This is the last post about the school visit – but there are so many fun observations. In all the times I have worked with kids on the project there has been one universal action – crawling under the frame. I laugh every time and had to get some pictures of it this time. It doesn’t really occur to big humans to crawl under the frame to work instead of flipping it over. Ah – the flexibility of youth.
Tricia
I have thousands and thousands of pictures on this project. The ones that I love most are the pictures of the children working on the pieces. They can’t seem to hide the emotions they are feeling like we adults do.
Pure Joy.
Now these spanglers weren’t on the list that has been published – our last group and they certainly pushed up our numbers of participants. I will get a last and updated list out before the Winterthur exhibit. There seems to be just some sort of karma that the last people to stitch on the pieces other than us lead team pinch hitters were a group of children. Why else should we volunteer so much time on this project.
So the school set me up in a little office in the main office area and the call went out to the teachers as well. They have a floater and so she went around and any staff that wanted to try ran in too. Because it was spangles, we could get at least two on the frame at once. After I started out the first group, I didn’t have much work to do – each group of kids would teach the next kid or teacher to come in for a turn. And those who have done this before know that one spangle doesn’t count – you have to do several! I gave each kid a few spangles in an envelope to take home to show their family (had to send an explanatory email out too – what comes home in the evening burbles is sometimes a bit choppy). They loved this so much that I am thinking about doing an afterschool activity next year on embroidery at the school. Maybe even E-Textile embroidery – embroider your own light-up circuit.
Ripples. They keep going in all directions.
Tricia
I wanted to show the kids, and especially the girls, that science could be pretty and so I wanted to somehow bring that out with the presentation of the jacket embroidery to them. We have done alot of engineering or forensics on this project and the one that seemed the most approachable to a group of young kids was the deduction of the lace spangle manufacture.
So I grabbed a bunch of the photos of the historic spangles that we had taken and put them up on the smart board one by one. The kids had a piece of paper and they were supposed to draw the spangle and their observations as we saw new pictures. Below you can see one of the drawings. I let them yell out observations and debate things with each other.
‘That one has a flat side’
‘Hey some have little nips out of the bottom’
‘They look rusty’
After they had listed these things out, I had them try to come up with why some did and some didn’t. Then guess what type of metal it was. To help them, we did some experimental archeology with tin foil and hole punches. They started punching out shapes and of course making the mistake to overlap some, etc. This experiment was key. They saw the results of the punches and what they also weren’t able to make and within only another 2 minutes as a class they had deduced the entire manufacturing process. Each kid building on the others comments. It was COOL – I wasn’t sure they would get it.
After we finished talking and watching videos, we gave the kids the option of going to recess or staying behind and two at a time would be able to put spangles on the coif with me in the side office. The entire class elected to stay behind. Nine boys 9-10 years old included! Pictures of that tomorrow!
The kids were so buzzed about the visit and working on the coif that I heard from parents all night. The next day, the teachers printed out the pattern for the jacket and the kids colored it as a filler activity before Christmas recess. I got some snaps of them doing it. Early on in the project, we thought that it would make a great coloring page – seems it does!
Tricia
So I debated for months after the reaction to that video yesterday – should I do a school visit with the coif or not? Finally, I decided I would go for it as time was running out and I would kick myself later if I hadn’t invited these really nice kids to try it out. Many of the boys had seen the coif in process at my house when Judy Laning was out (I had been coaching them in a Lego Robotics competition). It was so neat to see them come up to her and ask her what she was doing, truly interested.
So I asked my son’s teachers if I could bring the unfinished coif into class and do a little program. They were really excited so we made a plan. Faith would visit a 4-5th grade classroom.
Then the big Boston Globe article came out two days before I was to come into class. That really got it smokin’. So by the time I got there two days before Christmas break, the kids had been doing all kinds of activities to prepare for my visit. These teachers are cool – they made the Plimoth Jacket a whole week event. The kids had read the article for reading group, done worksheets to prepare questions for me for writing/comprehension, and then studied the relationship of the time frame to their Great Explorers unit in social studies. So they were pretty excited by the time I came in with the coif. As Christmas break was a day away, they gave me carte blanch to work with the class. We had a blast – I was there for three hours. I wish I had been able to do this more.
So we started out by going over the project and the history of these jackets in society. I had some great video on hand with more history to show them. Then we went on to talk about the Gilt Sylke Twist – you can see some of the kids examining the threads here.
