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The waistcoat is done by a different hand than the embroidery at the Maritime Museum. Our opinion is that a professional embroiderer did it. The embroidery is complete. The cloth just needs to be made up. For the time it is a discrete waistcoat, suitable for a middle aged sailor without aristrocratic pretensions.
The stain is ink, they think. They believe that it was spilled on the cloth sometime after it came into their collection.
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The tapa cloth is fine, but not as fine as silk satin so it must have been a challenge for the embroiderer to achieve such beautifully fine, even stitches. The cloth is beige and there is an underlayer of linen to support the embroidery. We couldn't tell if it was tambour work because the stitches were so even and tiny.
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