What Sewing Samplers Tell Us About Women’s Lives from the 17th to 19th Centuries
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Re: What Sewing Samplers Tell Us About Women’s Lives from the 17th to 19th Centuries
#2It's interesting how close some of these get to being fractals. Some probably are based on counting spaces and threads.
Re: What Sewing Samplers Tell Us About Women’s Lives from the 17th to 19th Centuries
#3As a huge fan of 8-bit titles from the golden age of the 80's, I can't help but feeling like these pieces are a kind of pixel art. The intricate detail and consideration for colour placement, while also reducing the load to a minimum (those amazing glyph bitmaps!) is very much aligned between these works, worlds apart..
Re: What Sewing Samplers Tell Us About Women’s Lives from the 17th to 19th Centuries
#4The cross-stitch/counted-thread samplers look exactly like old-style pixel art, aside from the "fonts" and the subject matter. Plus ça change.
Re: What Sewing Samplers Tell Us About Women’s Lives from the 17th to 19th Centuries
#5My favorite things to embroider are fractals and flowers, fractals because you can keep your place without a pattern handy and flowers because you can freehand them easily. It's a therapeutic, contemplative activity when done for leisure.
I can't imagine having your personal worth judged by your stitching though. It's such a frivolous thing.
Re: What Sewing Samplers Tell Us About Women’s Lives from the 17th to 19th Centuries
#6Truly wonderful handicraft and workmanship, these women really do deserve to be remembered.
Re: What Sewing Samplers Tell Us About Women’s Lives from the 17th to 19th Centuries
#7I love finding historical artifacts that reveal some of what has been excluded from our stories. We can forget how much the internet has removed gatekeeping and resource constraints on who's writings are considered valuable enough to devote paper and archive space too.
Now instead we have the question of search ranking algorithms. I wonder if some day researchers will be trawling through the internet archives looking for old Geocities pages overlooked by the then-traditional scholarship.
Re: What Sewing Samplers Tell Us About Women’s Lives from the 17th to 19th Centuries
#8The cross-stitch/counted-thread samplers look exactly like old-style pixel art, aside from the "fonts" and the subject matter. Plus ça change.
It's kind of fun, speculating about the interaction between medium and style. Like, that there's something about human minds and a grid of squares that leads to certain things that ~work~ and feel good, regardless of whether that grid was created by the warp and weft of woven cloth or an electronic bitmap.
Re: What Sewing Samplers Tell Us About Women’s Lives from the 17th to 19th Centuries
#9As a huge fan of 8-bit titles from the golden age of the 80's, I can't help but feeling like these pieces are a kind of pixel art. The intricate detail and consideration for colour placement, while also reducing the load to a minimum (those amazing glyph bitmaps!) is very much aligned between these works, worlds apart..
Not necessary world's apart. People stitch video game art now.
Re: What Sewing Samplers Tell Us About Women’s Lives from the 17th to 19th Centuries
#10On the sadder side, this http://www.dewsburyreporter.co.uk/news/tragic-story-behind-r... is a tapestry which records a ladies nine children who died in infancy between 1855 and 1871. Seen it and it is affecting.