Melinda is working on the narration for the video of our project for her exhibit. She asked, how many hours of embroidery have been done so far?

In the fine old tradition of passing the buck, I asked Arianna to go through the heap of time sheets from over a year’s worth of embroidery sessions. She patiently, and painstakingly, combed each one, totaling the minutes, figuring hours, totaling hours, checking, double checking, walking away for coffee ….

After a couple of days, she gave me a little yellow post-it with the total so far -

2183.5

Very nearly 2200 hundred hours. This is, as Tricia says, “time spent moving the needle”. This isn’t shopping, or chatting, or even practicing on the doodle cloth. This includes time spent on the coif and forehead cloth, but not Tricia’s hours or some of Wendy’s, so it probably all evens out. Of course we still have the gold and sequins to go, so the final, grand total may top our original estimate, but we’ll continue to keep good records so we’ll be able to report back.

I’m amazed and humbly grateful. Thank you all so much for your dedication to this project.

Because a number like that deserves some eye candy to go with it, here’s a photo of show & tells waiting their turn. I love this; it’s such a heap of riches, of time and skill and precious needleworked beauty and usefulness. Included here are items by Sandye, Jennifer, Sharon and Catherine.

Norma has been here stitching at least a couple of times before. She comes from Connecticut.

This past weekend for show & tell Norma brought her in-progress nightcap, the project Tricia taught last February in Williamsburg. It is an awesome piece, even in-progress. The kit came with a slate frame. Oooh.

Plus Norma brought another couple of Tricia’s pieces - the glove and a rose with goldwork set into a box. I particularly love this one. It unites two of my favorite things, red and something to put things in.

Norma also brought a box with one of Elizabeth Creeden’s designs set into the top. This is a mourning piece, and is dedicated to a friend of Norma’s who passed away while helping out another friend. The second friend and her family were all down with what seemed like the flu. Norma’s friend Kathy went over to help out, but turned out they didn’t have the flu. They were slowly being poisoned by carbon monoxide. Norma’s friend Kathy died as well as two members of the family. Norma finished this piece in tribute to her friend, and part of a very long tradition of women memorializing loved ones through needlework.

During the weekend Norma completed fifteen detached butterfly wings. I haven’t had a chance yet to count how many there are total, but 15 must win her the Butterfly Queen crown. Thanks, Norma.

Last winter, Catherine and Deb from Kansas came out to Plymouth to embroider bearing gifts of coffee and chocolate. This September they came again, bringing more chocolate (bless them) and a friend! Catherine and Deb had been trying to persuade Sandye to come out to Plymouth and exercise her considerable embroidery skill on the jacket, but, well, we all know the gravitational pull of our usual orbit can be pretty strong. This time,they contacted Sandye’s husband and explained the situation. He responded by making Sandye a plane reservation and then telling her to sort out the rest of the arrangements. How great is that?

Sandye brought treasures to share with us. First is a favor she made for her husband to carry. They are members of the Society for Creative Anachronism, as are many of our embroidery volunteers. The first picture is Sandye holding up her work, the second is a close up. She said that she has often been asked why she made him such a lovely favor to carry, wouldn’t it get ruined? She says, I know how to make another. And after hearing about his supportive attitude towards her avocation, I bet we all agree he totally deserves pretties.

Sandye really likes snails. Do you see how the coiling vine is the snail’s shell? It’s subtle, and so pleasing because you have to discover it. She said she used up leftovers from other projects on this.

Here is a coif she embroidered. There are many motifs on it, including a snail which isn’t visible from this angle.

The last piece was a gift to Sandye from Catherine. In the SCA it is an honor and an achievement to receive a laurel (or is always plural?), and it sounds like it can also be a grand party! Catherine made this for Sandye for Sandye’s laurel award.  See the snail?

(SCA members, did I mess that up completely? Straighten me out.)

Tricia sent this to me this morning:

I am up early this morning preparing for my trip to see the jacket in the UK and took a quick look at the blog to see Jill’s latest entry. It made me very happy and again validated the enormous amount of work this project has required.

