Sad to say, Curtiss Museum is not offering its traditional holiday miniatures show this year. But on Friday the 18th, the museum did open another perennial favorite, the biennial embroidery show. Some of the pieces are over a hundred years old, and others were finished, I imagine, under the lowering pressure of the Friday deadline.
*A crazy quilt (c. 1900) on loan from Schuyler County Historical Society belies the commonplace idea of crazy quilts as patchwork folk-art primitives. Certainly odd patches are pieced together, but artistic embroidery adorns the work. This is, in fact a work of art on a different level than the usual crazy quilt.
*And it spotlights the definition of embroidery as work with an eyed needle, embellishing a fabric surface. The three 1905 pieces by Clara and Olivia Schumacher use silk thread, worked onto linen with a flat satin stitch. It took a lot of labor and a lot of patience to work the baskets in these works, capturing the weaving of slats, with alternating warp and woof slats oriented differently. I didn’t touch, (of course!) but I didn’t need to to. I could “feel” the texture of the silk, and I could “feel” the texture of the baskets.
*A brightly-colored bird approaches one basket from the upper corner, with marvelous clear space between. Sometimes successful embellishment includes recognizing when NOT to embellish.
*Now having waxed on about these historic pieces, I confess that I’m usually pretty ho-hum about historic samplers and the like. But my eye was seized by the REPRODUCTION Mary Starker 1760 sampler (embroidered by Pat Bennett), and by the REPRODUCTION Dorothy Walpole 1774 sampler (embroidered by Patty Kahl).
*What I loved about these is the fact that they’re so vivid. Now I get a sense of what it might have been like, in the 1700s, to see their just-finished originals, in all their vivid unfaded glory. The colors pop out; so do the birds, the deer, the vases, the tree. Even the “white space” seems to leap from the surface.
*The deer and the rabbit connect, in my mind, with a deer, a rabbit, a squirrel and a peacock on Barbara Heytmeijer’s counted-thread piece, Sanctuary. The layout reminds me of one of those boxwood hedge gardens in England, with each creature in its own quadrant and a space in the center.
*Speaking of England, Joyce House’s counted cross-stitch English village, overflowing with flowers, is also overflowing with colors. It took first prize at the New York State Fair. Mary Clarkson’s crewel piece, Country Cottage 1967, holds forth in paler colors. I couldn’t tell whether this was worked in 1967, or whether it was supposed to represent 1967, but it surely has a ’67 feel.
*And in keeping with the season there are also numerous Christmas pieces. Joyce House’s cross-stitch Snow Family Christmas whimsically shows a snow father and snow mother out pulling their little snow boy on a sled, with a little snow dog along for the adventure. Kristine Garner’s Home for Christmas (in beads and cross-stitch) pictures a closed but welcoming front door, surrounded by lights and next to a Christmas tree. It’s the door we all can’t wait to open… in memory if not today, in the mind if not in reality.