Goldwork Master Class

Back in 2008, I had the opportunity to work on a joint project between Thistle-Threads, Plimoth Plantation, the Bard Graduate Center for the Decorative Arts, and the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art. Long story short, Plimoth Plantation and Thistle-Threads recreated a 17th Century women's jacket that relied heavily on gold and silk embroidery and going on display shortly at Winterthur. Said jacket was part of a museum display presented at the BGC and used dozens of museum pieces from the MET. My part of the project was to animated a pair of goldwork stitches: the ladder stitch and the zig-zag stitch.

Okay, fast forward. Late in 2009, Dr. Tricia Wilson-Nguyen of Thistle-Threads approached me to animate an additional twenty-six stitches for an Online University that she is offering on her website. The following video is one that Dr. Wilson-Nguyen and I put together to promote this 18-month Master Class on the art of gold and silk embroidery. During this video, you'll see not only parts of the stitches I animated for the BGC/MET project, but also the stitches that Dr. Wilson-Nguyen reconstructed from historical examples and stitched into a sampler that students will be recreating during the course of this class.