Antique samplers and Great Grandfather's Painting.

 Over the years one thing that I have resisted collecting is antique samplers. I don't stitch reproduction samplers because I just don't. Many of them are lovely but with the limited time I have, they have not been things that I choose to spend my time on. I have loved collecting antique needlework tools. I still enjoy taking classes and buying threads: silk threads, gold threads and lots of others. 

Well, now I have three samplers so I shall probably have to call that a collection. It is not going to grow a much if at all. With limited wall space, I prefer to hang my father's oil paintings, prints that I love and my own work, but this last sampler will be hung at least part of the time. It is fragile enough that it should not hang full time.

The oldest sampler was stitched by Jane Bates in 1791. She was 11 years old when she stitched her sampler. The sampler was purchased in Cumbria. That is a county in the north-west corner or England. The owner bought from the "estate of a lady" and told me that the old samplers usually stay in the family. So perhaps with some work I can find out more. 

Here are photos of the front and back. The colors have not faded much but the moths have eaten parts of the background.

This is the back.

The second sampler was stitched by Ann Donaldson who was born  on July 6, 1824. She listed many different initials but did include the name of REVd  EDW MOISES and E J Faill on the second line of her sampler. It is my conjecture that she was educated or lived at a charity school run by the Reverend.

The final sampler is from Germany and stitched by Helen Trager. I have reproduced this one and an adaptation. The pattern is for sale in several retail outlets. I purchased it from Helen's great niece and she gave me quite a bit of information about her Great-aunt. It is red on white fabric.

My Great-Grandfather, James Morgan Waterfall, emigrated from England in the 1880's. He painted a number of pieces but the only one that I know of now is this one of seals on some rocks. He signed the back: J Waterfall 1901. He painted others with ships in full sail that I would love to see.  He was a ship repair man in London but became a shoe maker here. He was so good that people would travel from miles around to have him work on their shoes. 

My mother treasured it because she loved her Grandfather. It is dirty and need some restoration but I have hung it up anyway.

Tea Cups and other pottery

 I am a bit of a collector. Mostly sewing tools but also other things that catch my eye. I don't have to acquire many of them to form an actual collection of whatever it is but just one or two of something makes my heart sing. Sometimes the collection is just a set of photos on  Pintrest because one - I can't afford to own the original or two - what am I going to do with either one or multiples of  whatever it is. My granddaughter calls it "Oh Shiny". Kind of a magpie response to trinkets or treasures. Years ago my father and I took a pottery class together. It was fun and I enjoyed doing it but I didn't follow up with learning to do more with it, but it did give me an appreciation of good pottery. 

I have for years enjoyed going to Horseshoe Mountain Pottery and looking at his pots and purchasing a few of them over the years. Joe Bennion is a very interesting man, a fabulous potter and his pots reflect his personality. 

 Another potter that I enjoy does bowls, plates and cups and other things that have horses on them. They are celadon green and have horses on them that remind me of fat Chinese horses from scroll paintings.  Her name is Sharon Brown Mikkelson.

I even did a whole room  that was inspired by the colors of a bowl. The soft green and sandy/copper colors inspired my embroidered copper bugs and critters. In the installation of the light fixture something got dropped on the bowl but I glued it back together because it was one of a kind and I love it. I have thought of using the Japanese technique of mending called Kintsugi that uses gold lacquer but for now I like it just as it is with a little bit extra of a story to tell.

The other day I watched a video that showed some pottery tea cups being fired. I just had to look at the web site and found the most creative group of tea cups. I don't drink tea but they are the most perfect little bowls for a snack or just to admire. So I bought three of them. It was so hard to decide just which ones I wanted but several dozen small cups did seem a bit excessive, so I settled for three. The company is called Tenmokus. They are based in Hong Kong but the shipping was so fast that they were here within a week. The top one is called Sunrise and the other two are Jellyfish and Golden Drops. The packing boxes are so nice that now I need to figure out what to do with them as they are too good to just throw out.

