If you are on the west coast and near San Fransisco, I will be giving a lecture about the jacket at Needle in a Haystack in Alemeda, CA on Saturday, April 18th. (http://www.needlestack.com/classes.html). I will be bringing the unfinished coif and forehead cloth for the attendees to see and maybe add a stitch or two themselves! Call Needle in a Haystack to register a spot. Hope to see you there!
Tricia
We started a session on Friday and worked all weekend. Monday is the last day of the session, but we had a small celebration in the workroom at 10:32 am on Sunday. That is when I took the last – yes LAST – stitches on the frame with two gussets on it. A small victory, but we were all excited to be starting on the official retiring of frames for good. It was funny, it was the first time I ever took a stitch with about seven paparazzi taking pictures of me. Flash, flash, flash. We were making alot of progress over the weekend, there may be a few more exciting ends to report tomorrow.
Tricia
Gussets
Judy and I were joined by Linda Fenton on Day 5 of the stitch-in. Linda worked on the coif which is not very far along. It had been set aside for awhile to allow progress to be concentrated on the jacket pieces. She was gracious enough to finish a bunch of trifoil leaves (the dreaded motif #3) which had been partially worked. Judy continued on plaited braid on the right under sleeve. Judy had to leave on Day 6, but she did manage to steal a bit of progress in on the morning before her flight.
Thank you so much Judy for getting the last two pieces of the jacket half filled with gold! You are queen of the Plaited Braid.
Tricia
Day 5 and 6 progress
Ok, maybe I was doing too much embroidery last week with Judy and got a little punchy thinking up titles! One of the big reasons we had waited on the birds was uncertainty about the tail and wing stitches. It was very hard to tell from the photos that Susan had sent me if the black outline was reverse chain or something else. Then there was the fill in each of the outlined areas. It seemed as if there was knot stitch, plaited braid, something akin to fly stitch, heavy chain, and reverse chain. And there didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason between the different birds to what stitch was used for which fiber. There seemed to be a blue and pink silk along with silver and silver-gilt used.
I closely photographed the birds when I visited the jacket. The outline stitch was stem stitch in black. In the areas where the black wasn’t flanked on either side by other thread, it had broken away leaving needle holes. After outlining the feathers on our jacket, I set about looking at all the pictures in detail and charting out on a piece of paper the patterns that showed up.
Outlined Wing and Tail
What I noted was that there are four regions to the wing/tail. Closest to the breast is the vertical segment. Always done in silver-gilt or silver. Could be done in plaited braid or heavy chain. Next segment of the wing is done in alternating blue silk and silver-gilt. The stitches there could be plaited braid, heavy chain, ceylon stitch or fly. The next segment was the tip of the wing and was worked in pink and silver using again plaited braid, heavy chain, ceylon or fly. The tail could have one or two segments and was always ended in a blue feather with silver-gilt. But again, a mixture of stitches between birds.
Semi-Filled Tail
This perplexed me until I was looking more closely at our outlined spaces on two birds and was trying to choose among their stitches for each outlined feather and realized what had been going on. Depending on the tracing and the stem stitch outline, some segments were bigger or smaller than others. When using a set thread, some stitches such as heavy chain are defined in their width and can’t get much bigger. So the top segment of a pink wing might be narrow and would fit a heavy chain width, the lower pink segment might be wider and so something else would have to be worked there to fill it properly. There, fly or ceylon might fit the bill. Duh. They did what worked. Yet again that is the lesson we have learned over and over. We keep getting fooled by the seeming regularity to the order of stitch choice and working direction, when in reality the stitchers just needed to get it done however they could.
Their mantra: ‘Get it Done, Save Silk, Skimp on Gold, Whatever Works’
When we apply that to any perplexing problem looking at historic embroidery – the answer becomes clear. I find this project fantastic because while these points might be ‘Duh’ moments to those engaged in the craft, they are not to historians of textiles and costume. Often they get wrapped up in the possibilities of layers of meaning in these objects and forget that the craftspeople working on them were not always ‘Artists’ in the esoteric sense but tradespeople who needed to make money to eat or amateurs who wanted to make something pretty for a gift. And often the mixed possibilities inherent in “Get it Done” are lost on historians. Buying premade parts, using leftovers, farming out your piece to others to finish, buying kits, etc. This project has put together a wealth of data to show that the thought process of the craft was the same 400 years ago as today.
Earlier this year we published an article on the making of gilt sylke twist in Plimoth Life magazine. The article has been reprinted with additional photographs in Sampler and Antique Needlework Quarterly this month. It is the Spring 2009 issue. A great issue overall, there are a few other articles that are related – an article about the Goodheart collection and an interview with Melinda Watt, one of the two curators of the ‘Twixt Art and Nature exhibit’. So on the whole, it is stuffed with 17th century needlework. Included along with the articles are two related projects. One of which is the Jacobean Pinkeep, a project I put together for SANQ to help promote the fibers. It was part of the ‘horse trading’ I have talked about before. In order to get the GST and gold threads made, I agreed to publish a project to help launch the threads commercially. For all of you that have asked about it’s availability before – this project also uses the gilt passing #4 on silk that we are using for the plaited braid in addition to Redde Gilt Sylke Twist.
