Embroidery History Sampler, Part 2

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. This is the second part of our episode about embroidery. History, which I mentioned in part one, is really a sampler because there is just so much history. Part one took us up through the creation of one of the most famous pieces of embroidery in the world, that being the Bayou Tapestry, and today we're going to pick right back up from there. This isn't, because of its nature, necessarily one big connected narrative, so you could probably listen to this one without hearing part one. First you'll just miss the earlier instances of embroidery and history. But we are going to jump right back into it, and as promised, we will talk quite a bit about embroidery samplers today. But first we're going to talk about our literary reference to embroidery. If you have read Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, you might have noticed a mention of embroidery in the passage about the Miller's wife, which describes her clothing. Quote of white too was the dainty smock she wore embroidered at the collar all about with coal black silk alike within and out. This is a reference to a style of embroidery known as blackwork, which originally used black silk on white or off white linen or cotton to create a dramatic contrast. Over time, other colors have been used for black work, but it's often still in the darker color range to maintain that really sharp difference. The reference to the collar's embellishment being alike within and out has led to the belief that Chaucer was probably describing a style of embroidery known as holbind stitch. That's a double running stitch where you lay out your design with the running stitch and then go back for another pass where you fill in the gaps left by the first one, and that gives both the front and the back of the fabric a complete line. In blackwork, the holbind stitch is usually used to create the outline base of the design, and then the interior spaces are often but not always filled in. Incidentally, the holbind stitch is named for the painter Hans Holbein the Younger because his portraits often showed subjects wearing garments that were adorned with blackwork. We do not know when people started using black work in England, but it was obviously before thirteen eighty seven, which is when The Canterbury Tales was written. Well before that, black work is believed to have originated in northern Africa, specifically the area of Morocco. When the Moors crossed the Strait of Gibraltar and moved into Spain in the early eighth century, black work embroidery moved with them. It evolved in the Moorish community of Spain with new designs, and eventually was adopted into wider Spanish culture. That is why you will sometimes see it called Spanish work instead of black work, and then from Spain it spread throughout Europe and eventually became associated very closely with English needlework. Well before Chaucer's famous work was published, England had become well known for the production of a style of embroidery that was called Opus anglicanum translated from Latin that's just English work. Opus anglicanum is characterized by detailed imagery made of delicate stitches that are worked in silk thread with gold and silver. The name was coined in the thirteenth century, which was well after it became popular. London was considered the epicenter for this style of work, and though it's high degree of technical proficiency meant it wasn't used for everyday items, there was quite a lot of it produced. The style of embroidery was usually reserved for religious garments, although it became so revered that churches all over Europe had ecclesiastical garments embroidered in London. A lot of examples of it from all over the European continent. One is in the collection of the met in New York and it's a chossible. That's an overlay garment worn by a priest during Mass. It features saints on the front of it and depictions of the Coronation of the Virgin, the adoration of the Magi, and the Annunciation on the back. Per the METS Online description of this garment, it once included John the Evangelist and John the Baptist among the saints, but the garment was altered at some point and their heads were cut off to set the front piece higher into the shoulder seam. Yeah, it had just been altered to change with styles of the times and as a consequence, sorry, John's yeah, it's a cut, that's a little that's a that's a little weird to me, But it's funny when you look at pictures of it. It is available to see online. I mean there are clearly like bodies there that just kind of end at the classical region. In twenty sixteen, the Victorian Albert Museum in London had an exhibition dedicated to medieval artistry and that included more than one hundred Opus Anglicanum embroidery works that featured pieces that had come from all around Europe. These items, like the piece known as the Toledo Cope, had been created in England on commission to be sent to churches around Europe. So the Toledo Cope had been in Spain since its creation in the thirteen hundreds, and that twenty sixteen exhibit marked its first time back in England. And this cope and others like that Chawsable we mentioned from the Mets collection are covered in this incredibly rich detailed embroidery and feature religious imagery such as Saints the Virgin Mary, et cetera. Once we get into the fourteen hundreds, we have lots and lots of surviving examples of embroidery. One