Let’s start Monday off with an interesting little bit of reading!
I find old needlework books interesting and inspirational, and I’m always grateful for the several online sources that supply access to obscure and hard to find public domain works from past eras of needlework history.
My friend Margaret (at The Sharp Needler) sent along a few publications she’s recently come across in her online explorations. She nerds out the same way I do on these old writings!
I dove into one of the books and was vastly diverted. I thought I’d share it with you today.
Designing for Art Needlework (the link will take you to the listing on Internet Archive) springs from a very specific and rather short lived era of needlework history encompassing the last several decades of the 1800’s and the first couple of the 1900’s, especially here in the the US. This was the era of “Society Silk.”
In the late 1870’s Candace Wheeler established The Society of Decorative Art here in the US, which established a cottage industry throughout the US and Canada, wherein women had the opportunity to work from home to bring in much-needed, post-Civil War income through needlework.
The women embroidered fine household linens with silk floss, creating tablecloths and other household decorative accents.
The whole movement lasted until about 1912, so this particular book, Designing for Art Needlework (published in 1915), is a little behind the times for Society Silk, but it still falls in the general era and style of art needlework that was typical during the first part of the 1900’s.
It’s a very interesting book on design, I think. Would all approaches in it apply to designing for today’s audience? Not necessarily – but there are good concepts in it that are worth taking a look at!
There are also some fun plates of stitch instructions – which makes sense, because you can’t really design for embroidery if you don’t have at least a basic understanding of the types of stitches employed in embroidery.
I hope you enjoy the book! Careful, though! Internet Archive can be a real rabbit hole when it comes to browsing through old needlework publications!
How interesting is that book. So different from what we find nowadays. There is so many treasures in the books that are now free of rights.
Louise from Montréal, Canada
What a fabulous book! The maths did my head in a bit, but it’s a great resource. Thank you.
i read through the book at the archive. The only part
i thought “no way”! was sending my lesson in for critique. I think Mr. Von Horvath would be a real Buzz kill. I wonder how many woman were braver than me and actually sent in their lesson.
This archive also has many books on embroidery to peruse.