Sommaire pour Winter 2019 de PieceWork

Stylish Stitches The Stockinette Stitch Motif Earrings from Porterness Studios evoke the repetitive V-shape of the knit stitch. Artist Jen L. Porter designs and casts the earrings in her Los Angeles, California, studio. Lever-back wires keep the earrings in place and from getting caught in your handknits. Mini-size earrings are shown in sterling silver. www.porternessstudio.com. Visible Mending The time-honored tradition of mending is experiencing a resurgence in popularity. The Utility Mending Fabric Pack from Brooklyn Haberdashery includes a variety of vintage and new fabrics for visibly repairing worn garments. Each set comes with ten to twelve patches and no two packs are alike. www.brooklynhaberdashery.com. Knitting Essentials The Namaste Maker’s Buddy Case from Jimmy Beans now comes loaded with all of the essentials a knitter needs. Each case comes with a…

In her fascinating new book—Traditional Danish Sweaters: 200 Stars and Other Classic Motifs from Historic Sweaters—Vivian Høxbro examines the uniquely Danish nattrøie (night sweater). The book is filled with historical information, photographs of traditional sweaters, detailed technical information on how the sweaters were created, and complete instructions for knitting eleven garments. The inclusion of knitted samples with charts for the 200 motifs and the “Knit Your Own Night Sweater” chapter truly are the icing on this cake. Traditional Danish Sweaters: 200 Stars and Other Classic Motifs from Historic Sweaters by Vivian Høxbro. English ed. North Pomfret, Vermont: Trafalgar Square Books, 2019. Softbound, 254 pages, $31.95. ISBN 978-1-57076-924-5.www.trafalgarbooks.com.…

< Inspired by the preceding article > Similarly constructed shawls made by several master knitters in Haapsalu, Estonia, inspired this small circular shawl or pelerine. I loved their airiness and the challenge of figuring out how they were made. This garment falls into the category of “Rebellious Lace” as it is a different shape from a traditional knitted-lace shawl or scarf from Haapsalu, and it is made in the round, offering a few technical challenges as well. FURTHER RESOURCES Bush, Nancy. Knitted Lace of Estonia: Techniques, Patterns, and Traditions. Fort Collins, Colorado: Interweave, 2010. MATERIALS Skacel HiKoo Merino Lace Light, 100% merino wool yarn, laceweight, 1,531 yard (1,400.0 m)/100 gram (3.5 oz) hank, 1 hank of #1003 Shade Needles, sizes 2 (2.75 mm) and 6 (4 mm) circ 24 inches…

It’s a chilly January afternoon, and my husband, Adam, and I are trudging through the roadside slush in a suburb of Reykjavík, Iceland. The streets are quiet; after a winter with a surprising dearth of snow, the skies have blanketed the Icelandic capital in a soft, downy layer. The city breathes a sigh of relief: nature has returned to normal. We are on our way to a nondescript warehouse that holds part of the collection of the National Museum of Iceland (Þjóðminjasafn Íslands). We are meeting with Lilja Árnardóttir, head of Artifact Collections, who has invited us to examine the embroidery pieces kept in the labyrinthine warehouse. Just two days before, Lilja had walked us through the impressive collection of sixteenth- to nineteenth-century embroidery pieces on permanent display at the…

› Inspired by the preceding article › The valhnútur, Icelandic for endless knot, is a design motif that appears in several handwritten Icelandic manuscripts from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This needlework version is inspired by a pattern recorded in the Skaftafell Book, drawn by an eighteenth-century farmer, Jón Einarsson. The colors for this design were inspired by a seventeenth-century bridal bench cushion in the collection of the National Museum of Iceland. This design is particularly fitting for a wedding—the two entwined knots symbolize the married couple. Traditional Icelandic embroidery was typically worked with plant-dyed wool yarns. The Icelandic yarn manufacturer Ístex, maker of Lopi yarns, produces a laceweight yarn offered in a twenty-six-color palette that is a close facsimile, but it is hard to use with any readily available…

FURTHER RESOURCES Bellamy, Virginia Woods. Number Knitting: The New All-Ways Stretch Method. New York: Crown, 1952. Braaten, Ann W. “Virginia Woods Bellamy: Knitter and Poet.” Knitting Traditions, Fall 2012. Braaten, Ann W., and Susan M. Strawn. “Virginia Woods Bellamy: The Poet as Knitter.” In The Hidden History of American Fashion, ed. Nancy Deihl. London: Bloomsbury, 2018. Strawn, Susan. “Number Knitting: The New All-Ways-Stretch Method.” Knitting Traditions, Fall 2012. Strawn, Susan, and Ann W. Braaten. “Virginia Woods Bellamy and the Puffbunny Wardrobe.” PieceWork March/April 2017. ANN W. BRAATEN is an associate professor of practice at North Dakota State University (Fargo) in the Department of Apparel, Merchandising, Interior Design and Hospitality Management and curator of the Emily Reynolds Historic Costume Collection. She studies the material culture of women to reveal their artistry…

