FT #2 - "Dresses, Dresses, Dresses!"

welcome flosstube this is susan stanley stitch and time and i'm susan stanley and welcome back this is my second flosstube if you saw the first one thank you for coming back if this is your first time thank you for joining me this video channel is about cross stitch quilting the history of textiles and sewing notions and interesting facts about things that happened in the 1800s sometimes the late 1700s that i think pertain to the culture of textiles fiber and sewing so i hope if you're interested you'll join me for this next hopefully under an hour trying to keep my sessions under an hour so um i just have to tell you that i didn't tell any of my friends that i was doing this last time and i have friends who watch flosstube and i did hear from quite a few of them and that was a lot of fun to surprise them but i also was really shocked and very very um encouraged that so many people responded and wrote lovely comments i had a few people like um well the first person who acknowledged my flosstube was ellen of with my needle and she found me through instagram where she watched my flosstube and then found me on instagram and was telling her friends on instagram and so i had all these people saying ellen told me to watch you so that was so fun and as a result of that ellen who is a prolific fantastic cross stitcher and also a designer sent me two patterns and i am very excited to work on these and talk about the histo historical significance of these with you um this one is a friendship backwards friendship book and she includes history and i mean this is a booklet really it's got so much information so i'm really excited to start that thank you so much ellen and then she also sent me a pair of pin cubes pattern which is cross stitch and i have a cl a few of these in my antique needlework collection um my antique needlework collection doesn't hold a candle to some people but it's things that i find that i love and um i love to learn about the history and the background and the reason why things were made and used the way they were so anyway so ellen ellen was the first one to call me out and then let's see it was um carol of salt box stitcher um said something and that just blew me away um i couldn't believe it i had another friend call me and said what you're doing flosstube and she lives in tucson arizona so it's just been so fun um then brenda and laura from brenda and the serial starter were so gracious and how can you just not love those ladies they're just so fun and i feel like all of these people all of you that i watch are my friends and now i have new friends who've watched me and have commented and connected with me online it's just been super exciting and encouraging and just uplifting during challenging days and then bonnie log cabin quilter mentioned me when i watched her so it's just it's just great it's more than i expected for sure i was happy to just talk talk to myself and record this for my own i don't know need to talk and uh anyway there's no greater joy than sharing what you love with people who share your same same passions and and um interest so thank you for letting me share this with you and i just love all the comments i loved reading your stories i loved hearing about your connection to something that i mentioned and it's just been just delightful and i hope to keep that communication back and forth going on um i just also want to thank everyone who's out there doing a video i you know it is it's such a pleasure to watch and it does take some effort and i and some bravery and so i really appreciate all of you and i'm trying to watch new flosstubers every week and just new to me because a lot almost everybody's new to me because i'm pretty new to this but i love learning from you i love the fact that flosstube has something for everybody and there's every genre of cross stitch taste out there and i am really enjoying watching people who do cross stitch designs that are probably not something i'm going to do but i'm learning so much from them and so enjoying the color combinations the motifs the just the information that they have to share so this is a whole whole new wonderful world and i'm i'm so grateful for it um someone that i so a few people that i ran into this time since my last recording were people who happened to share some of the interest in the history in some kind of a realm and the first person i ran into was catherine adrian and her flosstube is called stitching in costume and so she has a lot of knowledge of historical costume and design and so that of course is fascinating to me because that that ties into the textile history that i love and so she's great to watch um jean farish is very knowledgeable and i know she's i think she's been doing floss tube for quite some time but her not her last video but the one before last she interviewed vicki jeannette and vicki is the one of the partners in the needlework press design partnership and she's a wealth of knowledge of history regarding the antique samplers so that was delightful and then evelyn across the pond and it's a x the pond and i'll i'll try to put this below in the show notes so you can access these people if you'd like she's studying um how political how textiles influence politics and vice versa i'm probably butchering that i'm sorry evelyn and she's in cambridge i believe that's right too i may have got that wrong as well anyway