Tabla de contenidos para Spring 2022 en PieceWork

In this era of the web browser, it’s sometimes easy to forget that the world is—as ever—full of loose ends. Histories can be lost and knowledge can pass out of memory. Sometimes all that might remain are pockets of stories and fragments of cloth. With the loss of their original context, these textile fragments often find new significance and purpose. We are sometimes left to wonder who made the original textile and why it was tucked away for safekeeping. Was the small section of an embroidered hem from Crete (below) saved as a way of remembering a loved one? Was it saved as a pattern reference? Maybe by cutting it from the skirt, it could be sold. Despite the missing pieces, this little textile can offer us a bounty of…

Nilda Callañaupa Alvarez began life tending sheep and learning to spin and weave in a rural village near Cusco, Peru. Her trajectory took her through the local school and to university in the city and then to the United States, where she honed her English skills and gained a following of weavers fascinated by the traditional ways she had mastered. Returning to Peru, she worked with others to establish the Center for Traditional Textiles of Cusco (CTTC), an organization that serves 10 Andean highland villages, each with its own weaving heritage. Nilda’s path has been one of discovering, reclaiming, and sustaining the extraordinary textiles of her home country. And so much more. Nilda, even as a child, you looked back at the old ways of weaving and spinning instead of…

Textiles are ubiquitous in the modern world—so ubiquitous that it’s hard to imagine what an existence would look like without them. From the obvious clothes and bedding to those associated with hidden histories, such as Jacquard weaving and computer code (see page 31), textiles are inextricable from everyday life. So often, it’s ubiquitous cloth that tells the biggest stories about the environment. The coffee stain on a fabric-covered sketchbook. The underside of an impeccably precise cross-stitch. The tears and folds of a dollar bill. As durable objects, textiles hold stories about their making and their use. Textiles offer up a unique way of exploring social and economic tensions in societies separated by geography and time. Exploring a few ways in which textile production and consumption have reflected class and gender…

Liturgical gloves are highly colored ornamental gloves created for ceremonial use by senior churchmen in Europe, dating from later medieval times onward. A significant number of these have survived, and virtually all are finely knitted in silk. There are many examples in museums and other collections in Europe and the United States, including the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts, and the Glove Collection Trust housed in the Fashion Museum in Bath, England. Each glove (or pair of gloves) is unique, but they do share common features—most are finely crafted and richly ornamented, including the use of religious symbolism, sometimes with knitted patterns and sometimes embroidered. They are often embellished with braid, lace, tassels, and fringe. Some have ornate gauntlets, which are sometimes trapezoid in shape, and many have…

My Mom’s Argyles My mom, Lois Lewis, likely knitted these socks in the early 1950s, when my dad, Roy Lewis, started playing golf with company colleagues. He was good but played sporadically, as the lack of sock mends can attest. My mom knitted beautiful sweaters, which I have kept, but she stopped knitting socks. I treasure these and wear them carefully. Karen Lewis Via email From Our Readers’ Hands Time for Ticking I was inspired when I saw the ticking embroidery cover of the Fall 2021 issue. It’s slow going, but I plan to use the fabric to make a coin-purse-style pouch. My son got the hardware for me last year. Kelsey Dilts McGregor, Seed Stitch Studio Via email Pass It On The PieceWork staff was thrilled to receive in…

A richly embroidered altar cloth, preserved for centuries in a small rural church in Bacton, Herefordshire, in Great Britain, was recently identified by experts as a piece of a sixteenth-century dress, which is thought to have belonged to Queen Elizabeth I. HISTORY OF THE BACTON CLOTH The altar cloth was found hanging in a glass case in St. Faith’s Church, Bacton, having been retired as an altar cloth over a hundred years ago. Bacton was the birthplace of one of Elizabeth I’s most faithful servants, Blanche Parry, who began her 57-year service supervising the royal cradle rockers and died as her Chief Gentlewoman of the Bedchamber. It is believed that the altar cloth was given to the church by or in memory of Blanche Parry. It is also known that…

