Published August 28, 2010
in General.
I have another finish for you on the Floral Glove class. This one is really special. Amy Mitten-Stevens took the class and decided to modify the design based on a piece of embroidery she loves. Love the pea pods and other little details in the design. She said that she used the project as an opportunity to stretch herself and learn bobbin lace as well to make her own trim for the ribbon. COOL! Look closely, she worked Gobelin in the background on the linen to get that look of a metal fabric. She also added more finishing details – such as stuffed fingers.
Love it!
Tricia
Published August 26, 2010
in General.
I had mentioned after my trip to London that there was a new book on the way from V&A Publishing by Susan North, Jenny Tiramani, Luca Costigliolo, Claire Thornton, Armelle Lucas and Christine Prentis. Well the title is now known and it is up on Amazon for far pre-order. The book is scheduled to be released April 2011 but you can see what to look forward to. (Please pre-order through your local independent store if at all possible).
It has the Layton Jacket done in it!
I saw the inside galleys of the book and it will be one for the shelf. While it is billed as a piece for garment construction, it is filled with close pictures of embroidery and bobbin lace as well. This is the embroidered jacket as well as a wonderful pair of embroidered Stuart gloves.
Here is the description from Amazon:
This breathtakingly detailed book presents dress patterns, construction details, embroidery and making instructions for fifteen garments and accessories from a seventeenth-century woman’s wardrobe. Full step-by-step drawings of the construction sequence are given for each garment alongside photographs of the objects and the groundbreaking use of x-ray photography revealing the hidden elements of the clothes, the precise number of layers and the stitches used inside.
Susan North is Curator in the V&A Fashion, Textiles and Furniture Department. Jenny Tiramani, Luca Costigliolo, Claire Thornton, Armelle Lucas and Christine Prentis, who produced the patterns for the book, were all members of the wardrobe team at Shakespeare’s Globe between 1999 and 2005.
Published August 21, 2010
in General.
I’m teaching this weekend for the Lake Michigan Sampler Guild and will be squeezing in a bit of historic embroidery viewing as well. Whenever I go to another city, I try to see what might be in the area. This time I will be looking at a few samplers from Newburyport (one of my current online classes) as well as alot of 17th century embroidery. One of the most exciting pieces is an embroidered jacket in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. One of the things I will be looking at is if a coif in the collection is the same pattern and thus part of a set.
I’ll have to report back!
Tricia
Published August 18, 2010
in General.
My Floral Glove Online University students are finishing their pieces and I wanted to share some with you – Here is fully finished piece by Kathleen Weston – what a lovely finish (the rushed ribbon is fantastic).
And Jenny Brooks reported that her lovely twist on the finishing was the result of an oops. Sometimes when you are forced to improvise because you have run out of materials or got glue on something – wonderful things result!! Don’t you love how the red sets off the embroidery!
Thanks to both of them for allowing me to post their wonderful pieces.
Tricia
Published August 15, 2010
in General.
I have been getting finished photos from my class who worked The Mermaid’s Grotto in February. Thought I would share some of them. The class was stumpwork and we concentrated on funky threads that were made at the time for these grottos. An amazing variety of threads would show up in the rocks to make gnarled looking granite. As it was an advanced class, the students had alot of creative energy and all their pieces are unique. I enjoy these types of classes as the personal choices that are made can give you a window into what may have been happening back in the 17th century when these techniques were being used.
One of the things I asked the class for was pictures of their pieces so I could see how they did the faces. I taught the face and gave them photos. Wendy White and I have a theory about the faces on stumpwork pieces and having their pictures would help us gather evidence to support or reject the theory. I have to thank everyone who has through this and other projects helped by sending in samples or pictures to extend embroidery research!
Don’t you love their work? We have here Ann Blalock, Deb Autorino, Margaret Henderson, and Pat Richards (in no particular order). I absolutely love details in each of them – places where they changed what the teacher’s piece showed. The creativity in use of techniques and materials is great. For those of you who are looking at them – be totally impressed. Most of the threads on these pieces were somehow manipulated by the ladies into new threads – things like covering wire and making purls to hand spinning the fibers to give bouche type threads with multiple colors. So there was usually tons of work to make the thread before they could even apply it to the rock.
Tricia
Published August 3, 2010
in General.
Here is another event to consider if you come to New England: “Following in the Stitches of Marietta Stebbins: The White Dove Sampler Embroidery Kit” A One-Day Workshop on Saturday, September 25, 2010.
Joanne Harvey will lead a reproduction of the famous Marietta Stebins sampler (1801) from the collection at Historic Deerfield. It is one of the ‘white dove’ samplers from the Connecticut River Valley. The day will include a tour of the embroidery on display as well as a talk about the needlework in the collection there by Stephen and Carol Huber.
The flyer and registration form with pictures is here.
Tricia
Published August 2, 2010
in General.