she's just wonderful to listen to and she does a little history moment in her floss tubes and all these people are so prolific i'm i'm nowhere near them as far as getting things done but i'm sure enjoying it so last time i talked to you about needles and that seemed to really strike a chord with a lot of a lot of you out there i think we can all relate to that calming influence that stitchery has on us and um so i talked about some of the traditions with the needle and what and so on and so forth but i wanted to show you what i do with my broken and bent needles i just have an old shaker i think it's a salt shaker the tops really damaged didn't have a pepper and i just keep them in here and keep them next to my sewing machine and they're just there i haven't i haven't tried sticking them in tofu or anything like i talked about last time but um just kind of a reminder that that uh of the the usefulness of this small little tool that sometimes i think a lot of people would take for granted so each time i i talk i want to talk either about i want to show you what i'm doing and what i'm what i'm well and what's been going on this last few weeks i'll probably record every three to four weeks if i get really on top of things i'll do it sooner but um i want to kind of have a theme so it'll either be around a textile or an ocean or a dye a color you know something that that has meaning in the fabric textile thread floss world so this month is international well i think this week was international women's week well it just so happened that i wanted to talk about um a woman because the patterns that i'm really pulling this this last few weeks are um are all i just seem to be very drawn to cross stitch patterns with girls and women and just i love the dress that they're in i love the way that the girl the young girl depicted um maybe it was a woman she knew maybe it was just an imaginary woman maybe it's who she hoped to grow up to be i don't know but they just seem to call to me so i've rece i've accumulated quite a few charts and i want to share those with you but i'm calling this um video remember the ladies and that phrase is in honor of a woman from the foundation of the united states named abigail adams and it's really interesting i'll you'll see in a little bit if you stick with me how she pops up again in something else i was studying so i was really excited that i happened upon her but remember the ladies was something that abigail wrote to her husband john abigail lived from 1744 to 1818 when a lot of these samplers were being produced and she was uh i'm sure she was a needle worker i'm not familiar with any of her needle work i'm sure it's out there i just didn't dive in quite deep enough on that did she have a needle i'm sure she had a needle i'm sure she did a lot of sewing she was not a she was a very down-to-earth woman she was a very gritty woman she lived through the smallpox epidemic and had i believe five children and cared for them through that smallpox epidemic when her with her husband being gone away um writing the constitution and doing all sorts of politic important political things and she really ran the farm and took care of everything on her own but she and john had a very unique relationship for that time period they wrote tons of letters so she documented they documented their feelings for each other and their feelings about political things and just lofty notions and one of the things that she asked him to do was to remember the ladies and be more favorable to them than your ancestors when they were when they were coming up with parameters for the way the country was going to be run i just always that's just always meant a lot to me and it's really stuck with me so i want to show you some of the ladies some of the charts that have really called to me since i jumped back into this cross stitch world and i think some of you will probably recognize some of them but the first one um is a chart from collector with i'm sorry from modern folk embroidery and it's susanna walker and it's a download it's a pdf download from modern folk embroidery you can see the little the ladies on the side of the house and jacob who owns modern folk embroidery has a lovely floss tube talking about this and he talked about the dress the sleeves on their their costume and that just really he really had a big influence on sucking me back into this um so i just love this i got some flex 36 count flex edinburg linen to work this on and i am just going to use the dmc that he recommended i i am and i've started i've been putting all my flosses and whether they're um silk or not in the bat in little bags because i feel like it keeps them safe i might not start this for a while and so it's gonna keep it from getting dusty in my my basket so i don't know if you can see that but there are a lot of people finishing this already there's a lot of people um posting it i just think it's charming and i hope to get that started soon i'm not sure which one of these ladies is going to get my attention first the next one is a kit that i had put together quite some time ago when i lived in arizona i was fortunate enough to be able to drive up to the attic and this is an old older i believe stacy nash it's older but it's a sewing box and needle book and so don't you love the sound of the crinkly bags like every time you you ladies you gentlemen and ladies and all you out there cross stitching