Table of contents for Winter 2018 in PieceWork

Welcome to this issue of PieceWork! It’s filled with information on two of my favorite things—magazines and books. That each feature and project includes the historical needlework context is icing on the cake. As with every issue, I learned some things that I hadn’t known about: • The tale of Rumpelstiltskin is from Germany; he’s called Tom Tit Tot in English; see “Deep-Seated Associations: Textile Threads in Language, Myths, Fairy Tales, and Novels.” • Ray Bradbury’s short story “Embroidery” is hauntingly beautiful; it was published in 1951 and is available online; see Further Resources in “Deep-Seated Associations: Textile Threads in Language, Myths, Fairy Tales, and Novels.” • Four generations of Worth men ran the haute couture House of Worth in Paris; see the review of a new gorgeous coffee-table book…

Colorful Carryall Take your needlework with you! DMC’s StitchBow Mini Needlework Travel Bag is perfect for on-the-go stitching, wherever you may roam. Each bag has plenty of pockets for accessories and a handy shoulder strap. Just throw the bag over your shoulder and go! www.dmc.com. Shades of Gray Indulge in hand-dyed merino, cashmere, and nylon fingering-weight yarn from Sun Valley Fibers. Owner and dyer Jeanette Sundstrom uses acid dyes to create her richly colored yarns and steam-sets her dyes to increase their fade resistance. Shown in Dust in the Wind. www.sunvalleyfibers.com. Quick Change Meet Clover’s new interchangeable tatting shuttle and bobbins. A welcome addition to any tatter’s toolbox, the shuttle and bobbin set lets you change threads in a snap. Each package contains a shuttle and two bobbins. Additional bobbins…

Alcott, Louisa May. Little Women. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1868–1869 (published in two parts). Atwood, Margaret. Alias Grace. New York: Anchor Books, 1996. Bausum, Dolores. Threading Time: A Cultural History of Threadwork. Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 2001. Bradbury, Ray. “Embroidery,” Marvel Science Fiction, November, 1951. Text available online: www.henleycol.ac.uk/media/1339/english-lit-embroidery-story-and-critical-cards-for-task-1.pdf. Connolly, John. The Book of Lost Things. New York: Atria Books, 2006. Gordon, Beverly. Textiles: The Whole Story: Uses, Meanings, Significance. New York: Thames and Hudson, 2011. Grand, Sarah. The Beth Book. New York: D. Appleton & Company, 1897. Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1850. Holmes, Oliver Wendell. The Guardian Angel. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1867. Jacobs, Joseph. English Fairy Tales and More English Fairy Tales. 1890. Reprint. Santa Barbara, California: ABC-CLIO, 2002. “List of 58…

The late nineteenth century saw a surge in the availability of magazines and publications directed at the female market. Increased affluence, more leisure time, the introduction of electric light, the groundswell of feminism, and the Arts and Crafts movement all contributed to a rise in the popularity of needlecrafts and a demand for information on “how to.” In Europe, North America, and Australasia, an industry blossomed, supplying magazines that not only offered fashion news but also included instructions on dressmaking, knitting, crochet, other forms of needlework, lacemaking, and more. In 1887, T. E. Parker (dates unknown) of Lynn, Massachusetts, published the first issue of The Priscilla magazine. The magazine’s name is attributed to Priscilla Mullins, born about 1602 in Dorking, in the County of Surrey, England. In 1620, she was…

I made the Spanish lace medallion from PieceWork May/June 2018 in purple! Via Facebook Norma Bucko The instructions are from Carolyn Wetzel’s “A Medallion of Frisado de Valladolid-Style Lace to Stitch,” which is the companion project to her article, “Spanish Frisado de Valladolid Needle Lace: Treasures in Gold, Silver, and Silk.” Reader Audrey Lintner knitted a mystery project from Weldon’s Practical Needlework, Volume 1, which was featured in our blog post “Weldon’s Mystery Project: Knitted Lace or Edging,” www.interweave.com/article/needlework/weldons-mystery-project-knitted-lace-edging.The knitted-lace pattern had no illustration, and what it looks like was unknown until now. Audrey commented: The main body of this pattern would make a nice baby blanket or lap robe in sport- or worsted-weight yarn, and a laceweight yarn would make a great scarf. The eyelet rows across the top…