With the exhibitions, there are always some events. Here are the ones that I am aware of at the moment that are ready for public promotion regarding the three exhibitions:
1. Lecture, Thursday October 21 at 6:30 pm at the Florence Griswold Museum in Old Lyme, CT. “With Needle and Brush: Schoolgirl Embroidery from the Connecticut River Valley” by Carol and Stephen Huber
2. Gallery Open House, Sunday, October 17, 12-4pm - Historic Needlework Day at the Huber’s Gallery in OLd Saybrook
3. Conference: Connecticut Needlework: Women, Art and Family, Saturday, October 30, 9 am-4:30 pm
There are more – but I can’t tell you at the moment. It will be a good year around here.
Tricia
Published August 1, 2010
in General.
An embarrassment of riches here in the New England region for embroideries on display this Fall. I was talking about the CHS and MFA exhibits. Does anyone know about the show at the Florence Griswold Museum in Old Lyme, CT from October 2, 2010-January 30, 2011. Check the page out – lots of great stuff on view. The exhibit is called “With Needle and Brush: Schoolgirl Embroidery from the Connecticut River Valley”. It will also have a book to go with the exhibition. Fantastic!
So you may just have to come to the Boston-Connecticut area!
Tricia
Published July 30, 2010
in General.
Becky yesterday asked about the dates of the new gallery opening – here is what I know:
The new American Wing of the MFA will open in November 2010 – installation is underway and can be seen on their webpage. There will be period rooms as well and textiles distributed in the wing as well as small exhibitions. There will be three mini-exhibitions of American embroideries. The first mini-exhibitions will focus on Boston textiles of the pre-revolution time frame. I know three of the units – Samplers, Pictorial Embroideries (Coats of Arms included), and Domestic Embroideries. The Samplers will include colonial Boston samplers with a few English band samplers where there is obvious relationship. Curator Pam Parmel promised to get me the exact dates next week.
I was thrilled to be able to help a bit on the Coats of Arms with technique and I was surprised at how fascinating I found it after examining around ten with the team. I had not been a fan before but they have grown on me! The most interesting of them was the unfinished piece at the Connecticut Historical Society. If things have continued as planned – it might be on display at their soon to come exhibition. It has its box of threads and needles intact as well – a VERY rare thing and was full of very useful information for researchers of embroidery technique.
The great thing is that these will be up at the same time as the Connecticut Historical Society exhibition called Connecticut Needlework: Woman, Art and Family, 1740-1840 – so you can see two exhibits of colonial needlework with one visit!
Cross your fingers as there is effort towards trying to make a small publication as well. As I well know, there are many potholes along the path to needlework publications.
Tricia
Published July 28, 2010
in General.
Today I was at the MFA helping with some stitch identification and looking at a few pieces. I was treated as part of it to several samplers from private collection that will be part of the upcoming year of ‘Boston Embroideries’ that will be on view in the new American Galleries that will be opening in November. You will WANT to come. There will be four rotations of pieces with different themes – one of them will be samplers of late 17th to mid-18th century that have a Boston provenance. Another is heraldic pieces made in Boston.
One of the schools of samplers (1730’s-1750’s) from the part of Boston known as the North End that Textile Curator Pam Parmel and her staff has uncovered seems to have a very close relationship to an earlier set of 17th century English band samplers. So much so that one possible theory is that the teacher had one of her own (descended in the family?) and copied much of the pictorial part for her teaching. I was working on the English sampler they have of this type and the Boston ones and doing stitch comparisons to see if they matched. I won’t tell you what we saw – but they are definitely on to something here. They have gathered many examples of the Boston sampler type from this school but haven’t identified many of the English sampler set to be able to do good enough comparisons yet.
So this is how you all come in – Distributed Problem Solving. I was telling Pam about a recent test that DARPA did to see how fast unusual problems could be solved in the age of the internet using many people. They hid 10-red weather balloons around the entire USA and then on a particular date said ‘go’ to a large number of university or research teams. These teams all had their own ’system’ of using the internet or social media to solve the problem of ‘where are the balloons in the USA’. The problem sounds incredibly daunting – how to find balloons somewhere in the USA – but the MIT team found them all in less than nine hours using social media. I was amazed and it made me think of the problems of finding related embroidery pieces and how we can use the blogs such as this or Needleprint solve some of these problems by putting out ‘calls’ for info. I suggested to Pam that this was one of those times where the distributed band of aficionados could find more of the samplers in collections or books that looked to be of the same English school. She said ‘let’s give it a try’.
So here is the link to the English sampler from 1654 by ‘MD’. Accession number MFA 43.275. The important part is the bottom of the sampler with the pictorial. The adam and eve with the large snake wrapping around the tree. Their funny hair. The leopard and unicorn. The funny frog and the rose with the detached petals. The sun, clouds and funny parrot. If you know of, have seen, or have a link to a sampler that is really similar to this one – send it on to me at tricia@alum.mit.edu and I will pass it on to the team at the MFA (full credit to you).
It would be really fun if something was uncovered this way!
Tricia
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