style of handiwork in the Western tradition is something that's still popular today, and that's needlework samplers. A needlework sand is a piece of fabric that has been embroidered with a bunch of different designs, often showing a wide range of techniques and stitching styles. Modern examples of samplers are often found frames and hanging as decor, but their origin is completely practical. These were really referenced documents. A stitcher might make a sampler to show the various stitches or designs that they had learned as they learned them, or as a way to record designs that they liked. Then this piece of fabric could be used as a guide so the stitcher could review it and see what they might want to use for an upcoming project. They have been used this way going at least to the thirteen hundreds, and they appear in a lot of different cultures. The Victoria and Albert Museum has a sampler from Egypt with an earliest estimated creation date of the fourteenth century. Some of the stitching on it looks almost like crosstitch, and the designs include what looked like stylized branching trees, a band of basket weave style designs, and even a kitty that looks like it is wearing a crown. Yeah, I might get that as a history tattoo to match my mic. The cat. Samplers offer an interesting look at the stitcher who creates them, because in many cases people created multiple ones throughout their lives. Some existing examples are the work of children learning the stitches, and others are clearly the work of experienced embroiderers who were perhaps learning new patterns, but who also maybe wanted to show an assortment of stitches and design that showcase their skill set. There aren't really any known historical examples of multiple comparable samplers from one stitcher, but if you were to look at a person's first sampler and then their samplers throughout their lives, you would very clearly be able to see the linear progression of their skill. Coming up, we will talk about how samplers were really reference documents, but first we will pause for a sponsor break. These samplers that we talked about earlier were, for a long time the only way that embroidered patterns could be shared before books or sheets with instructions and designs were printed on them. This was a good way for stitchers to keep a record to refer back to, and it was also a way that people could share their reference collections so that different embroiderers could borrow patterns and designs from one another. Over time, particularly in Europe, two styles of samplers started to develop, with a degree of structure to their layouts that were not present in earlier examples. Like earlier examples look like I have this piece of cloth and I'm kind of embroidering on it wherever I want to put something. But at this point it started to be like, here's how you lay out your sampler. Some are in a style that's known as a band sampler, in which rows of designs appear in bands across them. These are the kinds of designs that you might expect to see along the edges of a garment or on linens like table cloths or pillowcases, and there are patterns that can repeat as long as the item being embellished needs. The other style of sampler is called a spot sampler. These have various different designs included on them, but they aren't the types of designs that generally repeat, so these are motifs like animals, flowers, symbols, or abstract geometric shapes. Sometimes, though, a band design or multiple band designs do appear on a spot sampler, so you'll have like spots along the top, bands along the bottom, or some other layout. One of the most famous samplers was created by a woman named Jane Bostock in fifteen ninety eight. It is the oldest dated British sampler that we know of, and it represents a moment of transition when samplers were going from practice fabrics to display pieces. It's forty two points six centimeters in length that's sixteen point eight and and thirty six point two centimeters wide or fourteen point twenty five inches. This sampler, which is embroidered on linen, was created to commemorate the birth of Jane's cousin, Alice Lee, who was born in fifteen ninety six. We know this because Jane used her skills to embroider out the lettering that said so on the sampler, which reads quote Alice Lee was born the twenty third of November, being Tuesday in the afternoon fifteen ninety six. Above the lettering are nature motifs. There's a dog carrying a collar with a leash attached, a bear with a muzzle on it surrounded by flowers, a squirrel in a tree, and the style of lion you would expect to see on a heraldry design. There are also elements of nature motifs in the upper space which have been unpicked so that just leaves the stitch holes to examine. According to the Victoria and Albert Museum, which has this piece in its collection, these unpicked designs quote appear to be a castle on an elephant, a squirrel cracking a nut, and a raven. Further description of the sampler at the VNA website indicates that the motifs that were removed from the sampler are associated with Jane's side of the family tree. The ones that remain on the sampler are associated with Alice's. Below the lettering that notes Alice's birth, there are blocks of various geometric and floral pattern designs. In North America, the oldest known historical sampler was created by Laura Standish, daughter of Miles and Barbara Standish, who traveled to North America on the Mayflower and were famously part