If you’re into historical costuming, sewing, dressmaking and so forth, then you have likely heard of Bernadette Banner. If you haven’t heard of her and you are intrigued by historical costume, then you might look her up!
Bernadette Banner is an online content creator (you can find her extensive YouTube channel here and her website here) who focuses on dressmaking before the era of the sewing machine. She recreates period-specific clothing by hand (and sometimes with period-specific machinery – but it’s mostly by hand, and that’s No Small Thing).
Recently, she and Hand & Lock (of embroidery renown) collaborated on an engrossing documentary about embroidering an 18th century waistcoat and produced a little embroidery kit to go along with it.
The images here are screen captures from the video that you’ll find linked to below.
The video – 18th Century Embroidery is No Joke – can be found here. It clocks in over 30 minutes, but it didn’t seem long to me. I started watching and next thing I knew, it was over!
The outcome of the project and its explorations is a Regency / 21st Century Meld of an embroidered waistcoat. Utilizing modern methods of machine embroidery combined with traditional methods of goldwork (couching and chip work) and other hand techniques – and discussing along the way the fluctuations in the clothing industry throughout history, the prohibitive cost of creating entirely hand-embroidered clothing of this scale, and more – the participants in the video give their audience a good understanding of what’s involved in producing even a “simple” embroidered waistcoat.
“Simple” is certainly not meant to be derogatory. There’s nothing simple about what this collaboration produced. And even though there are more elaborate waistcoats out there – like the ones I highlighted from this visit to the Bavarian National Museum, where there are at least these two (and a monkey’s coat) – this one is quite beautiful, even if not as elaborate.
And, oh! The pailettes! How they sparkle!
To ice the collaborative cake, Hand & Lock produced a kit to go along with the video. It includes ground fabric worked with a machine embroidered motif that corresponds with the stylistic flavor of the waistcoat (the ground fabric is a poly satin, just so you know), to which the embroiderer applies goldwork, beads, and the like that require hand application. It’s a neat idea! And it’s a great way to get a feel for what was involved in completing this (forgive the pun, but you had to know it was coming…) banner achievement.
You can find the kit on Hand & Lock, here.
I hope you enjoy the video!
Coming Up!
We’ll be starting the stitch-along for Blackberry Brambles & Blossoms next week, with the first installment covering tools, supplies, and designs. So even if you haven’t purchased a kit, you can follow along and glean some good tips and techniques to add to your embroidery repertoire.
I’ll also show you a project that I’m experimenting with, testing threads and whatnot.
And we’ll continue our discussion of design transfer techniques. I’ve got a few other seldom-discussed methods that may or may not work for you – but you may as well know about them!
Have a lovely weekend!
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