Tomorrow – Embroidery meets science experiments with a bunch of kids
Tricia
The biggest compliment I got last year was from one of my oldest’s child’s classmates. I had come to pick them up from afterschool and I was walking on cloud nine. I had just driven back to Boston from Plymouth where we had done the first fitting of the jacket on Elizabeth. The piece had come alive that day for the first time ever. I was still carrying my camera in my purse that I had filmed her with and couldn’t help showing the first people I saw the video of Elizabeth in a partially finished jacket twirling in a dark office. That is when we all started to scream – “she is covered in diamonds!”
So it happened that the first people I saw was a group of 7-10 year olds. I gathered them away from their construction paper and paste and burbled about this jacket and cool threads and pretty spangles. They crowded around, looked at the video on my little camera, and oohed and ahhed. Then one of the girls looked up at me and sighed and said ‘You have the COOLEST jobs’.
I have known these kids for a long time and often go into class to tell them about something I am doing. The last thing I had shown them was electro-textile jackets that played music through the fabrics. So I guess I do have cool jobs in their eyes. So I am not sure what people think when they hear my kids answer to the question in the title.
‘My mom is an embroidery engineer.’
What the heck is that?
Tricia
P.S. Here are the videos they saw that day
Sorry for not posting over the weekend. I had loaded a week of blogs ahead days ago and lost track – I just noticed that they had run out. It has been a very, very busy week and weekend. Sick kids home from school, lots of engineering business and trying to get the Floral Glove Course up and running. We had technical difficulties with that (solved now) that had me hitting my head against the wall for days. 5 hours on the phone with Quark technical support on Friday with no resolution.
Wendy calls that mind-numbing type work ‘Plaited Brain’. Where did that come from? Well, finishing the plaited braid on the jacket and coif of course! Her she is working on the feet of unfinished coils in September.
Tricia
While Susan was stitching on the coif; Denise, Wendy and I were busy talking about the outfit that Elizabeth would wear. It was mind boggling to get past the huge job of the jacket and realize that in order to see it on someone in a way that did it justice, we would have to outfit the woman with a ton of well researched and hand made pieces.
Good gosh – will this project ever end?
(Ok, you know some of us have thought that in moments of weakness). ‘Nuf of that – onto decisions again. So the silk for the skirt is chosen and seen here and then the shift is discussed and the lace/collar. We went around and around that decision for multiple meetings. And if you remember – we went searching for an authentic ruff too. Here was one of the plantations falling bands against the jacket. While the handmade lace is lovely, it isn’t quite right and so we decided against it. We also decided that a falling band covered too much.
Tricia
Ok – so you can imagine that as Faith was being assembled that it was tempting, very tempting to put her on. Most of us couldn’t even come close to any amount of that and so if we allowed ourselves the pleasure of laying the sleeve over our arm, it was just enough. While we did it the first time for pure fun and voyeurism, the eyebrows immediately went up as it taught us something.
Faith is heavy. In fact, her weight tripled with the silk and gold thread applied. So when you placed an unfinished sleeve on your arm it was weighted down. And the stiffness of the fabric was so apparent. Your mind immediately goes to all the portraits and those funny looking arm positions. Well dearie – that is all that they could do. I know that first hand. We saw it in spades when Elizabeth wore it. It wasn’t that she was trying to be careful with the embroidery – she couldn’t bend her arms!
And another thing we realized was that the natural skew of the fabric on the bias was gone with all the ‘pinning’ of the stitching. So when an arm bends, the fabric accommodates the bend by stretching along the bias. The body of the sleeve can’t do that any more at all. So all the stress gets transferred to the seams.
Hence the plaited braid. It wasn’t for pretty decoration at all. You had to have something on the seams to prevent the sleeve from ripping apart when you moved your arm. It all made sense, because I tell ya – stitching that over the seam is HARD.
Susan from Down Under was there at the right time and got to ‘wear’ the sleeve too. LUCKY her – I am sure she will carry the memory of that one for awhile.
Tricia
You may have noticed from yesterday’s post that there was writing, in fact signatures, in the seams of one of the pictures. You would be right! Most of the lead team had a chance to sign the seams where there was blank space. Two did not as they weren’t ever close to it at the time that the jacket was available. I wish we would have thought of this earlier and had many of the stitchers sign too – but we can’t think of everything ahead! We most likely wouldn’t have had space as there was other writing to be done. Jill earlier said in a post that there was a hex put on it to keep those who might consider dismantling it from that unfortunate act. But in seriousness, there is a story written in the seams. Most of the reason for the writings is to make sure that history doesn’t misinterpret the time that this piece was made. When we get around to the huge task of taking the 500 construction pictures and writing that part of the story – I’ll share that ’story’ with you.
But for now you can enjoy seeing Mark put his John Hancock in the piece.
Tricia
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