When I moved to Morocco in 2017, I did not expect to find myself researching knitting in the Atlas Mountains. However, a pair of striped, knitted pants in a small museum in the High Atlas set me off in search of information about knitting in North Africa. Interviews with the last practicing knitters in a village in the Aït Boulli valley, coupled with historical documents and museum artifacts, revealed a patchwork of knitting history stretching across North Africa and possibly connecting to the nålbound socks of early first-millennium Roman and Byzantine Egypt. To date, the oldest examples of knitting with two needles come from Egypt; however, little is known about how this unique textile technology developed and spread around the world.1 In contrast, the history of knitting in Europe is…

You might not realize how crucial the textile industry was to the development of computing hardware, but it makes sense when you think about the technological advances of the Industrial Revolution. The flying shuttle, the spinning jenny, the cotton gin, and more were all developed to meet the increased demand for textiles, as was an invention that was the origin of weaving computing machines: the Jacquard loom. Invented by Joseph Marie Jacquard (1752–1834), the Jacquard loom sped the process of weaving complex textiles like brocade, damask, and matelassé, allowing factory owners to increase their profit margins and scale up the industry. This was accomplished by translating complex weaving instructions into punched cards, laced together into a sequence that gave the loom instructions for raising and lowering warp threads. This “language”…

Man is the most insane species. He worships an invisible God and slaughters a visible Nature . . . without realizing that this Nature he slaughters is the invisible God he worships. –Hubert Reeves The man gestured toward the white cotton huipil decorated with a stylized red geometric tree. He pointed with a hand that seemed to mix the strength of an ironsmith and the grace of an aristocrat. “All our dress huipils are characterized by tree designs. Look at this one here, the design on it is called El Arbol Desparramado; it is a sprawling or wildly branching sapling. This is what little girls once wore because they, too, were wildly branching saplings, running about and stretching upwards day by day like some fast-growing, verdant plant. As they grew…

I have this piece of cloth. Simply described, it has colorful cross-stitch on woven linen with a cutwork border and could be used under hot pots to protect a table from heat or condensation. It could be used to cover a small bowl of bread or other food item as the rest of a meal is being prepared. I would like to tell you how these 50 square inches or so of cloth have provided insight into my ancestral needlework traditions. As a child of immigrants, I learned bits and pieces about fiber arts—albeit limited—within my Hungarian ancestry. There was an emphasis on normalizing and adopting new Canadian traditions and objects, which were often prioritized over maintaining traditional cultural techniques in the fiber arts. And so, not surprisingly, I came…

Jane de Forest Shelton’s book, The Salt-Box House, described life in Connecticut during the eighteenth century. This early example of historical fiction was published in 1900 and soon rose in popularity. The titular Salt-Box House, a style of building common in colonial New England, was based on the home of the Shelton family. Unfortunately, the house was destroyed by a fire in the 1840s and lay in ruins by the time the book was published. As the book gained popularity, tourists began making pilgrimages to the ruins of the house. Many people would comb through the abandoned home, looking for souvenirs. This led to the discovery of a small child’s boot by a Mr. Townsend and a Mr. Hubbard. This shoe was then given as a token of good luck…

Imagine living during the early Renaissance when fine art has taken a new direction. You likely attend church services and are thunderstruck by the vestments that church leaders are wearing. They are shining in the candlelight with gold threads and figurative motifs that tell the stories you know so well. The embroidery is so very lifelike you can hardly believe that it is needlework and not the realistic oil painting that has taken the art world by storm. You are looking at the highly skilled and labor-intensive technique of goldwork embroidery known as or nué. HISTORIC OR NUÉ Or nué is also called Burgundian embroidery, shaded gold, nuance on gold, Netherlandish embroidery, opus Florentinum, shaded metal, and lasurstickerei (German glaze embroidery, referring to its overall visual effect). It has its…

Bargello? Some of us of a certain age may faintly remember it from the sixties and seventies—on Auntie’s mod pillow covers or a funky needlepoint belt. In this new millennium, we look back at the history and evolution of this needlework technique. Bargello is a form of needlepoint embroidery also referred to as canvas embroidery. It consists of signature upright stitches (Gobelin-type stitches) that are linear. Repeating sequences of stitches create motifs in geometric and symmetrical patterns. Use of yarn colors and shading illuminate peaks, ridges, and zigzags. Analogous color schemes, from light to dark, are the classic choices. One main pattern line of stitches is first established and then repeated sequentially throughout. This is not a free-style form of needlework but rather an orderly, formal, and disciplined use of…