In re-creating Rita’s childhood sweater, I mimicked the sleeve construction of the original. I knitted seven-stitch armhole steeks centered on each side of the body, and dedicated seven body stitches on each side to each armhole. In the round in which I created the steeks, I put the seven body stitches that would form the base of each armhole on a length of waste yarn and then cast-on seven new steek stitches to replace the stitches placed on waste yarn. Thereafter, I continued to knit the sweater body in pattern in the round. However, when I reached each steek, I knitted the steek in a pattern of alternating red and blue stripes, with the two outermost stitches, which formed the steek border stitches, and the center stitch knitted in white,…

American Style and Spirit: The Fashions and Lives of the Roddis Family, 1850–1995 Jane Bradbury and Edward Maeder London: Victoria & Albert Museum, 2016. Hardbound, 304 pages, $45. ISBN 978-1-851-77889-8. The Golden Thread: How Fabric Changed History Kassia St. Clair London: John Murray, 2018. Hardbound, 368 pages, £20. ISBN 978-1-473-65903-2. The Indian Textile Sourcebook Avalon Fortheringham New York: Thames & Hudson, 2019. Hardbound, 400 pages, $55. ISBN 978-0-500-48042-7. A Textile Traveler’s Guide to Peru & Bolivia Cynthia LeCount Samaké Loveland, Colorado: Thrums Books, 2019. Softbound, 152 pages, $24.95. ISBN 978-1-732-35285-8. Threads of Life: A History of the World Through the Eye of a Needle Clare Hunter New York: Abrams, 2019. Hardbound, 320 pages, $26. ISBN 978-1-419-73953-8.…

Tasty Translation Thank you for the lovely and sad article about Luisa Sanfelice [“Luisa Sanfelice: Martyr of the Parthenopean Republic”] by Mimi Seyferth in the Summer 2019 issue. A painting by painter Gioacchino Toma in the introduction to the companion project is incorrectly titled as Scuola per cioccolatini ciechi. Since Italian is my first language, I know that cioccolatini means “little chocolates” and the word for lace is merletto. I searched the web for Toma’s painting, and the following Facebook link brings you to the painting and its title, La scuola delle merlettaie cieche, www.facebook.com/FondazioneAndrianaMarcello/photos/a.1397998563766561/1893121704254242/?type=1&theater.The painting is very moving. Thank you for a very informative and fun to read magazine. I never do any of the projects, but I love to read about the history and people of our fiber…

We included the story of Mary Elizabeth Greenwall Edie’s handmade knitted-lace sampler book in the May/June 2016 issue of PieceWork. We asked Frances H. Rautenbach to re-create some of Mary Elizabeth’s samples, using modern terminology and abbreviations to knit the patterns as flat pieces worked back and forth on two needles. Mary Elizabeth made her sampler book in 1935, and her patterns reflect that time. The sidebar on page 9 includes a chart showing Mary Elizabeth’s notations followed by modern translations. A total of ten samples are included in the May/June 2017 and May/June 2018 issues. The final four are given here. Each sample retains the number or name that Mary Elizabeth assigned to it. —Editor MATERIALS Garden Cotton Thread by Nazli Gelin, 100% cotton crochet thread, size 10, 306…

Þjóminjasafn Íslands (National Museum of Iceland) was established as the Forngripasafn Íslands (Antiquarian Collection) in 1863. It preserves and manages thousands of historical and cultural artifacts dating back to the founding of the Icelandic commonwealth in the late ninth century. The National Museum of Iceland, National Gallery, and Icelandic Museum of Natural History are the three principal Icelandic museums, providing collaborative leadership and professional promotional support to museums throughout the country. In addition to the primary museum building on Suðurgata in Reykjavík, the museum maintains the collection at Safnahúsið (Culture House, located in Reykjavík’s former library), and multiple historical buildings throughout Iceland. The National Museum of Iceland, Suðurgata 41, 101 Reykjavík, Iceland; 354 530-2201; www.thjodminjasafn.is/english.…

