Salisbury Museum - June 2017

I've wanted to visit this particular museum for some considerable time, as you'll be able to see from the next few posts, its well worth a visit and I've promised myself to return...

I'll start with the needlework images.  In this first batch they're all from the same mirror.  I believe this design was originally sold in kit form, from house to house, where the supplier would also provide the threads you would need.  

If you Google 'Restoration Embroidered Mirror' you'll see many more, especially if you refine the search to only 'Images', at the top there.  

This typical design incorporates a huge variety of stitches.  The piece doesn't cover the period that I'm most interested in, as I prefer to see needlework from roughly 30 years or more earlier. 

Its my personal observation with these mirrors, that not all the examples of Cloth Stitch, which is a lacemaking stitch, were made especially for the piece, but in my view, collaged from samples.  I could be wrong, but scale, apart from anything else, seems to be the giveaway?  Comments most welcome.  

However, apart from the odd piece of collaged fabric, the rest still needed an incredible amount of work to stitch and then put together and must have taken years by a single stitcher, or perhaps less if there were say 3 or 4 sisters working on it together?  

The colour is obviously very faded, which is a shame, but at least it must have been displayed and enjoyed over the years, instead of put away, never to be seen again, as can so often happen to heirloom pieces.   

I decided to leave the image below in its original orientation, to preserve the detail.

There are more in this series, but I'm exhausted at the present time, so will have to grab some zeds...

Texture and Form

Here's a corded Brussels stitch petal. So easy to make, lots of examples of this kind of thing on the bag. Just concentrating now of self-supporting non-wired petal structures. Its so exciting because with those discoveries come all kinds of other ideas for miniature embroidered motifs. Just love miniature! Here's a kind of rosebud thing. Made it nice a loose but it would need to a be lot firmer to really look the part.

Here's just a trellis stitch coiled strip but this time I finished it off with 2 rows of buttonhole, to give it a little frill. There are lots of examples of this kind of thing on the bag, but they go one step further and finish it with metal or a contrasting colour, to create unity no doubt.

Here's an experiment with corded detached, wanted to see which side would look nicest. You begin with a buttonhole band and work upwards from a central vertical reversed chain support. I really liked making this little thing.

I also gave it the characteristic buttonhole frill edge. This could have been done a lot tighter but I was in a rush.

See what I mean about doing it 2 ways. I prefer the right hand side as it expresses the form in a more botanically correct way. for next time

So, I tried Corded buttonhole in mid-air aka 3-D, anchored only along the bottom edge and it worked. Just have to work out how best to anchor the straight stitch return so that its unobtrusive. Used a single Trellis stitch to anchor. Let's not forget, front side Trellis is also Rope Stitch and Cup Stitch.

Thoughts on That Bag

If you blow up the view of That Bag to say 200% you can really see the synthesis of texture and form. Its also quite obvious that the stitcher just got really carried away and 'tried this, then tried that'. Everything is just an expression of imagination running away with itself. This is what I really love about that Golden Age of embroidery: its exuberance. I think when you see modern pieces worked faithfully and precisely according to a kind of grid, you lose all the intended exuberance. I believe you have to remind yourself that what you are after is the ultimate expression of FREE FORM embroidery. And free is the key element. All the stitches; all the colours; the metals the whole thing were about celebrating life and God if you ask me. It was actually a very creative expression of spirituality in a way, especially when you remind yourself of the whole socio-political background of the post-Reformation and the revival of that age-old cental motif: The Tree-of-Life. Gone were the icons, the monks, the illuminated manuscripts.

By then the Tree-of-Life idea must have seemed like a celebration of God's bounty in its truest form: the garden.

I just noticed they made a little overlapping thingy using knotted buttonhole. Great, I really like that stitch.

I think I need to do a diagram of how I think they did bits of it and just add to it as I go along. I haven't yet worked out all of it, but I really hope to.

Btw, the spiral trellis you can see at the top starts as the Elizabethan's did it, from the centre outwards. I find this is the prettiest way to do it.