Welcome back and happy new year

The end of year holidays are over, and A Study in Textiles is back.  It's Monday, so time for some historic embroidery talk.

Over the holidays I was able to go to the Met to see the exhibit "Fashion and Virtue" which focuses on embroidery design books, mostly from the late 16th Century (with a couple things earlier and a few things later).  The exhibit continues through January 10 -- and if you've been thinking about it, and still have the chance, I would say GO.

Fortunately, photos are permitted (of all but one item).  I will also say that the Met knows how to put on an exhibit of textiles.  Pieces are displayed in such a way as to be able to get pretty close to the items, to really *see* them.

I have a full album of my photos (and a few other things I photographed that day) on Flickr (feel free to grab my photos, but please give full credits, both to the object owners and to me).  For most items, the label follows the photo(s).

But, I really want to share a couple of things.

For instance, there is this lovely photo, showing the pricking holes used to transfer this embroidery cartoon to fabric:

That's the kind of detail in an exhibit I love to see.  Not only does it cover "oh, look, here are beautiful things" but also "here are things that are beautiful and were used and here is how they were used."

Of course, the focus of the exhibit was the embroidery books or "modelbuchs."

There were a lot of them.  Certainly more than I have ever seen in one place (eve in reprints).

One of the things that was clear is that the printers of these books "borrowed" liberally from each other.

For example, here is a page displayed as being from one book (Christian Egenolff, Modelbuch aller Art Nehens vn[d] Stickens 1`535 -- and yet, I know that some of the designs on this page appear in at least one other book.

There were a number of motifs and designs that appeared in several places throughout the exhibit.

The exhibit was vast, and the photos will provide much for me to talk about in future posts (For instance, I will want to devote a post just to the embroidered net....oh, yes).  I spent over two hours and took over 350 photos -- and there was a lot that I did not photograph.  It was a wonderfully constructed exhibit, and I only wish I had gone earlier in its run, so that I could have gone again.