Horizontal Rows Step 1: The first arm in a row is a shortened long arm; all long arms in this row will repeat the direction of this stitch. This first row is worked from left to right. Step 2: The second arm is another short arm; all short arms in this row repeat the direction of this stitch. Step 3: This is the first long arm covering two horizontal and four vertical threads of the ground fabric. Step 4: Steps 3 and 4 complete one full long-arm cross-stitch; repeat these steps to the last stitch in the row. Step 5: The last arm in a row is a shortened long arm. Step 6: The long arms in the adjacent rows run in the opposite direction, regardless of the color of…

› Inspired by the preceding article › The Butterfly Wrap consists of three divided squares, each of which looks like two triangles knitted at once. Actually, the cast-on edge of each square forms two sides, and a line of diagonal decreases through the center shapes the right angles of the triangles. Placing a center marker as the instructions indicate keeps the line of double decreases in an even line. Fastening a locking stitch marker to the right side of the knitted fabric (the side on which decreases are made) lets you keep track of decrease rows. These instructions are for a smaller variation of the pattern XXVIII Butterfly Wrap, one of the “Designs on Divided Squares” in Virginia Woods Bellamy’s Number Knitting: The New All-Ways-Stretch Method (New York: Crown, 1952).…

Christoffersson, Britt-Marie. Swedish Sweaters: New Designs from Historical Examples. Newtown, Connecticut: Taunton Press, 1990. Compton, Rae. The Complete Book of Traditional Knitting. 1983. Reprint. Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, 2010. Gibson-Roberts, Priscilla. Knitting in the Old Way: Designs and Techniques from Ethnic Sweaters. Fort Collins, Colorado: Nomad Press, 2003. Jang, Eunny. “Steeks: Cutting the Edge.” Interweave Knits, Winter 2006. Johansson, Britta, and Kersti Nilsson. Binge: en halländsk stick-tradition [Binge: A Halland Knitting Tradition]. Stockholm Sweden: LTs Förlag, 1980. Mucklestone, Mary Jane. 150 Scandinavian Motifs: The Knitter’s Directory. Loveland, Colorado: Interweave Press LLC, 2013. Palmskold, Anneli. “Knitting for Income in Halland, Sweden,” PieceWork, January/February 2010. Rhoades, Carol Huebscher. “Binge: Industrious Knitting in South Sweden,” Knitting Traditions, Spring 2014. Rife, James P. The Sound of Freedom: Naval Weapons Technology at Dahlgren, Virginia…

Aslop, James D. “Island Refashioning: The Nantucket Agricultural Society, 1856–1880.” The New England Quarterly, December 2004. “Craft Traditions.”www.nha.org/the-winter-show/craft-traditions. Field, Jacqueline, Marjorie Senechal, and Madelyn Shaw. American Silk, 1830–1930: Entrepreneurs and Artifacts. Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2007. “History of Social Activism on Nantucket.” www.nha .org/research/nantucket-history/history-topics /history-of-social-activism-on-nantucket. Finger, Jascin Leonardo. “From Silk to Straw: Nantucket Women in Manufactories.” Nantucket Chronicle. July 23, 2013. ———. “Nantucket’s Daring Daughters: A Brief Look at Anna Gardner, 1816–1891.” Nantucket Chronicle. May 7, 2015. Marsh, Ben. “The Republic’s New Clothes: Making Silk in the Antebellum United States.” Agricultural History, Fall 2012. “Material Culture: Form, Function & Fashion.” www.turtlebay.org/material-culture. McGoey, Elizabeth, ed. American Silver in the Art Institute of Chicago. Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 2017. Morral, Frank, and Barbara Ann White. Hidden History of Nantucket. Charleston,…

Exhibitions Berkeley, California: November 16, 2019–October 2020. Worn to Dance: 1920s Beads and Fashion, at Lacis Museum of Lace and Textiles. (510) 843-7290; www.lacismuseum.org. Los Angeles, California: Through January 5, 2020. The Allure of Matter: Material Art from China, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. (323) 857-6000; www.lacma.org. San Francisco, California: Through July 5, 2020. The Turkmen Storage Bag, at the de Young Museum. (415) 750-3600; https://deyoung.famsf.org. Chicago, Illinois: Through January 21, 2020. Silver Screen to Mainstream: American Fashion in the 1930s and 40s, at the Chicago History Museum. (312) 642-4600; www.chicagohistory.org. Boston, Massachusetts: Through March 29, 2020. Boston Made: Arts and Crafts Jewelry and Metalwork, at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. (617) 267-9300; www.mfa.org. New York, New York: Through January 5, 2020. Pierre Cardin: Future Fashion,…