Goldwork and a family heirloom

 Years ago my grandmother gave me a glass micro mosaic pin from Italy. I didn't ever wear it but did make a small silver box  and I used the pin as a lid for the box. Several years ago I discovered the jewelry art of Marianne Hunter and am so inspired by her creativity and her work. Much of what is does is in enamel and it is a very technically difficult type of  craft.

This is a pendant that she named Kabuki Kachina in Crimson Poppies. She has used a number of old jewelry pieces in her work including some micro mosaic pins. 

I took my pin and used many different couching and other embroidery techniques to design and create a home for it. I need to come up with a wonderful name for it like she does but so far nothing really fits yet. It is a mille fleur design so that must feature in it somewhere. 

I took the circular shape as my starting point and used many overlapping arcs to create my design. Then I needed to fill the voids with designs that complemented the colors of the pin and the shapes that I had created. It was fun to decide just how I wanted to fill in the areas and then add the outlines to balance the work. 

I think that I will make an oval box with this as the top.

Black work Jacket and Skirt

 A life time ago and in a galaxy far away one of my ambitions was to do graduate work in costuming and work in that profession. While I still love historical costuming, I decided that it was not for me - the long hours and the fierce competition would  not work well with family responsibilities. So I dabble in dressing a historical doll or two.

I have always loved 17th century embroidered jackets; most of them are polychrome but a few are black work. There are a number of portraits that feature the jackets. Perhaps the most famous of the jackets is one that was owned by Margaret Layton. The jacket and her portrait are exhibited together so you can actually see how accurately the clothing was depicted.

Several years ago I found a black work rectangle on Pintrest that I liked. I was able to trace the pin back to the original source. It was a 17th century jacket featured in Gift of Stitches Magazine. I found the site to purchase the magazine with both the design and the finishing. Any  miniature clothing needs to have fabric that is not too stiff or out of scale so now the hunt was on for just the right fabric for the jacket and all the other parts of the set.

 I started with 55 count linen for the stitching. A bit small but I wanted the jacket to be as small as I could make it. I used size 100 black silk thread for the stitching. The directions called for putting lace around the edges but leaving the jacket raw on the inside. I knew that once the jacket was finished, the inside would never be seen but just could not leave it unlined. 

A while ago, I was in China and bought some very fine pale pink silk and decided to line the jacket with that. I had forgotten just how hard it is to work on that scale but love how it turned out.

Of course a jacket needs to be displayed with a skirt - a 17th century embroidered skirt. Now the hunt was on for the perfect fabric. It had to be just the right color and have the correct drape. The design is adapted from historical sources and stitched with gold silk  thread with metal thread accents.

 Then it needed a dress form to put it on and the  proper underthings so that it would look right. You know how that goes - right down the rabbit hole.

The dress form...

The linen petticoat - front and back...

The bum roll - this is rather strange piece of clothing but it was used in that period and made the skirt hang correctly...

The salmon colored skirt...

The finally the jacket......

The front assembled with the gussets. 

The lined jacket.

Aspens in Autumn

 This fall we were at the cabin and I was watching the colors of the leaves turn. The difference was very noticeable from one day to the next. I had never really studied just how the green just fades away and leaves only the golden colors of the aspens. I started picking a few of them so that I could study them. It has been several months since I got them and found it was interesting that the colors stay stable until they turn fully gold and then they start to turn brown even after they are picked.

I matched colors of DMC stranded cotton to the colors of the leaves so that I could stitch them. I wanted to be able to see both side of the leaves have the light shine through them so I decided to stitch them on a very sheer silk organdy. I was not sure that the fabric would hold up to all of the stitching but it worked really well. I mounted the silk in a hoop, traced the pattern on and then colored the silk with Copic pens to match the colors that I wanted. I stitched a wire around the edge to make them hold their shape and then used one strand of thread to stitch the veins of the leaves and wrap the stems.

After they were cut out, I used either the same color of cotton or invisible thread to attach the leaves together. They only have a few stitches where the leaves touch and form a cylinder that changes from green at the base to sunlit yellow/gold at the top. I really like the way that the colors move up and the way that the light makes the top leaves glow.

