Happy New Year everybody! Yesterday for Winter Camp we made Chinese dragon puppets and explored a bunch of other New Year's traditions from around the world. So now here's another one: the end of the year review...I've had a really good year. Really. Knock on wood and all that.
I applied to grad school with a portfolio of cityscapes in pencil and embroidery, and found out soon after that I'd been accepted to Tyler School of Art at Temple University to get my Masters in Art Education. Hooray!
I got to be a part of Little Berlin's 80 person collaboration back in June, which led to new connections in the art community and a chance to explore my mapping ideas.I continued to teach embroidery, color theory, and started teaching kids classes at Fleisher. With the new administration there it seems that fiber arts will continue and grow in the future.
In the summer I started to get involved with NLArts, teaching at their summer camp. Success there led to further opportunities to teach in their First Friday kids workshops and Winter Camp. Hopefully I'll get to be more involved with planning next year's summer camp too.
In September I got to teach an embroidery workshop up at Peters Valley Craft Center, which was a big highlight of the year... maybe even the decade!
I started attending the Philadelphia Cathedral and am happy to have found a faith community that feels like home. I've enjoyed singing with the Cathedral Singers, especially as much of the music is challenging and beautiful to hear in that space. They've learned I'm the creative type and have started to enlist my help with projects as well (more on that tomorrow).
Grad School is going well so far. I got to exhibit with my classmates back in September and my coursework has pushed me towards new areas of exploration both artistically and academically. My family has been supportive even though I haven't been able to pay as much attention to them as I'd like in this time. I've been incredibly busy and pre-occupied, and I'm glad I started this blog back in May to help me make sense of it all.So- all in all, it's been a good year. Thanks for joining me on my journey, and health and happiness in the new year!
Hope you got everything you wanted for Christmas. I'm enjoying a paisley shawl that my in-laws sent!
When it looks like that outside, I'd rather stay inside. So I've been christmas decorating and cooking to weather the storm. (By the way, see how small my backyard is?)
So I got my friend Colleen to remind me how to knit again, and I think I've figured it out now. Before , I never got into a comfortable way to hold the knitting needles, but 10 years of working in fiber arts has brought new dexterity.
In case you're wondering, the mitten tops are knitted flat in garter stitch starting with 30 stitches, then after about 10 rows (I counted 10 ridges up) I decreased both sides one stitch, then up another 5, decreased both sides again, up 5 while decreasing each row one stitch at the side and the center point. Then I bound off, folded the mitten top in half and crocheted the sides together, then added a bottom border of crocheted fan stitch. The second one went a lot faster!
I'm not normally this crafty- it's the holiday season, I swear. I will return to art eventually.
Back in August I started this multi-panel piece of a photograph of the backs of some houses and yards on Trenton St. The image is broken up into the map of the place. Unfortunately it got put on the backburner once the semester started.
Finally I picked it back up again. Put in a needlewoven window screen, a random cross boarded window, and a buttonhole roofline. 
Now I'm ready to applique the final panel and finish this puppy. 
The top row should look something like this in the end. It's nice to do some embroidery! It's been a while!
I'm hoping it will be a fun semester!
Rachel's a girl after my own heart, and was busily crocheting away while she talked and chatted with us and her customers. Her work was on display primarily for an exhibition going on in the 2424 skybox (up through December 18th, better catch it quick), but she came out with an additional table and wares for sale for today's craft market.
Here is the Elizabeth Hudson of 1700 sampler I've shown you before from the Haddonfield Historical Society and the Sarah Stone 1678 sampler juxtaposed with a series of band patterns from the Gilbers 1527 Modelbuch I composed together as a band sampler. As soon as there is widespread printing of books there is dissemination of embroidery patterns!
These two embroidered pastoral scenes from New England show the "clip art" style of composition. I found engraving shop catalogues from the 18th century that listed "Children's lottery prints" with images of animals, ladies and gentleman, and assorted "droll subjects" which I believe would have been selected for embroidery compositions. I also believe that the foliage in the trees and the landscape style were influenced by the Indian Palampores, which would have been imported in Europe and the colonies and used as bedhangings.
The American sampler moved from narrow bands of patterns to a more "painting-like" rectangular format with the bands becoming a decorative frame, and started to include more text. Instead of just an alphabet and the maker's name and age, the samplers started to include religious phrases and quotations as well as family registers listing the births and deaths of the stitcher's family members. I discovered a printed version of a family register by Brunton in 1808 which I believe appropriates the compositional characteristics of samplers that set the tradition. Moving into the Federal period, samplers become far more pictorial- graphic, decorative frames shift to more floral and representational imagery. Embroiders start looking more specifically at fine art for inspiration, and so Embroidered paintings become more sophisticated.
This embroidered painting by Mary Esher is the only embroidery for which I found a specific reference, and that was to a Seymour engraving published in a 1791 edition of the Holy bible. Materials in this period shift from cotton and wool to fine silks. Text in sampler work nearly disappears, save for the maker's name. Unfortunately, the Civil war, the industrial revolution, and increased formal public education opportunities for girls meant that schoolgirls no longer made samplers and handwork no longer held the same high value. While Ladies magazines and pattern books abound between the end of the 19th century and continue through the 20th century, there does not seem to be a great deal of embroidered "masterpieces". Perhaps this is due to the more decorative application of embroidery in this period.
However, the Feminist and Craft movements of the 60's and 70's brought renewed interest in textiles to the attention of artists. Fine artists look back on the traditions and continue the language of appropriation. Contemporary artists (like Elaine Reichek above) appropriate the visual language of historical samplers, quote various sources of information, refer to other artists and artforms into embroidered translations, and appropriate vintage textiles and the work of past needleworkers for new purposes. DIY embroiderers also carry on the handwork traditions in the decorative vein.
She says this one below is a baby robin because it has spots on its grey breast.