of the Plymouth Colony. Laura was born in North America in the late sixteen twenties. Her sampler, which is also on linen, is long and narrow. It's twenty three point five inches at sixty centimeters long and a mere seven and a half inches or nineteen centimeters wide. It's believed that she created this sometime in the sixteen forties. Laura embroidered her own message, which is placed at the bottom of the sampler and reads, Laura Standish is my name, Lord, guide my heart, that I may do Thy will also my hands with such convenient skill as may conduce to virtue void of shame, and I will give the glory to thy name. This sampler has no standard motifs. It is all stitched bands of design, although they do incorporate iconography like an acorn and a rose in their repeats, and this sampler is hugely popular with modern embroiderers. You can easily purchase a Laura's Standish Sampler kit to recreate it. As time and the art of embroidery progressed, people started developing patterns for entire samplers with a set assortment of designs laid out to fill the space. These are still popular today and they offer a chance for a needle artist to learn stitches or to practice them. You can even purchase kits now that have a sampler that's designed to be a piece of art in its own right, with the cohesive style to all the designs and all of the embroidery, floss and other supplies that you will need to complete the project. An interesting holdover from earlier samplers that is still included in the modern sampler patterns and kits is designed to make letters of the alphabet. In early samplers, these were practiced because of a practical need. Foundation garments and personal linens like bedclothes were routinely embroidered with the owner's initials for easier sorting of the wash and returning things to the correct person. Worsted yarn called cruel has been around for many centuries, dating back at least to the first century BCE, but it became very popular in the fifteenth century, and soon after embroidery that made use of it also exploded in popularity. The word cruel to describe this type of yarn which is spelled Crwel, not cruel like being mean, is derived from the Welsh word for wool, which is krua. Unlike other embroidery material, which is fine and can be pulled apart, similar to the way one might separate embroidery flows today to achieve the desired thickness for a project, cruel work makes use of an entire piece of yarn. Cruel yarn was not originally intended to be pulled apart. If you buy modern cruel yarn, sometimes it is, but the initial thing was not that. This results, of course, in a much more dimensional work because of the thickness. Cruel is also known for its fluid lines. It is not as rigid in its designs as some other forms of embroidery, and it has often been worked freehand without a set pattern. This raised embroidery quickly became very popular throughout Europe, and like almost any new embellishment, it was first used for the clothes of religious figures and the very wealthy. One item of note, going back to the first part of this and our frequent flyer on the show, the Bayou Tapestry, which predates this surge in popularity, is sometimes described as having cruel embroidery, and that is not wrong, but the style that was used on it is very different from what was popularized as cruel embroidery several hundred years later. The rise of samplers in English embroidery is indicative of a shift that was happening regarding embroidery in Europe, led largely by the Tutors as rulers during the Tudor period, which began in fourteen eighty five. When the War of the Roses ended and Henry the Seventh emerged victorious and took the throne, Embroidery ceased to be exclusively used for religious ornamentation and started to be an integral part of fashion, particularly for the royal court and the wealthy nobles. If someone wanted to show off their status and wealth, they could easily do it if they appeared at court wearing a garment that was lavishly embroidered with silk and precious metals. This meant that more skilled embroiderers were also needed to create these kinds of things, and, as is often the case, as embroidery became a status signifier and something that people outside the aristocracy created it was copied by people who didn't have as much status. Over time, it became integrated into the clothing and lenins of a lot of people. By the sixteen hundreds, embroidery had become commonly practiced and taught as a pastime as well as a valuable skill. We're going to talk about some of the organizations that formed to promote embroidery and the earliest embroidery books. Right after we hear from the sponsors that keep stuff you missed in history class going. By the sixteenth century, embroidery was so important in England that the Worshipful Company of Broiderers received its grant of Arms in fifteen fifty eight, and it was given its first charter three years later in fifteen sixty one from Queen Elizabeth the First. Though that recognition was new, the group its was not. It is believed to have formed at least as early as the thirteenth century, although the documentation of that is not available. For several hundred years, the group held its functions in the Broderers Hall, which was a monastery that was originally constructed in the tenth century. That location remained active until nineteen forty when it was bombed by Germany in early World War II, and that is why the documentation of the companies founding in the