Whether you remember Hester Prynne from a literature class reading of The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) or from the 1995 big-screen version in which Hester is portrayed by Demi Moore, most of us are familiar with her difficult story. The novel’s setting is the seventeenth-century Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony. Mistakenly believing her husband dead, Puritan Hester Prynne commits the sin of adultery, resulting in the birth of a child, Pearl, whose father remains a mystery to the community. After being imprisoned, Hester receives further punishment in the form of a “brand”—a large, capital letter A affixed to the bosom of her dress. One might think Hester would be so shamed at the idea of being forced to wear this symbol of her impurity that she would fabricate the…

Byatt, A. S. The Matisse Stories. 1991. Reprint, New York: Vintage Books, 1996. MARY POLITYKA BUSH reads, writes, and designs from the apartment she shares with her husband, Tom, in Northern California. She knits, sews, felts, and enjoys patchwork, canvaswork, and several types of embroidery. She recycles. The electricity generated by unexpected combinations of color and pattern fascinates her ,although she admits she is far more cautious than A. S. Byatt’s character Mrs. Brown in that area.…

Anyone traveling to Belgium will be awestruck by the lace they find there, as well as by the country’s cultural history. Belgium, a small country nestled in northwestern Europe, has traditionally displayed great prowess in the art of lacemaking. Over the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, the lacemakers of Bruges, Brussels, Mechelin, Antwerp, and Zele became superbly skilled and proficient in needle-lace techniques (sometimes referred to as “point lace”), bobbin lace, and mixed laces using both needle and bobbins. Belgium was known to have the greatest lacemaking centers in all of Northern Europe. Flanders, a region now consisting of parts of Belgium, France, and the Netherlands, became the center for producing exquisite needle lace with an incomparable aesthetic. The creation of needle lace seems a rather simple and undemanding challenge…

Across time and under economic duress, women have turned to needlework. Closely reading a selection of American needlework magazines published between 1885 and 1930 reveals an often-overlooked history of women who were needlework editors, designers, and aspiring entrepreneurs. The classic Needlecraft Magazine provides the most insight into this history, with glimpses into various issues of Modern Priscilla, Home Needlework Magazine, The Delineator, The Farmer’s Wife, Woman’s Home Companion, and The Ladies’ Home Journal. Although women were breaking new ground in higher education and white-collar occupations during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, society in general held fast to the notion that women should center their lives on domesticity and the home. Needlework, closely associated with the home, offered more acceptable and less defiant ways for women from all walks…

In 2011, I started out as a volunteer working on the publications in the collection of the United Kingdom’s Knitting & Crochet Guild (KCG). I knew relatively little about the history of knitting and crochet and discovered several magazines published in the early twentieth century that I had not heard of, including Weldon’s Practical Needlework, Needlecraft Practical Journal, Needlework for All, and The Lady’s World Fancy Work Book. Sorting through boxes of mixed publications, I began to distinguish between these titles. Some must have been quite popular in their day, and copies turned up over and over again, whereas we had only a few issues of other magazines. Fancy Needlework Illustrated was one of the popular magazines, and it became a personal favorite, partly because it was one of the…

I have traveled to St. Petersburg, Russia, many times and have been able to visit many museums. Highlights at the Hermitage Museum include the Gates to the Winter Palace, Leonardo da Vinci’s painting the Madonna Litta (which surprised me with its unexpected colors and its size—just 16½ by 13 inches [42.0 by 33.0 cm]), Edgar Degas’s drawings of dancers, and opulent rooms with royal decorations. At the Russian Museum of Ethnography, highlights include the Marble Hall and the ethnic costumes. N. M. Kalashnikova’s book Perchatschki da rukavitsy, chulochki da nogovitsy—Aksessuary Traditsionnogo Kostyuma iz Sobraniya Rossiiskogo Etnograficheskogo Muzeya [Gloves and Mittens, Stockings and Leggings—Traditional Costume Accessories in the Collections of the Russian Museum of Ethnography] (Moscow, Russia: Russian Museum of Ethnography, 2015) delves into the Museum of Ethnography’s collection. Among the…

Rag books were developed because they were ideal for babies and small children: the pages couldn’t be torn out and eaten, and the books were soft and comfortable and wouldn’t cause harm. In 1903, Henry Samuel Dean founded Dean’s Rag Book Company, also known as Dean’s Rag Books (or just Dean’s in London), to produce rag books for children. The rag books Dean’s made were simple printed cloth books whose edges were cut with zigzag clothmaking shears. The company’s expertise in working with cloth, printing, and patterns also led it to branch out into other enterprises such as making soft toys and cut-out books. In addition, the company produced printed cloth. For many years, the company’s trademark was a bulldog and a terrier fighting over a rag book, which was…

