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Stitching the self : identity and the needle arts
The needle arts are traditionally associated with the decorative, domestic, and feminine. Stitching the Self sets out to expand this narrow view, demonstrating how needlework has emerged as an art form through which both objects and identities - social, political, and often non-conformist - are crafted. Bringing together the work of ten art and craft historians, this illustrated collection focuses on the interplay between craft and artistry, amateurism and professionalism, and re-evaluates ideas of gendered production between 1850 and the present. From quilting in settler Canada to the embroidery of suffragist banners and the needlework of the Bloomsbury Group, it reveals how needlework is a transformative process - one which is used to express political ideas, forge professional relationships, and document shifting identities. With a range of methodological approaches, including object-based, feminist, and historical analyses, Stitching the Self examines individual and communal involvement in a range of textile practices. Exploring how stitching shapes both self and world, the book recognizes the needle as a powerful tool in the fight for self-expression.
Book
A stitch in time : the needlework of aging women in antebellum America
Drawing from 167 examples of decorative needlework—primarily samplers and quilts from 114 collections across the United States—made by individual women aged forty years and over between 1820 and 1860, this exquisitely illustrated book explores how women experienced social and cultural change in antebellum America. The book is filled with individual examples, stories, and over eighty fine color photographs that illuminate the role that samplers and needlework played in the culture of the time. For example, in October 1852, Amy Fiske (1785–1859) of Sturbridge, Massachusetts, stitched a sampler. But she was not a schoolgirl making a sampler to learn her letters. Instead, as she explained, \"The above is what I have taken from my sampler that I wrought when I was nine years old. It was w[rough]t on fine cloth [and] it tattered to pieces. My age at this time is 66 years.\" Situated at the intersection of women's history, material culture study, and the history of aging, this book brings together objects, diaries, letters, portraits, and prescriptive literature to consider how middle-class American women experienced the aging process. Chapters explore the physical and mental effects of \"old age\" on antebellum women and their needlework, technological developments related to needlework during the antebellum period and the tensions that arose from the increased mechanization of textile production, and how gift needlework functioned among friends and family members. Far from being solely decorative ornaments or functional household textiles, these samplers and quilts served their own ends. They offered aging women a means of coping, of sharing and of expressing themselves. These \"threads of time\" provide a valuable and revealing source for the lives of mature antebellum women. Publication of this book was made possible in part through generous funding from the Coby Foundation, Ltd and from the Quilters Guild of Dallas, Helena Hibbs Endowment Fund.
eBook
Findings
Mary C. Beaudry mines archaeological findings of sewing and needlework to discover what these small traces of female experience reveal about the societies and cultures in which they were used. Beaudry's geographical and chronological scope is broad: she examines sites in the United States and Great Britain, as well as Australia and Canada, and she ranges from the Middle Ages through the Industrial Revolution.
The author describes the social and cultural significance of \"findings\": pins, needles, thimbles, scissors, and other sewing accessories and tools. Through the fascinating stories that grow out of these findings, Beaudry shows the extent to which such \"small things\" were deeply entrenched in the construction of gender, personal identity, and social class.
eBook
The Point of the Needle
Tens of millions of people sew for necessity or pleasure every day, yet the craft is surprisingly under-appreciated. The Point of the Needle redresses the balance: this is a book that argues for sewing's place in our lives. It celebrates not only sewing's recent resurgence but sewists' creativity, well-being and community. Barbara Burman chronicles new voices of people who sew today, by hand or machine, to explore what they sew, what motivates them, what they value and why they mend things, revealing insights into sewing's more intimate stories. In our age of superfast fashion with its environmental and social injustices, this eloquent book makes a passionate case for identity, diversity, resilience and memory – what people create for themselves as they stitch and make.
eBook
A History of the Paper Pattern Industry
Sewing patterns have been the principle blueprint for making garments in the home for centuries. From their origins in the tailoring manuals of the 16th century to the widely produced pamphlets of the 18th and 19th centuries, through to the full size packet patterns of today, their history and development has reflected major changes in technology (such as the advent of the sewing machine), retailing and marketing practices (the fashion periodical), and shifts in social and cultural influences. This accessible book explores this history, outlining innovations in patternmaking by the companies who produced patterns and how these reflected the fashions and demands of the market. Showcasing beautiful illustrations from original pattern pamphlets, packets and ads, as well as 9 complete patterns from which readers can reproduce vintage garments of different eras, the book provides a unique visual guide to homemade fashions as well as essential exploration of the industry that produced them.