thirteenth century is not available. It and other pieces of their archive were destroyed at that time. The Worshipful Company of Broiderers still exists. It got a new supplemental charter in twenty nineteen. According to the website quote, the company continues to patronize the industry and to encourage excellence within the art through association with the Embroiderers Guild and support of the Royal School of Needlework, today a registered charity housed in Hampton Court Palace, as well as through continuing their competitions and exhibitions for hundreds of years. Right up to today, the official Broiderer's toast has remained the same quote, the Worshipful Company of Broderers, Root and branch, May it continue and flourish forever. The sixteen hundreds saw the rise of a style of embroidery in Norway known as Hardanger. That is also the name of the region where it developed. And this decorative embroidery is also called white work because traditionally it used white thread on white fabric and It makes use of a lot of different stitch techniques to create striking geometric designs, often with a repeat. Sometimes these even have little cutout sections to make it just really intricate. This style quickly gained popularity throughout Europe and eventually the globe. It remains very popular today. You can find lots of books about it. The first book of embroidery patterns is sometimes stated as for Alla Frohmen Frauen or or All Pious Women, sometimes translated as for All Devout Women. This was published in Germany in fifteen twenty three or fifteen twenty four by publisher Johann Schaunsberger the Younger. There don't seem to be any scans or photos of this book online, but there are others that were published around the same time, also published by Shaunsberger. One is I'm New from Bookline, which is a new little book of patterns, and I'm New Motor Book, a new model book. These are usually described as books of textile and embroidery patterns, but they don't have any instructions. The pages just contain mostly woodcut prints of the designs, so somebody trying to use them would be expected to know how to use them as the basis to create their own embroidery designs. There are some notes on the weaving of textile designs, but not for how to do any of the actual beeedlework. Also, to be clear, Schaunsberger was a publisher, not a needlework expert. It is not clear who assembled this collection of designs. After Germany started publishing design books, the rest of Europe started doing the same. In the seventeen hundreds, Rococo fashion gave rise to a new and very beautiful style of embellishment, and that is ribbon embroidery. This is another way to create dimensional embroidery. It uses silk ribbons in lieu of floss or yarn, and these ribbons tend to have a very fine and thin texture, so they can easily be pulled through fabric with a needle. This technique is often used to create just scrumptious and sumptuous floral designs that look both delicate and luxurious while also having lots of depth. During the late eighteenth century, the concept of sashiko embroidery was mentioned in print for the first time. This is a Japanese technique that combines mending and decoration and uses simple straight stitches of white thread or floss to reinforce an article of clothing. Traditionally, the white thread is featured on a background of dark blue. Sashiko endures today and it's popular for mending denim. Modern iterations often harken back to those original colors, with white thread or floss used to repair the blue denim. Yeah, sometimes people do just like a straight like basket weave, but sometimes they do beautiful swirls and other designs. It's super pretty. If you embroider, you have almost certainly purchased DMC six strand embroidery flaws. And that company actually reaches back to the middle of the seventeen hundreds, although it did begin as a fabric manufacturer. The founding members were Jean Henridolphus, Jean Jacques Schmeltzer and Samuel Cochland, and they formed their business in Mohouse, France, which sits right in the crook that's kind of made by the country's borders with Switzerland and Germany today and the founding of that textile company was a significant economic moment for the town, as it and other textile companies brought Mohause into the industrial age with their production processes. That company then passed to Jeanre's nephew, Daniel Dolphus late in the seventeen nineties, and when Daniel married a woman named Ann Marie MiG he rebranded the company as Dolphus meg A Company or DMC in eighteen hundred. Over time, of course, the company diversified from strictly printing textiles into offering yarns, embroidery patterns, and other embroidery supplies, and today DMC is a widely recognized brand among embroiderers. You can get it at just about any fabric or craft store that carries embroidery supplies. Eighteen oh four saw a huge step forward in the way embroidery patterns were published. This is the first year that patterns were available in Europe laid out across a grid, with every square showing a stitch. This is also the beginning of an embroidery style known as Berlin work. This is the style of needle point embroidery that uses a thick yarn like tapestry yarn, and sometimes covers a whole canvas. Berlin work named for Berlin, Germany, where it was developed off and features red Wool's tapestry yarn as a primary component. The gritted pattern system has become standard across many different types of