Exhibitions San Francisco, California: Through January 6, 2019. Veiled Meanings: Fashioning Jewish Dress, from the Collection of The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, at The Contemporary Jewish Museum. (415) 655-7800; www.thecjm.org. Denver, Colorado: November 19, 2018–March 3, 2019. Dior: From Paris to the World, at the Denver Museum of Art. (720) 865-5000; www.denverartmuseum.org. St. Louis, Missouri: Through November 25. Balance and Opposition in Ancient Peruvian Textiles, at the Saint Louis Art Museum. (314) 721-0072; www.slam.org. New York, New York: November 12, 2018–February 24, 2019. Jewelry: The Body Transformed, at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. (212) 535-7710; www.metmuseum.org. Kent, Ohio: Through February 3, 2019. For the Birds, at the Kent State University Museum. (330) 672-3450; www.kent.edu/museum. Shippensburg, Pennsylvania: Through April 11, 2019. The Fashions of Fiction from Pamela to Gatsby, at the Fashion…

Contemporary literature is filled with novels—especially mysteries—that use knitting or quilting as a background motif; the heroine runs a yarn shop, for example, and is part of a community of women who are drawn together through this interest. This type of book is a relatively new phenomenon, but stories that feature the primacy of textiles and the way they are connected with women are quite ancient. Our language is full of metaphors that demonstrate these deep, primal associations, as are the myths and fairy tales and treasured stories that we (Westerners) grew up with. These associations not only reflect but also help shape our assumptions and attitudes. We literally often visualize our reality in textile terms. The expressions and metaphors refer to textile elements (fibers, filaments, cords, strings, or threads),…

One of my favorite books as a young girl was Little Women by American author Louisa May Alcott (1832–1888). Originally published in two parts in 1868 and 1869, it is a story of four teenage girls coming of age during the time of the American Civil War (1861–1865) and living in a state of genteel poverty in Concord, Massachusetts. The March sisters were often characterized by their clothing and accessories. Looking respectable but not showy was the sign of a good woman. It meant that one was reserved and proper but not extravagant and wasteful. Several illustrations in the book depict the mother and girls wearing fichus, a fashionable but modest accessory of the time. The fichu, a large kerchief, was typically made of linen, muslin, cotton, or silk fabric.…

Below are the instructions for the lovely butterfly centerpiece shown on the cover of the October 1918 issue of Needlecraft. They are printed here exactly as they appeared in that issue. In smaller type at the end of the first column are the options for the pattern, fabric, and thread that Needlecraft offered: “Perforated stamping-pattern, 25 cents. Transfer-pattern, 15 cents. Stamped on 24-inch tan linen, 75 cents. Floss to embroider, $1.30. Crochet-thread for edge, 30 cents extra.” —Editor The butterfly is a popular motif, always; and probably it has never been used to better advantage than in the decoration of the centerpiece illustrated. The colors are well chosen and effectively combined; although rich in appearance there is nothing about the work to hint of gaudiness—it is in the best of…

One of my favorite things to do with vintage lace patterns is dissection, a possible holdover from my college days of studying anatomy. The lace pattern I used for this scarf is from a jumper pattern in an issue of Fancy Needlework Illustrated magazine, which was published in the United Kingdom from 1906 to 1939. For the scarf itself, I drew inspiration from my pattern Gerard’s Seaman’s Scarf, which was featured in PieceWork’s special issue Knitting Traditions (Spring 2015). This scarf is constructed with ribbing at the neck to reduce bulk. This option also let me preserve the directional flow of the leaves in the lace pattern. MATERIALS • Knit Picks Curio, 100% cotton yarn, laceweight, 721 yard (659.3 m)/100 gram (3.5 oz) ball, 1 ball of Tea Rose• Needles,…

A small, rather insignificant greeting card from the gift shop of the Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh has been pinned up on my notice board for several years. Something about the image of an embroidered fox captivated me, and the scant amount of information on the back of the card made me want to find out more. It was described as: Fox Detail from a white woollen child’s rag book embroidered with coloured mercerised threads and showing various animals and the inscription ‘Ann’s Book’. English, by Jeanne Mount, 1951. I wanted to see the book’s other animals and find out how the book had found its way into the museum’s textiles collection. I contacted the National Museum of Scotland and discovered that the piece was not currently being exhibited. Undeterred,…