Table of contents for Fall 2022 in PieceWork

Smooth Touch Tatting shuttles have been crafted from a variety of materials over time. This post shuttle from Provo Lace Shop is made in the Philippines and crafted from natural horn.provolaceshop.etsy.com Big Projects With a beautiful gold finish, this 3-inch brass filigree shuttle from Lacis holds a generous amount of thread for large tatting projects. lacis.com Quick Color Change Bobbin shuttles make it easy to change colors between projects. The Aerlit shuttle from Handy Hands comes with two bobbins that pop in and out of the shuttle. hhtatting.com Custom Order With post shuttles handcrafted from a variety of woods, David Reed Smith can customize to your specifications. Shown here in Olivewood (front) and Tchitola (rear). davidreedsmith.com For the Needle Tatter This tatting needle set from Lacis includes needles in three…

In 2004, while documenting Siddi visual and performing arts and living with a Siddi community, Henry John Drewal learned about the quilts and wondered if they could be an incomeproducing activity for the quilters. After discussions with the community, fellow researcher Sarah K. Khan, and The Sisters of Mercy of the Holy Cross (a social service ministry devoted to the Siddi communities for over 30 years), the Siddi Women's Quilting Cooperative (SWQC) was founded. It was initially funded by Drewal, Khan, and Pashington Obeng, a professor at Wellesley College who has worked with the Siddis since 2001. The Cooperative continues to help provide a source of income for women of Siddi communities in Northern Karnataka, India, through sales of their traditional quilts. To learn more about the Siddi quilters, to…

When I met my second husband, I was introduced to an unfamiliar and very different world, one in which I never expected to travel. Vlado was different from other men I had dated. I enjoyed many evenings with him learning about the history of the Balkans and his life as a teenager under a socialist government. He had emigrated from Yugoslavia in 1987 as it was on the brink of ethnic war. By the time he returned to Yugoslavia for a visit in 1991, it no longer existed and had been separated into several independent countries, including the Republic of Macedonia. Vlado is an ethnic Macedonian and is very proud of his ethnicity, its history, and culture. In 2012, he proposed, and we decided to marry in January of 2013.1…

As a professional historical interpreter at the Fortress of Louisbourg and a specialist in eighteenth-century history, I find it fascinating that there was a time when ladies' elbows were risque and men's calves were sexy. The fashion of the time emphasized male calves with breeches reaching just below the knee and stockings. A well-developed calf tapering to a narrow ankle indicated that the stocking wearer might be a gentleman of means and perhaps a merchant or government official. This was a sign of someone who had devoted more time to dance than to hard labor. FIBER AND SPINNING NOTES When designing these handspun kilt stockings, I knew that the eighteenth-century, so-called mongrel sheep (see page 50) were no longer available. So, I looked to the twenty-first-century sheep living at the…

When the Phebe A. Nelson cross-stitch sampler arrived on my Canadian doorstep (see page 60), I recognized it as belonging to an era of sampler history when fine-quality stitching and materials were becoming things of the past, making way for samplers that often employed more rudimentary materials and skills. As I discussed in “A Schoolhouse Sampler: Like Morning Dew on a Rose” (Piecework, Spring 2021), the quality of the materials used in a sampler may or may not correlate to the financial means of the family, teacher, or school providing the stitching materials. Other societal and cultural factors contributed, as did the profound influence of the Industrial Revolution. As the nineteenth century advanced and educational and employment opportunities progressed for women and girls, especially at the end of the century,…

Same Technique, Different Name! Could we please have an article about yatting? I saw this at a local museum and think it is some sort of handwork, but I have no idea what it is or how to do it. The museum labeled it yatting, and it is related to some sort of craft or needlework. Holly Berry Via email Editor's note: Holly sent us photos of the needlework by Isabella Cooke and then later sent the following information provided by her local museum, the Alstonville Plateau Historical Society. To our surprise, yatting is another name for the rickrack crochet technique featured in Piecework's Summer 2022 issue and shown in the book Guide to Lace and Linens by Elizabeth M. Kurella. Thanks for sharing! “Isabella Cooke (1860-1940) was an extremely…

My son Fernando's christening gown is an heirloom that connects four generations through creation, preservation, and wear. I inherited various pieces of mundillo, or bobbin lace, from my motherin-law, Laura Virginia Emmanuelli Negroni, Fernando's paternal grandmother. These would become a very important part of Fernando's faldellín, or baptismal gown. The great care involved in the creation of this special dress tells a story about family, love, and dedication and reflects a mother's feelings. It also conveys a sense of patriotic pride and history transmitted through local lacemaking traditions. The fact that a tiny piece of lace can reveal so much about the past and the migration of our family from Corsica to Puerto Rico has surprised me. Mundillo is a variation of torchon lace made in Puerto Rico. This openwork…

