacket and then trying all of them on the side to see what results we got and comparing them to the original. It often takes more than one person to do this as you feed off each other to come up with various options that the embroiderer of the past may have tried.

The details in question were the veins on the leaves. Since a portion of the embroidery pattern was traced from the Embroiderers’ Guild (UK) piece, we had their veins on our linen. But as comes up constantly on this project, you can see the forest but don’t notice the grass until you need to walk through it! The veins on the EG piece all have a main vein and all the nice off-shoots. We noted that the veins on the jacket in the V&A collection only have the main vein. Disappointing at first, until you realize that we have to do about a hundred or more of them. As we looked at them, we were confused. I have to admit that my ‘forest view’ had told me that they would be couched down and so I had carefully selected a couching thread the night before and brought it with me.

They didn’t seemed couched, in fact they looked like two twisted gold threads. But how was it secured? Options were a) can’t see couched thread, b) it is one long stitch that is wrapped on itself after coming back up through the fabric, c) the gold is used to couch itself, or d) a loop of gold is twisted and held down at the tip. In the next two photos, you can see all these options worked except that with a couching thread made of silk. We discounted that option until all others failed. These embroiderers were going for speed, remember.

If you want to see the original, there is a nice close-up on the V&A website that shows these veins. You can compare to our work and see if you agree. In the end, the easiest method worked the best and looks just like the original. We come up at the base of the leaf and down near the tip. Go back up again near the needle hole and wrap the laid gold thread three-four times and back in at the base of the leaf. Very fast.

Tricia

If you want to see the close-up on the V&A website, remember you have to go from the V&A main page to the “collections” page, and use THAT search function – the “search the collections” one; NOT the search box that appears on the upper right corner of the main page. Once you have the search-the-collections box, put in 1359-1900 to see the embroidery pattern jacket. jmh

Hi everyone, I haven’t dropped off the face of the earth. Husband Away turned into Husband Home but with Appendicitis. He no longer has appendicitis, no longer has an appendix even, but I’ve been a little preoccupied. Distracted. Frazzled, as a co-worker so eloquently put it this morning. And then last night we had the Thunderstorms. Thou shalt not fire up the computer during a violent thunderstorm.

Anyway, Jill H (the lace making Jill H, as opposed to me, the non-lace making Jill H) asked about finding 1359-1900. The key is to search the V&A collections. You can’t use the search function in the upper right hand corner of their website. That searches for things like exhibits and lectures and new books. You have to click the ‘collections’ option (other options on that page are exhibits, things to do, your visit, support us, contact us, etc.). Once in the collections section, you have choices of which collection to look at. There is also a ’search the collections’ box. It’s the top left section. Click on that and you get a screen with a search box on the left. Continue to ignore the search box in the upper right. It does not love you.

The search box you want says ‘all fields’ above it, and below there are two buttons: clear field and search. Put ‘1359-1900′ in this search box and click search. This will get you the embroidery-pattern jacket. If you instead put in ‘Laton jacket’ you will get the garment-and-lace-pattern jacket. Have fun!

Emily and Lacey have been exceedingly busy while I’ve been frazzling. Lacey has made three pairs of canvas breeches and is working on her fourth. She’s also knitting mittens. Emily is making a gown for a small child who soon will be volunteering in the English Village. She’s also making a green canvas suit for one of the interpretive artisans. Emily left me a note saying that yesterday’s late-afternoon fitting with him went “swimmingly. He says the fabric is the same color as his truck. I’m assuming this is a good thing.” Hope so. Penny is taking a well-deserved looong weekend. When she comes back Monday she and Emily and Lacey will be preparing for a two-day dye fest. On Tuesday and Wednesday of next week they’ll be dyeing wool yarn with natural dyes outside the Crafts Center. I’m so excited about this, I can’t wait. If you’re in the neighborhood, come see.

Several of the stitches we’re using on the jacket have been diagrammed and illustrated by Tricia. Her directions and photos are fantastic, I think. They really helped me understand these stitches, none of which I’d ever tried before last summer.

Tricia hasn’t done up her own version of the plaited braid stitch instructions, though, and likely won’t for some time. Fortunately, Linda Connors of Calico Crossroads has, and has made them available through her website for a very small fee. Here’s a link to the searchable catalog for Calico Crossroads. Put in plaited braid stitch and it should come up; if not email Linda for help.

If you want to see images of the two original jackets we’re using for this project, go to the V&A website, to the collections page. Go to the ’search collections’ feature. In the search box type “Laton jacket” for many pictures of this jacket and the portrait of Margaret Laton wearing it. This jacket is the source of the garment pattern and the lace that we’re reproducing. To see the jacket bearing the embroidery pattern, put “1359-1900″ in the search field. There are fewer pictures of this one available, but they’re gorgeous.

