I am back in New Jersey to write this as I was just too tired on Saturday night. And yesterday Mr. M and I got to drive to Long Island so that we could have dinner with my father and sister to celebrate their birthdays (95 for him, 61 for her). Can someone explain to me how it take 2-1/4 hours to drive 125 miles from Winterthur, DE (even with some construction detours) and almost 3 hours to drive the 65 miles to Jericho, NY?  Gotta love the NY/NJ Metro area!

Saturday morning I got to pack up and head over to Winterthur for a free morning just wandering around the grounds and the Galleries. I was not sure of my timing so I didn’t wander too far, but I did get to see a few of the follies on the property (a folly being a costly ornamental building with no practical purpose). Maybe if I win the lottery I can build my own folly!

The Galleries provide an up-close and personal look at objects in the museum’s collection, and the pieces are changed periodically.  There are several galleries but I stayed focused on the Textiles and Needlework.  (You can access the collections online.)

There was a special exhibit entitled Dining by Design: Nature Displayed on the Dinner Table which included some very elaborate table pieces.

And, of course, there was the exhibit for the conference Embroidery: The Thread of History.

One of the most impressive pieces in the exhibit is an embroidered casket and toys created by Janet Carija Brandt from Indianapolis. It is part of a group of work she created imagining the adult lives of traditional fairy tale characters. The piece on exhibit shows the life of Little Red Riding Hood. My pictures do not do this piece justice so please click on the link here; it is amazing!  Be sure to explore her site to see the toys that go with the casket as well as all of her amazing work.

Of course the afternoon was spent in more fascinating lectures. Did you know that the National Archives and Records Administration in DC found six embroidered samplers in the tens of thousands of documents housed in the Archives? In Embroidered Evidence: Family Record Samplers in the Revolutionary War Pension Files of the National Archives, Washington, DC, Kathleen Staples described how these samplers were used as legal proof in determining the eligibility of claimants for Revolutionary War pensions!

In Embroidered Narratives: Storytelling Through the Eye of the Needle, Susan Boardman, an artist from Nantucket, described how she was inspired to create 8-inch by 9-inch textile narratives of women who lived on the island during the ninetheenth century. Her creations use dye painting, hand embroidery, handmade needle lace, appliqué, beadwork, gold leaf, carving and quilting.

In Collecting for Love or Money: A Discussion of Needlework Donations to The Met and the Art Institute of Chicago, Melinda Watt, Chair and Christa C. Mayer Thurman Curator of Textiles, Art Institute of Chicago, described the individuals who amassed diverse collections of European embroideries.

Our final speaker was Dr. Susan Kay-Williams, Chief Executive of the Royal School of Needlework, Hampton Court Palace, UK, who spoke on Fine and Beautiful: Historic Commissions from the RSN Studio. Dr. Kay-Williams was fascinating as she described some of the history of the RSN; it moved seven times in the 146 years since it was first established, settling in its current location in 1987. RSN tutors work in teams on a project and the training is such that no matter how many people are on the team the final piece looks as if it was completed by one person. One incredible project that they worked on was The Overlord Embroidery which tells the story of the D-Day Invasion and the Battle of Normandy in 34 embroidered panels, a total length of 83 meters (about 272 feet).

This conference was truly amazing and I’m so glad I was able to attend. The next conference will be in 2020 (date TBD) and will focus on the work of Erica Wilson, so it promises to be another exciting event.

For fans of The Crown, Winterthur will be mounting an exhibit in March 2019 entitled Dressing the Crown which will feature the fashions from the series.

Finally, for those of you who are readers of history, Dr. Joan DeJean, who I mentioned in my previous post, has written a book entitled The Queen’s Embroiderer: A True Story of Paris, Lovers, Swindlers, and the First Stock Market Crisis. I have my copy already and am looking forward to reading it.

 

 

Today is the first day of the Winterthur Conference Embroidery: The Thread of History. Approximately 200 people are in attendance, representing a number of states. The focus of the conference is how embroidery serves as a historical record of the socioeconomic issues of the time, allowing for a view of embroidery from a historian’s perspective. The exhibit of the same name is on view from October 5, 2018 to January 6, 2019.