When it comes to family heirlooms, there is often a magical quality that these otherwise mundane objects possess. Whether it's the quilt your great-aunt made or that sweater your mother wore, it's the sentiment that bestows that special feeling. But what about a textile made with actual magic and ritual? One that's made from start to finish with a specific intent and ornamented with selected symbols and motifs that call upon something greater, something otherworldly? As a descendant of a family with strong Slavic roots, I grew up accustomed to textiles such as these, commonly known as rushnyky (roosh-nick-kee). SACRED CLOTH To the uninitiated, a rushnyk (singular) might as well be just another towel or piece of decorative fabric, but to those who are familiar with Slavic culture and traditions,…

The Artisans Beyond Borders initiative grew in large part out of a trauma-informed Arts & Activities program developed in 2018-2019 at Tucson's Casa Alitas short-term Welcome Center for asylum seekers. Our volunteer facilitators learned how best to respond to the needs of our guests from Latin America by listening and observing what was most comfortable and healing to them. Culturally aligned handwork—embroidery, crochet, and weaving—brought about calm, respite, and more resiliency to make it through another day of forced migration and family displacement. In summer 2019, we brought Arts & Activities to a resource-poor shelter on the other side of the border in Nogales, Mexico, where families waited for months to interview for asylum in the US. Over the next few weeks, a committed group of embroiderers engaged in bordando…

When they settled in Cape Breton, Gaelic women brought the preindustrial Scottish tools that they had used to make clothing for their families. The common tool for spinning wool and flax was a whorl-less drop spindle called a dealgan (pronounced jal-agen), which looks like a short wooden cone with a small knob on the end. On the wide end, two carved grooves form a cross resembling the end of an animal bone. The Gaelic name of this traditional spindle translates to “collar bone” in English, while the Gaelic name of a whorled drop spindle is fearsaid.…

Women's Work: The First 20,000 Years; Women, Cloth, and Society in Early Times Elizabeth Wayland Barber New York: W. W. Norton, 1994. Paperback, 336 pages, $19.95. ISBN 9780393313482. This textile history classic is well worth revisiting in the context of living through (and spinning through) a pandemic. Women's Work: The First 20,000 Years traces the development of ancient textiles back to the invention of string 20 to 30 thousand years ago. As professor emerita of archaeology and linguistics at Occidental College, Dr. Elizabeth Wayland Barber pulls from wide-ranging sources including ancient Greek poetry, Indo-European linguistics, prehistoric art, and archaeology for her research. A maker herself, Barber's approach to history places real value on the knowledge that comes with practicing a craft, mining her sources for milestones in human civilization and women's…

Mundillo is considered a labor-intensive art, as 1 inch of bobbin lace can take more than an hour to produce. Bobbins are long, round-topped, wood-turned cylinders measuring around 6 inches in length. The fiber is wound around the neck, a carved indentation near the top of the bobbin.11 The length and weight of the bobbin allow the lacer to braid the fiber and maintain the desired tension.12 The number of strands used to create a particular design varies, depending on the type of piece to be constructed. The strands are worked in pairs and can be a few or more than a thousand. The desired pattern is traced onto a piece of cardstock, which is plaited and pricked to the pillow to be used as a guide for the creation…

The Willard Asylum for the Chronic Insane in Ovid, New York, received its first patients in October 1869. In 1995, the renamed Willard Psychiatric Center discharged the last patients. During these years, some 50 thousand patients entered Willard Asylum, of which approximately half died and were buried there. More than four hundred suitcases that had belonged to the deceased patients—and hadn't been claimed by loved ones—were discovered by employee Bev Courtwright in one of the asylum's attics in 1995 when the institution was closing. These suitcases still held the owners' belongings, most undisturbed for decades, that had been stored for the patients to retrieve when and if they left the asylum. Apart from photos and other sentimental or practical items, many of the suitcases contained half-finished pieces of needlework of…

Nova Scotia, “New Scotland” in Latin, received the bulk of its Scottish population between roughly 1770 and 1850. The Scottish Hebrideans left their homelands because of general industrial depression and the forcible removal of people from the Scottish Highlands to make way for sheep farms (often referred to as The Clearances). Thousands made their way to the eastern coast of Canada, including the Nova Scotian island of Cape Breton. However, romantic visions of burly, kilted Scots working the farms of Cape Breton Island after the mass nineteenth-century emigration from their homeland may not be entirely accurate. Historical records indicate that many of these new landowners were very poor, slightly malnourished, and starting their new lives in English-style clothing.1 By 1871, settlers of Scottish descent outnumbered the rest of the population…