Category: textile art

I thought I would have a go at a little dress for my 19th-century-style sampler book. Ellen Mahon’s sampler book contains some truly adorable little dresses:

My version has turned out to be a little more three-dimensional than either of these, but I will flatten it later when I attach it to a page. I haven’t decided yet whether I will use paper or cloth pages to display my samples – there are advantages and disadvantages to both methods, but I’ve got a lot more to make so I don’t need to decide yet.

I decided on a vaguely 1850s-style flounced day dress, using some vintage sari silk fabric and some fine silk thread. The Workwoman’s Guide is quite sketchy on dress patterns, and tends to stick to basic instructions for children’s clothes and plain dresses for servants and the working classes. The anonymous author says that making as much as you can at home will save money, but “it is strongly recommended to all those who can afford it, to have their best dresses invariably made by a mantua-maker, as those which are cut out at home seldom fit so comfortably, or look so well, as when made by persons in constant practice.” I had to make a few concessions, but it has turned out more or less as I intended.

There was no way I could make it wearable, but it’s doing a fairly convincing impression. Under the subtitle ‘Order is the best economy of time’, The Workwoman’s Guide advises, very sagely, “it is of great consequence that dresses should be carefully and neatly put away, as their preservation depends much on the attention paid to this: a gown smoothly folded, and laid by directly it is taken off, will last half as long again as one that is thrown about upon dirty chairs, or tumbled and creased in the wrapping up.” I have taken her advice and placed it in the box with the other samples.

Of all the examples of fine needlework in Ellen Mahon’s sampler book, it’s the tiny clothes I find most fascinating. One of my favourite stories as a child was ‘The Elves and the Shoemaker’ because I loved the idea of making tiny clothes for elves.

Here is a page showing Ellen’s example of a basic shift and a more complex shirt:

The shirt in particular is impossibly detailed. I have emailed the V and A to ask them for the dimensions of this book but haven’t had a response yet, so I can’t tell how big (or small) these examples might be. As I mentioned in my last post, it is often difficult to get a sense of scale just from looking at pictures – this book might be foolscap or bigger, or it might be much smaller than that and more like a pocket exercise-book. I’d like to know, just out of interest.

I’ve been using The Workwoman’s Guide as my main source for nineteenth-century sewing. Written by ‘A Lady’ and published in 1838, it has a baffling amount of information about what, and how, women were expected to sew. Most daily needlework would have been functional rather than decorative. I am astounded every time I think about how much sewing there would have been for a household before people had access to sewing machines. Every item in the house made of cloth would have been cut and sewn by hand – so that’s everyone’s clothes, towels, sheets, curtains, table linen, bed covers and quilts. The Workwoman’s Guide gives cutting instructions for six shirts, as it’s more efficient to cut and sew six shirts than one. That’s about 22 yards of fabric, all to be cut by hand.

Measurements are given in nails (a nail is 2.5 inches), and the book lists the nineteen useful parts of a shirt. Apart from the body, sleeves, cuffs and collar, there are various kinds of gusset, plus binders and shoulder straps.

It was therefore with quite a sense of trepidation that I embarked on an example of my own.

In the end my poor effort only has 7 parts – a back, a front, two sleeves, two cuffs and a collar. I used a bit of vintage cotton sheet and in this scale it looks and feels like fine wool or flannel, so definitely a labouring man’s garment rather than anything a gentleman would consider suitable. The sleeves are rather too voluminous, on reflection, and the body is probably too short, but as a sample, and as a learning experience, it’s as good as it’s going to get. I did manage to get a few little pintucks into the front, and I found some very tiny beads that will do as buttons.

Don’t zoom in, it doesn’t bear close inspection. It is kind of cute though.

I made some darning samples a few weeks ago, inspired by the darning samples created by Ellen Mahon in her sampler book

I’ve never done darning before. I have mended clothes, obviously, but have never done ‘proper’ traditional darning, which is basically weaving. I am not a weaver. I had to draw a diagram to stop me getting confused about all the unders and overs.

I used a single strand of DMC embroidery thread on hand-dyed evenweave (32 count, I think). You can see that my attempts are nowhere near as fine as Ellen’s.

If you follow the instructions in nineteenth-century needlework manuals, you are supposed to leave a little loop at the end of each row to allow for shrinking in the wash. As these are only ever going to be decorative, I didn’t bother doing that. I tried a few different patterns, and made a few mistakes, but overall I think it will do. I was a bit concerned about the tension, as I didn’t use a hoop or frame, but a quick (careful) press with the iron seems to have sorted it out. The rather shoddy-looking example top right below was my first attempt.

This sample overall measures about 7″ square.

A while ago I became fascinated by samplers, and in particular by the sampler books made by nineteenth-century schoolgirls. These consisted of little samples of various kinds of needlework, like seams, hemming, cross stitch, embroidery, darning, etc, and were pasted into exercise books as a record of the skills they had learned.
In fact I remember making something very similar as a schoolgirl myself. In the olden days, by which I mean the 1970s, in our secondary school boys and girls were separated for some of the lessons. The boys were herded off to do woodwork and technical drawing while the girls did needlework and cookery. We learned to sew using very old cast iron Singer treadle machines, and we stapled samples of flat felled seams and French seams into our exercise books.

I thought it might be an interesting exercise to connect the past and present by making my own version. The example that started this train of thought is in the V and A museum and can be viewed here:

This is a sampler book compiled by Ellen Mahon, when she was a student at Boyle School in Ireland in the early 1850s. It is filled with examples of fine needlework.

I still can’t sew, of course, but I’m thinking about how I might create something similar, and how that might be a good opportunity to sample some varieties of needlework that I wouldn’t normally do. There’s always something to learn, right?