The following is excerpted with permission from Traditional Danish Sweaters: 200 Stars and Other Classic Motifs from Historic Sweaters by Vivian Høxbro. The book is filled with historical information, photographs and sketches of many night sweaters from museum and private collections, and much more. For more information, see the sidebar on page 12. —Editor The sweaters in this book are from the 19th century: “night sweaters,” as they were once called, which have roots deep in Danish history. Yes, they are single-color—minimalist, you might say, with quite artfully designed relief patterns. You could also find them in south Sweden (where these garments are referred to as spedetröjor) and in Norway—both areas that were considered Danish territory at one time or another, where women knitted sweaters as part of traditional folk…

During a trip to Haapsalu, Estonia, in the summer of 2018, I visited a delightful exhibition at the Pitsikeskus (Lace Center). The inspiration for the exhibition, The Definition of a True Haapsalu Shawl, was the way so many visitors to the center would walk in and, noticing a lovely scarf or other item in the shop, comment, “Oh, look, a Haapsalu shawl.” Often, the item was actually neither a true shawl nor a true scarf but a variation in some form of one of the exquisite lace items that have their origins in Haapsalu. (Note: In the “lace language” of Estonia, a scarf is a square or triangle; a shawl is a rectangle.) The exhibition fascinated me: I studied the items displayed and took many notes. After talking with the…

On April 15, 2019, just before 6:20 p.m. local time, the world was startled to hear that the Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris was burning. I have a BBC news alert on my phone, so I found out right away. What an awful feeling—to know, as the firefighters struggled, that la forêt (the frame) was burning, and not to know if they would be able to put the fire out. Notre-Dame is a centuries-old structure and an amazing feat of architectural engineering. Begun in 1163, it was built on the ruins of two other churches (and a temple to Jupiter) and took almost two hundred years to complete. Notre-Dame shines as an example of early Gothic structure with its massive flying buttresses that offset the weight of the tall walls. The…

FURTHER RESOURCES Gudjónsson, Elsa E. Traditional Icelandic Embroidery. 1982. Reprint. Reykjavík Iceland: Elsa E. Gudjónsson, 2003. (This book offers the most complete history of Icelandic embroidery.) Hallgrímsdóttir, Margrét. Treasures of the National Museum of Iceland. Reykjavík, Iceland: National Museum of Iceland, 2017. Handíðir Horfinnar Aldar: Sjónabók Frá Skaftafelli [Crafts from a Vanished Age: A Pattern Book from Skaftafell]. 1994. Reprint. Reykjavík, Iceland: Mál og Menning, 2009. (The introduction to this book was written by Elsa E. Guðjónsson; it contains a facsimile of Jón Einarsson’s Skaftafell Book.) Hjálmarsson, Jón R. History of Iceland: From the Settlement to the Present Day. Reykjavík, Iceland: Forlagið, 2009. Íslensk Sjónabók: Ornaments and Patterns Found in Iceland. Reykjavík, Iceland: Heimilisiðnaðarfélag Íslands (The Icelandic Handcraft Association), Þjóðminjasafn Íslands (The National Museum of Iceland), and Listaháskóli Íslands (The…

I took Shetland-born Gudrun Johnston’s Traditional Shetland Shawls class at the Spring 2018 Knot Another Fiber Festival (KAFF). Johnston taught us how to construct what could be considered a modern Shetland traditional shawl. After doing some more research, I found that “modern” means from Victorian times and later, because before the Victorian age, such shawls in Shetland were usually constructed in pieces and sewn together with the border, which was often begun first. The speculation is that the invention of circular needles had something to do with the changes in construction techniques. The more modern traditional Shetland construction for both triangular and square shawls consists of three sections. For a triangular shawl, there’s first a center garter-stitch triangle of varying size, which is constructed by starting with a single slipknot…

› Inspired by the preceding article › Throughout the nineteenth century, size-two needles like those in the Turtle Bay collection (shown in the preceding article) were used for small items such as silk purses and pincushions. Silk was a luxurious and popular fiber in the 1830s, as a mania or craze for creating an American silk industry swept the United States. The Atlantic Silk Company was incorporated in Nantucket in 1836 by William H. Gardner, Samuel B. Tuck, and William Coffin. The intention was to grow mulberry trees and raise silkworms on Nantucket in order to weave silk. The authors of Hidden History of Nantucket (see Further Resources in the preceding article) explain, “While the industries associated with whaling depended on men, it was women who provided the bulk of…