The morning agenda was four fabulous talks on very different topics. We started with Tricia Wilson Nguyen of Thistle Threads whose program was Materials for Historically Inspired Needlework. Tricia spoke about creating threads and other materials for adaptions in order to make the reproduction as accurate as possible. In addition to showing extensive slides of historic needlework, she discussed the economics of producing materials for a limited market.

The second speaker was Virginia Whelan, a textile conservator and owner of Filaments Conservation Studio. Her talk, entitled Material Witnesses: Testimony of Embroidery, focused on how she was able to trace information about furniture, cotton manufacturing, and Independence Hall by using information extracted from the study of three different samplers given to her for conservation.

The third speaker was Joan DeJean, Trustee Professor of French at the University of Pennsylvania, who spoke on The Price of Beauty: Embroidery and Louis XIV’s Versailles. She discussed the role of embroidery in the rise of Paris as the center of fashion during the reign of Louis XIV and his construction of Versailles. She spoke about the loss of the wonderful tapestries that used to hang in Versailles’ Hall of Mirrors as well as the garments created for Louis XIV (the Sun King), because he needed the gold and silver threads used in their creation to finance his wars.

Our final speaker before lunch was Sally Tuckett, Lecturer in Dress and Textile Histories at the University of Glasgow, who spoke on the Ayrshire whitework industry. Needle Crusaders: The Ayrshire Whitework Industry in Nineteenth-Century Scotland described the production of this popular alternative to lace through a cottage industry. In the mid-nineteenth century it employed thousands of Scottish and Irish women but by the end of the century the industry had fallen into decline due to changing fashion as well as advances in textile manufacture.

After lunch the attendees participated in a variety of workshops that included tours as well as needlework projects, either 90 minutes or 3 hours. I was able to attend a 90-minute tour of the needlework collection on public view at Winterthur.

 

We were also able to visit the study room and see some of the pieces in the collection that are not on public view.

My second workshop was to participate in stitching the Plymouth Tapestry. Rather than paraphrase I will quote directly from the brochure:

A large-scale embroidered tapestry telling the story of Plymouth, Massachusetts, is being created for Pilgrim Hall Museum, in honor of the 400th anniversary of the 1620 founding of Plymouth Colony. The Plymouth Tapestry will portray the experiences, familiar and unfamiliar, of the English settlers who arrived on the Mayflower, and the Wampanoag families who inhabited the region for millennia before their arrival. The tapestry is a visual exploration of history, memory, and cosmology, depicting the culture and everyday life of the Wampanoag, English, and American peoples who have inhabited this unique place.

The multimedia thread-on-linen embroidery will be comprised of twenty, six-foot-long panels. Three of these panels will be at Winterthur, where embroiderers (beginner to experienced) will have an opportunity to participate in the project. Elizabeth Creeden, who designed and drew the tapestry, will lead the work. For those who wish to learn more or simply witness the work in progress, she will also be available to describe the steps required to plan such a heroically scaled project.

The Plymouth Tapestry is a signature project of Pilgrim Hall Museum, repository of many of the real 17th-century belongings of the Pilgrims and will be exhibited in conjunction with Plymouth’s 400th anniversary commemoration in 2020.

I was able to put in some yellow stem stitching on the banner edges on the panel that includes the image of Henry VIII. The stem stitch on the top from “excommunicates” to “publishes” is my stitching, as is the bottom line in between Henry’s legs. Each stitcher signs the Record of Stitchers and there is a full-size drawing of each of the panels that each stitcher indicates exactly what (s)he stitched. It is an amazing undertaking and I was honored to be able to be a small part of it.

Tomorrow morning I will be touring the exhibit at a leisurely pace since I have no workshops scheduled. After lunch we will hear from four more speakers. At the end of the conference I will be heading home so tomorrow’s blog may have to wait until Sunday to be posted.