embroidery, and it's often associated with cross ditch today. For a very long time. How long is not documented, a technique called beetle wing embroidery has been used in India. This is an embellishment that makes use of eletra, the kitanous outer shell of a jewel beetle. These casings are absolutely beautiful. They come in many different colors, but the most common is a metallic green with a purply iridescent secondary shimmer that glints as the shell moves in the light. These wings are very hard and they can be cut to a desired shape and drilled with small holes for a needle and thread to pass through. India is certainly not the only place they have been used as decoration. Jewel beetles can live in a variety of environments and they thrive around the globe, and their sparkly wings have been incorporated into ornamentation on just about every but in India, particularly during the long period of the Mughal Empire. Their use was perfected. Often, these wing based sequins were stitched into clothes with gold embroidery thread to create just a dazzling effect. Beetlewing embroidery was hugely popular among Indian aristocracy in the seventeen hundreds and eighteen hundreds. So that's just as England's power in the country was growing to the point that the British Raj rule began in eighteen fifty eight, and naturally Europeans appropriated this technique and made it a fad back in Europe. The first beatlewing embellished garments to make it to England appeared in the eighteen twenties, and the popularity of eletra im best clothes grew rapidly. As with any fad, things had to get bigger and more sparkly, so within a decade there were huge ornate designs appearing on ladies' dresses and that trend continued for decades. Uh. Yeah. To be clear, electra and beetle wing embroidery is very closely tied to colonialism. In India, electra were used on all colors of garments, but in Europe it became very popular to embroider them into a design on a white cotton or linen garment, although after a few decades different background colors became popular as well, and as the English adopted the style, the way that beetlewing embroidery was produced in India changed. It had been the kind of embellishment that was reserved for special occasion wear for the elite classes, but as demand from Europe grew, the small scale production in India could simply not meet demand, and soon a more industrial approach to churning out embroidery with beetle wings started up. This meant that designs were not customized for specific garments as much. There tended to be a fairly static library of designs that went on to dress after dress after dress. Still, these clothes were very prized in England, and any famous women of the day were described in written accounts as wearing dresses adorned with beetle wings. Dame Alice Ellen Terry, who was a renowned British actress fame for her Shakespearean roles, appeared as the female lead in Macbeth in eighteen eighty eight. She wore a gown that was dripping with green, iridescent beetle wings. Beetle wings style also made its way to the US when John Singer Sargent painted a portrait of Mary Barrett Wendell during his first visit to the US, which was also in eighteen eighty eight. She is depicted wearing a gown embellished with eletra. Like many of the techniques we've been discussing, beetling embroidery is still done today, although the sourcing of the materials has changed. Real beetles are still used, but today most of them come from Thailand, and the wings are collected from insects that are being used as a protein source in food, rather than the old way of just taking the wings and discarding the insect. A eighteen seventy two, the Royal School of Needlework was founded in London at Hampton Court Palace. That palace was originally built in fifteen fourteen for Henry the Ight's Chief Minister, Cardinal Thomas Woolsey. The goal was twofold to revive interest in embroidery and also to educate women in embroidery as a vocation. In the decades since its inception, the organization has worked on a number of high profile projects, including the Funeral Paul that adorned Queen Victoria's coffin and the coronation regalia for King George the Fifth, among others. The group has also been involved in outreach programs, including one after World War One that offered embroidery lessons to soldiers who had returned home from the front as a form of therapy. Today, the RSN continues. It offers classes, lecture series and other events, and continues to contribute work to royal events as well as collaborating with museums. In nineteen oh six, the Embroiderers Guild was started in London. This group's founding was the result of sixteen former students from the Royal School of Needlework who wanted to form a group to quote deal entirely with embroidery and with the first object of keeping up a high standard of work and design. So this isn't a guild in the formal sense that we've often talked about on the show. Before anybody can join it and over its one hundred twenty year history, the Embroiderers Guild has accumulated a really impressive collection of embroidery from around the globe and dating back to the fifteen hundreds. It keeps all of this in its archive. In nineteen fifty eight, a US branch of the Embroiderers Guild was formed in New York, but after twelve years, the New York group withdrew from the English umbrella to form the Embroiderers Guild of America. As is the case with the European group, anyone of any skill level can