pull out your project and those threads and those crinkly bags i just it's like a pavlovian response i know something fun's coming so i got this steel gray 28 count linen and the flosses for it so this one i've kind of been drawn to this one just because it's something i can make and use right away so that might be first on my lady list and i do really enjoy the costume like this this lady has sorry about the glare everyone seems to have trouble with this and i sure am she's got a very sheer apron on and these puffy sleeves and her hair looks like it's up in a little bun and i just love that i love i love doing research into the costuming and now now that i am um a little more committed to this i'm i'm definitely going to do more research into the costuming next one i got i don't have it kitted is anna morgan from scattered seed samplers and i thought i i know some people have mentioned they're going to do a lady wall or a wall of women i'm not sure how i'm going to display all these quite yet maybe the blue dresses will go together i don't know she's got her hoop and stick so she's ready to play that the game that the kids played back in the early part of the century and then i downloaded ann powell from this is from antique reproduction antique reproduction from pineberry lane and she also is wearing an apron her hair's up in a bun she's very slender she's got kind of a lace collar so i loved looking at her costume and she is going to be done on this khaki edinburgh linen 36 count and her threads are the general arts threads so like i said last time i i am drawn to darker colors and things that look like my antique samplers my antique samplers are not high-end but they make me happy and anyway all right then [Music] i actually ordered this one this one's new i had those and she has a similar design on the front of her dress to the other one with the apron petite filet and rouge and it's a ggr i really like her love her puff sleeves i love her pantaloons or her bloomers i'm not sure i know bloomers came in around the time um that women were pursuing the vote because amy bloomer was kind of the one who pushed that new fashion trend maybe i'll talk about that sometime anyway super cute and then of course i had to get this one to the lady in red spinning her wool this is gorgeous there's the lady in red and she's got her hand spindle so she's spinning the yarn by hand with her dog and then this is it entirely the entire sampler and i i will do the whole thing because it's just beautiful i love it and then betty glover 1837 this one is taken from the metropolitan museum of art i just loved her her hat with the plumes and that is very very classic for 1830s it's it's very interesting when you study costume and i'm i'm a novice for sure but how the um the skirt changes goes from straight and very um no no um padding nothing to enhance the hips to then these huge hoops and bustles and things to just interesting fascinating anyway love that one and then this one girl with flowers 1830 and this is a really cute little needle pocket and pin cushion collect combination and there she is so i have a lot of blue dresses but i love them anyway so that's that's some of the trouble i got into this week or this last month i think i got three of those charts just since my last flosstube this is very enabling but i love it so i want to show you something that i've been working on and then something that i'm hoping to chart and make make available at some point so i've been working on julia fuchs which is the cross stitch that was made available early in the year as as a sew along a lot of people have already finished it i'm still tr trucking along but i moved down to the section kind of in the middle once i had once i had this the outer edges done and the alphabet i moved down to this section here because i wanted to talk about this motif there are several names for it but i'm calling it the greek key for this moment and this motif has shows up quite a bit in samplers and it showed up in one that um one that i own a little antique one and i just think it's very interesting so the the greek motif the greek key is also called a greek fret or a meander motif and it originated in ancient greece but it but it's also been seen in the roman empire areas where that the romans conquered and took over and were established their their citizenship and it's also shown up in china and possibly other places because like i said i'm self-taught and i just read and i find things out and i might not know everything so i'd love to know if some any of you studied any of this and know more i'd love to hear from you um it's seen in architecture at scene and pottery we're all really familiar with it it's that interlocking continuous line or border band it's speculated that it it originated because of greek mythology and it has the shape of a labyrinth kind of the maze and it's or it could be that it it began because of the meandering river called the meander river that runs through asia minor so that was um something that was kind of an interlocking river so i don't know that it's a definitive on exactly what it stemmed from but it means infinity and unity so i thought that was really neat to know it made me wonder if these little girls or these you know young women making their sampler just liked the design or if they if they were taught the meanings of these images and motifs that they were stitching and chose