The kit for the project is available on the Thistle Threads site. If I get to it this week, the Gilt Passing #4 on silk will also be available too. It will be sold with a $5 donation to the institution where the Jacket will be displayed to start their exhibition fund.
Yes, you read that correctly. We are posting here the last sessions at the Plantation for working on the jacket. If you have EVER thought of coming to work on the piece, this is your last chance! As those who have come can attest, it is alot of fun and very rewarding. We have many who have been over and over from as far away as Canada!
The dates are:
Thursday, May 7th – Saturday, May 9th
Friday, May 29th – Monday, June 1st
Friday, July 24th – Monday, July 27th
May 9th will also coincide with the Costume Society of America symposium which will be held at the Plantation. They will visit the workshop to see the jacket in process and I think everyone will enjoy the interaction. We are happy to have you for a day or an entire session. With the economy, if the cost of housing is keeping you from participating – let us know and we can see if we can find a local stitcher who might be able to offer a guest room.
Hope to see you there!
Tricia
Update: I forgot to give my contact info! tricia@alum.mit.edu
After figuring out the head, it was on to the body of the bird. Check out the bird shown in the picture on the V&A Collections website (http://collections.vam.ac.uk/objectid/O15345). The bird body is worked in trellis stitch and moves from dark green to red in color. The first time I worked the bird body, I started from the top of the bird’s back which seemed natural to me. Because the neck area is small, you seem to reach the breast before yo have the chance to transition to red. I had to add some extra red stitches on the edge of previously worked finished rows to try to get the breast red.
Ugly Birdie
When finished, I didn’t like the way it looked – especially the red breast. So back to the drawing board…how did they do it? I had figured out how to read the trellis stitch for the beak and applied that to the bird body. I was surprised, they did work the bird upside down starting from the red breast. When I tried that for the second bird, it looked like the original embroidery. Since the red is very eye catching, they worked it first to get the best line.
Pretty Birdie
If you have been a reader of the blog for years, you will remember that I had traced the coif upside down the first time. Jill had noticed it because the birds were all feet up – dead birds. Guess I was ahead of my time.
Tricia
Just like the feet, it was hard to figure out what was going on with the bird beaks in the photos of the jacket (1359-1900). Pictures of the panel in the Embroiderers’ Guild collection show a it is worked in ‘heavy ceylon’ with a light blue thread. I’ll try to work ‘heavy ceylon’ at some point and post it so I can show the difference between it and regular ceylon.
The visit to the jacket showed that the beak was worked in trellis stitch. Too bad as I had liked the effect on the panel much better – it resulted in a nice sharp beak with contrast to the trellis stitching of the bird head/body. It was stitched in the same taupe color as the bird feet.
When I thought about attacking the triangular shape, I thought that it would be natural to stitch north – south along the wide end across from the tip and work each row shorter until I had one stitch left for the tip. It would make a nice sharp tip. I did the first beak that was as shown here. Before this, I had never thought allot about how to ‘decode’ trellis to determine the direction a piece was worked and what was top and bottom. After getting the beak done, it was obvious to me that it wasn’t the same as the photograph. So I had to figure out how the stitch can be decoded.
As you work trellis stitch, a tail with a knot ‘head’ is formed. The tail is above the knot and so it points to the top of the embroidery. The curve of the tail shows you which way the row was worked – curving to the left if you were progressing right to left and curving to the right if you were progressing left to right.
Final Test Beak
With this in hand, I could read the beak on the original jacket. The beaks were worked from head to tip with the bird right side up.
Tricia
Correct Beak
While there was much progress going on with plaited braid, I was working on getting this blog going and birds. We had waited to start the birds and I am very happy we did, as there are a few things that hadn’t shown up in the photos on-line and in print. One of those was the coloration of the bird head. Previously we had thought it was red and pink with a spider web as an eye in gold thread. Now we know that it is red, pink and yellow with the gold eye. It was kinda hard to tell since the pink and yellow are close in value and it was somewhat obscured by the gold eye.
Tricia
Yesterday I showed how Judy makes nice tapered points in plaited braid using tweezers. Previously in sessions, the tapers came up as an issue and Wendy came up with putting a reverse chain stitch or two at the end or to fill in those tight spots. The pictures here show both. The big question was – how did they treat these tough areas. So Judy and I went through my photos of the jacket (1359-1900) and several other similar pieces worked with coiled stems of plaited braid. The answer was: BOTH and none. None meaning they would stop before the taper was fully filled and it would look somewhat awkward. The reverse chain solution was there many times and then lovely little tapers filled with smaller and smaller plaited braid. The cool thing was that Judy has found that she needs to space the stitches out farther to fill the taper. This results in the straight stitches on the back being farther apart. I had a photo of a tapered region on a period piece – both back and front – and we found the same thing, their stitch spacing increased also.
Tricia
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