eBook
ON THE SUBJECT OF IMPERIAL DIGNITY: A CONTRIBUTION TO THE STUDY OF THE CROWN OF KING STEFAN UROŠ III DEČANSKI IN THE MONASTERY OF CETINJE 1
The crown of King Stefan Uros Ш Decanski, which is now kept in the Treasury of the Monastery of St. Petar Cetinjski in Cetinje and which served as the main regalia in the coronation of Prince, future King, Nikola I Petrovié Njegos of Montenegro, has not been studied in its entirety until today. The Holy King Stefan Uros III Decanski (reigned 1321-1331) is one of the best known Saints and Holy Kings of the Serbian Orthodox Church. Historical Introduction Our (hi)story begins in the Treasury of the Monastery of St. Petar Cetinjski in Cetinje, where the crown, attributed to the Serbian King Stefan Uros III Decanski, is kept (THE TREASURY: 150-151). In this very context, the newspaper Czernowitzer Tagblatt reported that \"Unter Festlichkeiten, wie sie das kleine Montenegro noch nie gesehen hat, erfolgt die Erhebung des Fiirstentums zum Königreich und die Krönung des Herrschers mit einer vollgewichtigen Kônigskrone\"5 This quotation is of much interest to us since it mentions the object of our research in a symbolic manner, namely the \"king's weighty crown\" (\"vollgewichtige Kônigskrone\"). According to the Austro-Hungarian media, Nikola I Petrovi Njegos intended to be crowned in the Monastery of Gracanica in Kosovo, where, as the newspaper reports state, the Serbian knights received Holy Communion before the battle of Kosovo Polje in 1389 and which was still under Ottoman rule in 1910. [...]Nikola I had to address the Sublime Porte to receive permission for the monastery's church to be used for this solemn event.
Journal Article
Making the Bible a Fashion Accessory in Seventeenth-Century England: Materiality, Market, and the Present-Tense Protestantism of Embroidered Book Covers
Embellished textiles were popular covers for early-to-mid seventeenth-century English books, with wool-stitched canvases or silk embroideries fitted to sewn and boarded volumes. These small books, primarily texts used for worship or devotional study – like the Bible and psalm books – became components of Protestant appearance as they were carried or depicted in portraiture. Scholarship on these items, in book history and in studies of English needlework of this period, has noted how they could function as fashion accessories, pronouncing piety as they ornamented the body. This article critically considers how fashion was manifest in the context of Protestant worship in this period. It argues that the trend for religious books with embroidered covers shows a usage of materials and motifs in similar ways to fashionable clothing, but with an understanding of their theological and devotional usefulness in signifying contemporary time.
Journal Article
“And I Shall Give to Thee the Crown of Life”: The Utstein Antependium and the Visual Religious Culture in Early Modern Norway (ca. 1680–1700)
Stavanger Museum (Norway) preserves an embroidered artefact dating from ca. 1680–1700, known as the Utstein antependium. Depicting six scenes of a woman zealously preparing for the afterlife under divine observation before receiving the Crown of Life, the antependium has puzzled the few scholars who have studied it, as its iconography appears “too Catholic” in post-Reformation Norway. In this article, we argue that the embroidered images and accompanying texts emphasize how a life lived faithfully and charitably on earth would secure one’s place in heaven is also applicable to a Lutheran context. Comparing the antependium’s iconography with previously overlooked votive paintings from the same period, we aim to demonstrate how the maker(s) ingeniously combined image, text, and theological concepts into an unprecedented iconography in textile form in early modern Norway, showing how “she” would receive “the Crown of Life” at the end of time thanks to her spiritually advanced disposition.
Journal Article
Burial Robes of the Polish King Sigismund III Vasa. Analysis of Textiles and Clothing
The subject of the paper are the grave robes of the Polish King Zygmunt III Vasa, resting in the crypt in the Archcathedral Basilica of Saint Stanislaus and Saint Wenceslaus on the Wawel Hill in Kraków. The studies presented were possible thanks to an ‘in situ’ analysis of the clothes and a possibility of taking samples of textiles from which the clothing was sewn. The paper presents the results of a comprehensive textile analysis of fabrics, a description of the clothing that made up the funerary robes and analysis of the results obtained in the context of historical sources and works of art depicting the monarch.
Journal Article