become a member of the EGA. Today there are more than two hundred and thirty chapters of this group across the US and Canada, and there are also online groups. Their national headquarters today are in Louisville, Kentucky. Both of these groups and others like them, have from the beginning offered instruction and education in addition to providing reference information. These groups also sometimes work on community projects. They form partnerships with museums and historical societies, and as embroidery education resources have shrunk in number in North America and Europe, these groups have really taken on the mission to ensure that there is always information available to people who are interested in the art. One of the really thrilling things about embroidery today is that it's going through a kind of revival, but one which, while often subversive and unconventional, connects it to the centuries old tradition of communication as well as art. While people still make embroidery pieces that are intended simply to be beautiful, there are many stitchers who specialize in protest art made through embroidery or thought provoking concept pieces. This is not the first time a surge of interests has happened, and it's interesting to note that handiwork has experienced surges in popularity in the US during times of political upheaval. In the eighteen seventies, as the US was in recovery from the Civil War, embroidery became more popular than ever as a pastime. Once again became popular in the nineteen sixties when the country was experiencing the unrest of the Civil Rights movement. Yeah, it kind of fascinates me that we in times when everything is a little bit stressful and strained, people want to go back to these kind of old school crafts as a way to ground themselves. I kind of love it. That's our very, very samply look at embroidery through the ages. Yeah, I have so many things to discuss on Friday, but right now I have listener mail. It's short but good. Yeah, and allows. I didn't mean to have two Disney emails in a row this week, but I did. And here we go. This is from our listener share. They're in who writes High Holly and Tracy, but this one is more for Holly. YouTube shows me odd things every once in a while. And you may know all about this already, but I definitely thought of you. Maybe they have this at disney World. Also enjoy happy New Year. And she sent a link to a video on YouTube that is all about the Disneyland cat program because Disneyland. We may have mentioned it before on the show, but it's been a while. Disneyland has a program where there are naturally feral cats that run around the property and they have a trap, neuter release program where they will trap those cats, get them vetted and sterilized, and then they let them go and they let them run around because they are controlling the rodent population. The one thing that's interesting is that there are even social media accounts of people that track some of these cats like they know them by sight. Most of them do not run around the parks in the day. They tend to wait until night time when it gets quiet, and then they come out, But there are some that will appear, and the kind of rule of thumb, as I understand it is that if they start to get too comfortable with humans, someone will scoop them up and they will get them adopted out, because they don't actually want the cats running around in the park during the day. Disney World does also do similar stuff to this, because they have four parks and a lot of wild space. There's a lot of kiddies as well as bunnies that run around some of the parks. There used to be a security guard that would keep carrots in his jacket to feed the bunnies. He has since passed. We all miss him. But there is a similar program. So if a cat is found on Disney property, they will get it vetted. If it is fairal, they will re release it. If it's kittens, they'll often try to get them socialized so they can adopt out. I've had friends that used to work in Disney that adopted kittens through that program. So there are always people on the lookout. I'm taking care of those critters, which I love. I love it so much. Any excuse to talk about Disney and also kitties. My dream is to one day sort of have a kitty from Disney, but I don't think that's realistic. Transport alone would be a pain in the neck. But I am glad that you mentioned it. It's a good thing. If you are in the parks and you see a kiddie, they're probably doing their job. They're so cute to every once in a while, it feels like a very special thing. I laugh sometimes anytime there are wild animals in the parks that appear when humans are around, and that goes for kitties, bunnies. Sometimes you'll see a family of ducks walking around and it kind of cracks me up because there's all of this beautiful stuff that has been created for people to engage with. But the second a duck walks through Epcot with five duck links behind it, that's all anybody's looking at. And I'm glad that they're being looked after and people care about them. So that's the answer to your question. In addition to probably more information than you wanted, If you would like to write to us about animals and parks, your own animals, anything, really, we love it all. You can do that at History podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. You can also subscribe to the show on the eye heart Radio app, or anywhere you like to listen to podcasts. 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