Welcome to Wednesday, and the article meant for Friday. I don’t love it when a plan doesn’t come together.
Alas, I was expecting our full shipment of The Hand Picked Collection Volume 7 to arrive between Monday and yesterday, and today, I was going to show it to you up close and personal.
But only one box arrived – late yesterday afternoon, as if by a Postal Afterthought. No worries – the rest will apparently be here today. And on Friday, we’ll explore the new volume together. Yay!
In the meantime, here’s a little pre-weekend diversion. You can save it for the weekend if you want! I came across this volume on Internet Archives and I wanted to share it with you because it has so much in it that’s good, plus it’s got some great illustrations that could translate into embroidery.
The book is called Guide to the Art of Illuminating & Missal Painting, by W & G Audsley.
The book is in the public domain, so if you follow that link, it’ll take you to the Internet Archives full (flippable) preview of the scanned book. Below the preview, you’ll see many options for downloading the digital file (including PDF), so that you can save it on your computer.
Although the book is about illumination – the art of decorating pages of hand-lettered or machine-lettered text with ink, paint, and gold leaf – there is much in it that speaks to me as an embroiderer, too.
There are some lovely color plates with design elements that can be adapted for needlework, for example.
I often find it difficult to look at illuminated art without thinking of its interpretation into embroidery.
The individual elements in the image above could play across any sampler, for example, or translate into varied embroidery techniques: silk and goldwork, petit point slips, crewel, Assisi work…
I often chuckle at old texts. They tend to be very direct, and this bit is no exception. Take this little excerpt:
“One who posses knowledge without taste, or taste without knowledge, rarely arrives at any eminence as a colourist. The acquiring of knowledge to the possessor of natural taste, is nothing more than the cultivating of that gift.”
If you take that bit to its conclusion, you could almost say that no amount of knowledge makes up for bad taste. (!!!!)
There are some nice plates with intricate line drawings.
Have I ever told you of my pet “dream project” that I’ve never realized? It involves embroidering an “illuminated” – or at least illustrated – poem that I love. Not sampler style, but illumination-style, with lettering that fits more in the realm of calligraphy than embroidery.
Will I ever do it? At the rate things are going in my life these days, probably not! But I do often toy with the idea, as I turn the lines of the poem over in my head in reflective moments.
And that’s one reason why I tend to ferret out these old volumes, either digitally or in print, on illumination.
Oh, and did you want to embroider a dragon? Here’s one for you.
So that’s your little diversion for today, or for this weekend! I think this is an interesting book, and I especially enjoy the illustrations in it, but I also appreciate many points in the text. I hope you have a chance to peruse it!
Reminder!
The Needle ‘n Thread online shop is open and you are most welcome to place orders. But, due to some constraints on the home front, we have to take a shipping break until next Thursday, June 25th. Anything ordered between now and June 24th will ship on June 25th. Thanks for understanding!
(Speaking of home-front constraints, I’m plugging away on a project at home, and I’ll share some sneak peeks with you next week!)
Have a wonderful Wednesday, and I’ll see you Friday with Volume 7 of The Hand Picked Collection.
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