Ceci n'est pas une poisson or Sweet Lips

This the final project from my couching class with Natalie Dupuis. We were to take the knowledge that we had gained in class and create a piece of needlework with as many of the couching techniques as we wanted.

As you already know, I love the art of James Christensen. One of the best things about his art is that it has a sense of humor and makes you smile. He usually included a floating fish in his paintings. They symbolized magic and wisdom, kind of an unexpected insight into the meaning of the whole design. Reminding us to look at more that just the surface but what it was trying to tell you.

The best kind of art appeals to us on many different levels. It creates beauty but also has room for us to find our own meaning in the creation.  An understanding of the technique that you are using is necessary to the final design. I have always told my students that they need to know how the do the stitches correctly so that when they do them differently there is a reason for it.  It is rather like the support from which to take flight and soar. Not all of  the areas have traditional couching techniques. I just sort of made some of them up as I went along. Of course not every work that we do has such deep meaning, sometimes it is just to play with shape, color and texture. Part of this design is the title. Ceci n'est pas une poisson  means This is not a fish. At least not any that swims in nature but one from a flight of fancy so a bit of fun with words for those who understand the meaning.

Here is the final drawing for the fish. By this time I had decided on colors and some of the stitches.

The design is transferred to the silk. Some of the details are drawn on with pen. I started some of the couching on her belly.

I used copic pens to color in some of the areas. The vermicelli needed a darker aqua as a background and for the other areas it helps when there were tiny gaps in the rows of stitching there was color behind it.

The top band of Ceci uses a 371 thread that changes color when the viewing angle changes much like a real fish. The eye is a thin piece of Paua shell that was glued to a white cotton and stitched in place.

Couching class with Natalie Dupuis - why take classes?

 I have been an embroidery teacher for over 30 years and I still take embroidery classes. basically there are three reasons why I take a class. 

Some times it is because I want to learn a new technique or find out more about one that I already know how to do. Even if you know the basics of a technique, it can be like taking a graduate level class where you get so many new tips about how to stitch in ways that you might not have thought of or you secretly do something and lo and behold others do it that way also. So much of embroidery is self taught unless you are lucky enough to have been able to attend an embroidery school and there are always new things to learn.

At other times it is because you want to learn from a certain teacher. You like the things that they design or have been told that they are a fabulous teacher and want to take a class from them. I have taken classes where I was not too fond of the project but it was worth the cost in time and money just to study with them. Plus you always learn some new tip that makes it worth it.

The third reason is that you fell in love with the design or project. You may already know how to do it or have taken from the teacher before but the project just sings to you.

I am now involved in an on-line class about couching. It is a brave new world that we live in. Some of the ways that we have always done things are not possible right now. Personally, I hope that on-line teaching stays around. It is not the same as an in-person class but has some genuine advantages. In the hands of a well prepared teacher you get a wealth of information both about the history and uses of the technique and how to actually do it. The classes can be recorded so that you can refer to them later and there is a place to ask questions during class time.  This may the only way that you will have the opportunity to study with a teacher because it is impossible to get to an in person class. All those things are good but in person classes have other good things going for them. The personal interaction cannot be duplicated if you are not there because you can connect on a one to one level in class.  Everyone learns a little differently and only in class can you get a unique answer to your question. 

These are two of my stitched samples.

Has this class been worth it? Oh yes, it has. Natalie Dupuis has been a wonderful teacher and has managed to make a large class feel personal. I have learned so many new things, tried some new techniques (one which I never intend to do again) and perfected ones that I had done before. A good class pushes you to expand and grow as an embroiderer. 

Here are two of the projects that I have finished in this class. The first one is a pomegranate couched over silver Japanese thread using Chinese flat silks. The couching threads run horizontally across the design with the design threads running vertically.

The second one is a pear and the gold Japanese threads are couched in a circle using shades of brown, gold and green #50 sewing thread for the design. I had always wanted to couch something that had the threads going in a circle.

We have one final project that we get to design. In it, we are to use many of our couching techniques. It is still in the "how am I going to make this work" stage but I am excited about doing it.