• We entered the dog days not long ago, and I can really feel it. The heat isn’t oppressive, but it is humid, the air quality is sub-par, and I’m suffering from embroidery craving. All I want to do is work on that right front piece, the one that’s less done than all the other pieces because it languished for months in an impossibly wide frame. It’s been re-framed and is marginally easier to work, and I want to stitch a columbine. And a pansy. And a few butterflies. Maybe some honeysuckle buds or a pink split by a gusset. But not the worms. I bear them a grudge for not being what I thought they were. Bah.
• Gilt Sylke Twist is noisy. It’s thinner than the soie perlee, but because of the gold wire wrapping it’s almost ribbed. The first time I pulled it through the linen I gasped at the noise. The more experienced stitchers in the room chuckled, oh, yes, it IS noisy. After you work with it a while you forget, mesmerized by its beauty.
• Thanks for the note about the symposium, Cate. We’ll be holding all the events at Plimoth, and the capacity is about 200. Which seems like not a lot unless you’re actually planning it and still aren’t sure if anyone will come. Then it seems like quite a lot indeed. Those dates are 24-27 September, 2009.
• Lacey’s experience with the hot dog buns rang a bell for lots of transplanted New Englanders who miss the familiar buns of their youth. Isn’t it funny what you miss? Years and years ago I spent a year in England and missed Oreos. Like crazy. When I can have them any time I almost never do. And yes, I’m sure while there I saw The Jacket at the V&A, but alas I had no idea how important it would become in my life and so wasted the chance to really SEE it.
• Who doesn’t want to come to Plymouth in August? Carolyn W has a free weekend and will be coming to make lace 22 – 24 August (Fri – Sun) so we decided to make a party of it and invite everyone. Have a few days? Want to come to the sea? Actually, by that time it usually isn’t so hot and humid anymore. And, at least we won’t have to worry about having to cancel for snow, like last winter. email me jhall@plimoth.org
• The credit for the plaited braid stitch illustrations in Plimoth’s embroidered coif kit belongs to Oliver Kline and Joanna Kline Cadorette. I heard from Joanna that she drew the initial sketches and her father cleaned them up on the computer and made them all nice and easy to understand. Thank you, Mr. Kline.

What are you doing Thursday September 24 – Sunday September 27, 2009?

I hope you answer, “Coming to Plymouth for The Embroiderers’ Story: Recreating a Stuart Jacket at Plimoth Plantation“! Yep, we’ve committed to throwing a major party to celebrate the creation of this remarkable garment.

I’ll give you the details I have now so you can mark your calendars and save the dates, but I don’t have the whole thing carved in stone yet. Susan North has promised to come, Susan North of the V&A, the benevolent godmother of the project, who has done so much to support this work. At first she thought she couldn’t manage it as there is a 17th-century dress conference in Switzerland the same weekend. This is one of those weird instances of problem-dissolving I’ve referred to before. After a few weeks of wondering if we could really have a jacket conference without her, I heard about that 17th-century conference in another context and realized – that one is 2008 and ours is 2009 and there’s no conflict at all. Whew.

We’ll have a pre-conference full-day class with Tricia Wilson Nguyen (who else? and I hope she wrote it down because she agreed in front of witnesses and if she didn’t write it down, well, I bet she will when she reads this) on Thursday. Friday and Saturday will be lectures/presentations in the morning and tours/classes in the afternoons. Some of the presenters will place these jackets in historical context, who wore them, how they were made, that kind of thing. Some will address how we made this particular jacket. We’re planning a tour to the RI School of Design Museum in Providence, RI. They have a portrait of a woman wearing an embroidered jacket. We’ll also see some of their fantastic textiles collection in a behind-the-scenes tour. We’ll have a farewell brunch on Sunday with a speaker, but it won’t be a full day. One evening we’ll have a benefit reception, another we’ll have a 17th-century dinner. I will of course let you know more details as they are finalized.

Please spread the word about this event. It will definitely be a once-in-a-lifetime experience. We are not prepared to take pre-registrations quite this early, but you know I’ll let you know the minute we can. Just don’t promise to be somewhere else that weekend.

(‘K. I’m just about ready to hit ‘publish’ and am feeling an attack of nerves. You’d think I’d be immune by now, having jumped feet first into so much deep water where this jacket is concerned, but no. Still nervous.)

ETA: This post now reflects the NEW date.

And let Linda V from Arizona write tonight’s post. Linda came to Plymouth last summer to work on the jacket. She also offered to work at home on a project for us. She’s reproducing a red silk double-running stitch-embroidered handkerchief from the V & A (where else?) that we can use either in the upcoming exhibit or in some of our living history programs.

The first picture is the front, with a dime for scale. The second is the back. Linda wrote:

It’s an interesting project and I’m enjoying working on it. At 55 count it’s a new experience for me to have to use magnification to do the job! It is a slow go however. What you see in the photos is roughly 30 hours of work. About 10 hours of work per flower/repeat. I’m going forward, but it will not be a quick project.

Lyn from Canada taught Linda a nifty technique for anchoring the thread without a knot. Linda writes: Nan Euler’s Surface Anchoring method is working well. It is a little challenging to do it at this scale, but I love that you hardly see the beginning or ending of the threads.

Elmsley Rose did a whole blog entry about the S and Z twist that we’ve been talking about. Check it out HERE.