We have been tallying the hours put into this project to help the Melinda Watt understand the labor that may have been used during the original construction. 1200 hours of productive embroidery time up to June 1. We embroidered allot since then. That only counts the minutes that the needles were actually moving. Most likely another 1200 hours of time the stitchers were there preparing, reading instructions, etc.

Then there are the staff hours. Countless at this point - setting up, organizing, feeding us, blogging. And working their normal load these two years to boot! And the hours that Wendy has spent supervising the workshop so I might be home on the weekend to be with my children. About 600 or more easily.

My hours. Jill and the volunteer coordinator have been on me to give them that tally. Pattern drafting, searching the world for supplies, re-engineering and testing threads, writing the instructions, embroidering, lecturing…we figure now about 1000 + hours over the project.

The blog this morning just reinforces the reward. The informal nature of the workshop set up has consistently provided opportunities for people to try and learn skills they would never have tried before.
Bobbin lace isn’t something you come upon easily and it is a skill with a barrier of cost and availability of instruction to overcome.

But by having the pillow there, it is easy to invite a person to sit for a few minutes and make the moves that Carolyn tells you to make. Then it is instantly demystified and the siren of the bobbin has caught you.

We laugh in the workroom when visitors (there are massive numbers of them) come in to look. There is a buzz on the plantation when we are working and people just show up. If you linger too long, the needle
is passed to your hand. Many people have been waylaid to put a few stitches in. If they resist - we give them a doodle cloth and show them. Sometimes we end up with that visitor staying for an hour stitching on the cloth. One set of visitors from our first session were converted and have become regular stitchers, traveling from the south to work with us over and over again. And if you are an intern, well expect that you will learn as part of your job.

Lilia is shown in her volunteer costume just in for a few minutes on break. She had to do something on the jacket, she has been our weekend helper for the project.

We are looking at the future of our handcrafts in this picture.

That is our reward.

Tricia

The September 26-29 session had the largest attendance since our first session in June, 2007. This session also had a really impressive show & tell on Saturday afternoon.

Today I’ll share Carolyn H’s treasures. First, though, some photos of Carolyn’s protegees. She’s evangelizing bobbin lace, and encouraging newbies to try. My daughter Lilia is only too happy to learn, and this is actually the second time Carolyn has helped her to make lace. I think bobbin lace tools and materials will be coming to our house soon.

Norma also did some, but we didn’t get a photo. And here’s Carli making some lace too. Wendy was jokingly teasing Carli about getting back to real work, and Carolyn was threatening to convert all the embroiderers. That’s Cheryl in the background, stitching detached butterfly wings on the cozy couch.

Carolyn brought some beautiful and poignant treasures to share. Here she is with a lace fan that she made and that her late daughter carried at her wedding. Behind her you can see one of the pieces of the jacket that was retired from service this weekend; nothing remains to do on it except the gold work and the bird.

Here’s a lovely piece of lace with a ladybug motif.

Carolyn introduced us to the joy of collecting bobbins. Apparently there are many different kinds of bobbin lace and each kind or style has a different kind of bobbins. We all know that the toys I mean tools are at least half the fun of a needlework technique.

Some have beads (called spangles, just to make things confusing with the teardrop shaped metal tags), some are made of hollow glass, some are beautiful exotic wood, you get the idea. Here are few in my hand, the left hand one is possibly what bobbins looked like in the early 17th century. As Carolyn said, there’s really very little evidence to go on.

This is possibly the most precious needlework ever. Carolyn’s daughter, who passed away about four years ago, started this piece. Carolyn was nervous about working on it because, as she said, it was very different from anything I’d ever done before. But I managed, OK, I think. She’s too modest. I couldn’t tell where Caroline left off and Carolyn picked it up. What a beautiful gift to her daughter’s memory, to finish this piece despite being nervous about the techniques. I was so glad she brought it to share.

Carolyn brought a present for the Wardrobe Department today. She gave us a copy of Le Pompe, 1559: Patterns for Venetian bobbin lace by Santina Levey and Patricia Payne. When we’re done with the jacket lace, which is getting closer and closer; already 80 inches of the “long piece,” both wings, and almost all of one cuff are completed, she’s planning to turn her attention to some simple white lace for the period clothing of our interpreters. This book will help.