At the dawn of the 1900’s, the companies that manufactured embroidery silk (known as filo and floss silks) published little manuals of instruction in hand embroidery that were also meant to be marketing tools.

One such company was the Brainerd & Armstrong Company out of New London, Connecticut. In 1899, they published a 140+ page instructional booklet called Embroidery Lessons with Colored Studies. It’s a fantastic little piece of embroidery history, focusing on Society (or Art) Silk Embroidery. I happen to have a copy of it, and when thumbing through it the other day, I found myself here and there chuckling, often nodding in agreement, and finally wondering why I hadn’t read through the whole book before. Continue reading “Hand Embroidery: Lessons from the Past”