them because of that i don't know i kind of think maybe half and half um were the girls aware of all that and during the 18th and 19th century when neoclassical architecture became really popular um this was when a lot of the buildings in washington dc were being built they also they have this pattern so it is kind of endemic and then i and i think there was a real push in early foundational america to to be um like the greeks so anyway i thought that was interesting it popped up in that i want to show you my antique that has that so my little my little antique sampler that also has a more elaborate form of the greek key er proctor this is this is her more elaborate form of the greek key and it's just a very simple little marking sampler with the sweetest little flowers little buds all the way around the julia fuchs also has these little buds in 1886 so i just thought it was lovely so of course then i thought well i'm to have to chart that i'm going to have to re remake that and i'm and i want to make it on 36 count that is actually on 24 count so i pulled out a piece of beautiful let's see natural 36 count linen and i just started at the bottom but it's gonna be so cute and tiny so i just started working on that and and um charting that up i just think it's so sweet so women's clothing women's attire was also influenced by the greek key theme and excuse me here while i grab some stuff i'm still trying to work out all the logistics of filming because it's kind of a challenge oh it's fun i love the way everyone's so natural so this is a woman in the early 19th century they wore dresses based on the greek form and they were very sheer fabric and very exaggerated caps and so here she is her shawl i don't know if you can see but it has that greek key and this would have been earlier than my either of those samplers that i showed you this this outfit but uh there's the greek key so these these young women were seeing it all over the place and then this is a dress later in the century it's from about the 1860s it's a it's a gauze it's a day dress um and so the sleeve on the dress has that greek key and then of course the bottom how can you not just love all of everything to do with the samplers that you're stitching on i just think it's fascinating but so many women were really eager especially in america they wanted to be just like europe and they wanted to dress in like uh the fashions that were coming out of paris but as i was reading about this um i found out that abigail adams pops up again and she hates this greek style she thinks it's extremely immodest and inappropriate and writes because she was so prolific of a writer she wouldn't have any of it and she wrote to her sister and said this style of dress is an outrage upon all decency it makes it's made so straight as to show the whole form and you might literally see through her so i just was so tickled that she popped up again when i was doing reading and research and i was excited to share that with you i do also have another another collection of uh things and i click buttons and these are from the 1800s and they have an agreed key or greek meander motif i think they're hopefully this is coming through i'll try to take a photo an actual photo there you go i think that showed up so does that look like something you'd see on a sampler just really fun and i'm not an expert on buttons either but i've learned a little bit now this is pretty much the exact design on my on my sampler that i'm charting which made me really excited maybe maybe the person the young woman charted it from her mom's buttons who knows or her own buttons let's see if i can get that oh hmm there we go so kind of fun i thought you'd enjoy seeing that too so of course being a quilter i had to try making a greek key quilt block and i made three of them they're really striking they're very easy to do if you are familiar with the log cabin quilt block basically you start out with the center and another and the opposite color and they're the same size square and then you add uh you add pieces to build the block similar to a log cabin or courthouse steps and i thought i thought i would use these to make a project bag or a have a little ridicule like a ladies bag pattern that might be fun for the outer band i don't know but this is where my brain goes um and then i was looking through my fabric because i love to to look at how these motifs pop up in all kinds of thing places and i found it in a fabric that was reproduced from the original deer jane quilt so i showed you the deer jane quilt that i made last time and the book has pictures of the real quilt that was that's in the museum and so then after the the book was published brenda papadakis published or designed some fabric based on the original fabric so this one is got a greek key in the crosshatch and then also in the centers and it came came in several colorways i just had green and blue in my in my collection so i thought that was fun and then if you're if you're at all interested in textile history i know that that's maybe not if you're pure cross stitch right now that might not be um completely what you're after but there is a really great book called dating fabrics by eileen tristian and she has pictures of fabrics by century by time period and lo and behold there's one with the greek key about the same time as that white dress i showed you so kind of fun i love this book because i you know i do run into antique quilts i have a few antique quilts but i love studying the fabrics and this is a really helpful guide if you're at all wanting to be accurate with that um i have a couple of finishes they're not cross stitch finishes but um oh oops one thing i forgot there's there's a quilt i'm gonna that i've been working on and it ties into the remember the ladies it was a quilt that i first saw in a magazine probably 30 years ago it's a quilt from the american folk art museum it's a quilt that was made circa 1858 1863 and it's it goes by several names but the name that's probably most familiar to people is called civil war bride so this is a picture of the quilt from the museum and you see that lonely lady there so this quote was made around the time of the civil war and it's thought because in the templates that the museum owns the templates from this original quilt there's a template of a man but obviously on the man never appeared on the quilt so it's thought that this was it's thought that it was made for a wedding that never happened and we can only suppose what happened because we don't really know but i just think it's stunning and it also popped up pops up in this book it's on the cover american folk art this is a really neat book jean littman and alice winchester it's also in here this book is full of folk art and textiles and no samplers unfortunately but um so the pattern was first available from threadbare in castlemaine victoria in australia corliss cersei was the woman who's um who drafted it and then later on carolyn mowry drafted a copy and this one i think you can still get she did include the groom or a gentleman and all the templates are in here so i want to show you what i've done up to date and then i'm hoping that doing these videos will keep me accountable because there are so many motifs and images in this quilt that are that are in cross stitch especially a lot of the cross stitch i want to do and fabric and textiles that i that i have so so i'll go through these kind of quickly because i am breaking my rule of keeping this under an hour i'd like to keep it a half hour but i'm i'm not a um film student i wasn't a student of film so i have a lot to learn but all right these are really wrinkly because they've been in my book for quite some time but here's the bird and the grapes or cherries of course i had to do the bride the woman and all of these apples cherries flowers they all have significance in the quilts and in in the i won't show these every time i'll just show you the new ones i've done i didn't know but i believe these these were supposed to be hummingbirds but i just thought they were extended leaves so i need to give them little eyes these remind me this basket reminds me a little bit of those tulip baskets you see on scottish samplers okay that's what i have so far so that's what i'll be working on i did finish a quilt that i've been working on for almost two years and i'll show it to you it's a quilt that is it's a pattern that's not in print anymore but i wanted to show it to you this is the quilt it's from 1850 circa 1850 it was drafted by the quilted crow girls and i don't believe they're in business anymore but i have it done and i will i'll just lay it out in my front room and take a picture because it's huge it's absolutely huge uh it was so much fun to do it's all applique um these birds remind me of cross stitch birds they're very folky and and natural they're not very pristine i finished putting the binding on this this was an exchange and what i mean by that is there were i think 15 of us no maybe 11 of us and we each made a block for each other and then swapped them out and so i will also i'll lay this out and take a picture of it if you'd like to see that and then i did get a little bit done on my ann robinson because she's another lady she's got a gentleman with her but i have to say now that i've stitched on um the zweigart i really like it this is a little harder to stitch on but i got i got a person started i'm loving the threads the colors are making me happy i mean they still make me happy this is what i have a long way to go i know it's not a race but there's so many out there that i want to make it's hard to it's hard to not feel like i wish i could move a little faster but that's okay and then finally i did get a little bit more done on my and got that's that and i i believe this is still available through the attic needleworks all right so the last thing i want to show you is something i purchased it was recommended by brenda and laura and i'm so so glad i got it it's this gorgeous pattern stand i don't know if you can see the patina on the wood when you set your you set your chart up in it like that it's got a magnet for your needle so beautiful and then a thread wrap to measure out your thread so anyway that's the damage i got into this month or this since i saw you last thank you so much for joining me thank you again for for all the feedback all the comments all the interaction it's just lovely this community is so welcoming and i know i have things to share that aren't all cross stitch and i hope i hope that you find that of interest and anyway i'll see you in a few weeks thank you you

Channel: Susan Standley Stitch In Time

Views: 7,171

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Id: kmzLuy5KmJg

Length: 41min 8sec (2468 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 13 2021