FT#4 - "The Color RED, Project update and a Strawberry

welcome flosstube welcome to my channel i'm susan stanley and this is susan stanley stitch in time where i talk about the history and reproduction of cross stitch samplers quilts antique sewing notions antique textiles and their history and anything else related to stitching in the past so i hope you'll stick around if you haven't met me or seen me before and thank you so much for those of you who have come back thank you again as always for your heartfelt comments and encouragement and support and technical help it's just all so appreciated and makes this so fun i've enjoyed so many new friendships in this community this is video number four today and we're going to talk about some new things that i've been kind of burning in my mind and show you some new whips and some new purchases and all kinds of fun stuff so i tried i've tried filming this this is the fourth time now yesterday was a bright sunny day and the lighting was great and today it's a little overcast i'm having every technical difficulty you can imagine so hopefully we can make it through this um again thank you so much thank you so much for your comments about my son scott last time and his little surprise entrance uh i didn't get him to do another little pop-up this time because he's back he lives about two hours away from me so he's back at his home working and i did tell him that he could probably start his own flosstube channel no problem hands down and have a large following pretty quickly so anyway that was fun thanks for joining in um i wanted to give you some information i had somebody mentioned to me uh it would might be nice for that to get some information on how to contact me and i will link this below and i will get a little more professional with this but this is my instagram stanley susan all lowercase and my email and you can message me through uh messenger on on instagram or email me if you have any questions or if let's say maybe you want a drawing and i need to get your address something like that so anyway there's that can't believe that i reached 2 000 subscribers in in this last few weeks and i don't have a giveaway this time but i will next time to celebrate that and i'm just so thrilled i'm just thrilled that there are people out there in the world that enjoy this topic as much as i do i was even i mean i love everyone's comments they mean so much to me but one comment i received that was so special was from a viewer someone who said i didn't think i'd like this history stuff at all i didn't think i'd be interested but i i really i really enjoyed the video and i you know i feel like i learned something that just really made me happy because if i can enlighten if i can encourage people to connect with the past and the people from the past who the that were standing on their shoulders and carrying this forward i just i don't know why that just makes my heart very happy so as you can see today i'm in a different room i'm in my sewing room it's we'll see how it goes but we're gonna i'm gonna go for it uh the random comment picker and i well i just programmed everything in i had a giveaway last time quilting traditions we were talking about stars the winner of that giveaway is rose heck and her lovely comment so thank you so much rose congratulations i hope you enjoy the book and please message me through those either of those two venues that i just shared earlier and i will get this off to you i also want to share some wonderful happy mail that i received from elaine and elaine had a stepfather who was involved in the insurance business and one of the things that he passed out when he was calling on people were these needle books and she saw my floss tube and so she shared these with me and i can't tell you how much this means to me i can add these to my collection these are just to me these are classic and so lovely to be to have a part of her life in my home that shiny that iconic shiny paper so thank you so much elaine she wrote wrote me a lovely note and i'll keep this all together in my collection of needlework books it's just really delightful and i sure appreciate it i wish i could meet all of you face to face and who knows maybe someday there'll be an instagram retreat that'd be kind of fun all right so today i want to talk to you about something uh you know we usually i introduce talk about cross stitch samplers antiques reproductions that i'm working on um or quilts that relate and i don't separate the topics out because in my mind in my world they all blend together a motif from a quilt makes me think of a that same motif on a sampler which makes me think of a thread color or a dye lot for a fabric it just all blends so my youtube videos are little youtube videos are a little bit unique and i hope if you're joining me for the first time you'll hang in there and just check it out i know it's different and i'm just glad some other people enjoy it so today i want to talk about a die a textile and it will also tie into floss and fabric but of course i guess i've been seeing this a lot and it also happens to be my favorite color so the the die i want to talk about today is the die for the color red and i'm sure there's people out there who don't love red but it seems like to me almost every project i start either in quilting or cross stitch even small handcrafts i there's always something red it just seems to draw me in i love red red is a very attention getting color and it's a very dynamic color but i just think red makes me happy and i think color is so personal and we we are drawn to colors for so many different reasons and i'm sure there are people out here there who don't care for red but red is a kind of multi it's a global has a global significance across the world red is used for celebrations so red is on the color wheel opposite of purple and it's on the traditional color wheel as a primary color and red carries a lot of meanings globally and in samplers and quilts and so some of those meanings include sacrifice represents sacrifice it represents blood it represents danger and warning it can represent courage heat passion love anger joy happiness and good fortune and i was just doing a little reading about the color red and there's a whole list on wikipedia of idiomatic language surrounding the color red to say that you're tied up in red tape to say that you caught someone red-handed to say i see red you're angry anyway i just thought it's very interesting how red ties into our language and our culture and our color so today i'm going to talk a little tiny bit about and i'm not going to get super technical on the way red was dyed for fabric and fibers in the 1800s before synthetic dyes were created and so everything prior to the last quarter of the 1800s so 1875 maybe 1860 on was made was dyed naturally and so in these antique samplers that we find prior to that date those dyes were set with a mordant and the mordant is something that sealed the dye to the fiber so you have the fiber either silk wool cotton or linen and that can either be in cloth or or floss or thread you have the natural substance using used to create the color and then you have the mordant which is what like i said before kind of affixes or bonds the color to the fiber and so the morton prior to synthetic chemical creations would be things like vinegar urine gall iron they put they put it all in a big iron pot and let the iron leach into this into the substance the dye it could be lead it could be acetate alum was also used tin was used it was frequently very toxic and so these dyed chem these dyed reactions would would affix to the the substance the fiber and you'd have a color well some of these colors were very fast and true and lasted and some of them washed right out now a lot of the samplers and and quilts and old textiles that we see have been overly washed they've been bleached out by the sun they've who knows what's happened to them and so the color is changed or the color has done something else that we see and in the quilt world when a color bleeds or runs into other colors doesn't stay right on the fiber it was intended and died for it's called traveling and so we see that in samplers as well especially with black and some time i'll talk about that but the the you know the as soon as the fiber is hit with water or something wet it just rushes out of the of the fiber and the dye brushes into everything around it so it's always sad and it's even more disappointing when it happens nowadays because we do have such color fast substances and fibers to work with but it still can happen and it's heartbreaking and i'll talk sometime about how to set your color if if you are concerned but i think most floss and fabric even is color fast but i still certain colors i still pre-treat so i'll talk about that so what did what did people use what was used what has been used throughout time to create these this beautiful color of red early on in prehistoric days uh ochre from the dirt was used to create body paint to do artwork on on rocks and um petroglyph creations um other things used were insects and one of the chief insects for the color red that was used is the cochineal bug and this is a picture the cochineal bug is grows on prickly pear cactus in the sonoran desert region and i used to live in tucson arizona for quite some time and you could see these bugs pooling up they're they're really tiny they're really microscopic but you could see them pulling around the pads of prickly pear and actually when my kids were young we scraped them off and pounded them up and made a kind of a dye soup and stuck fabric in them just because that was the cool thing to do when you know your teeth working with kids and exploring the environment and uh so this is a little picture of what the bug looked like looks like and it's the female that emits the color and here's another picture of the prickly pear pad with a collection of these cochineal bugs and so the indigenous people to that region were were using these bugs to create color and then when spaniards came they globbed on to the idea and they actually took this back to europe so that's how it spread throughout europe because you need a hot dry climate for these prickly pear cactus to grow and the bug seems to be attracted to that plant so it's interesting so now we've got this color in europe and it's spread now there were other things in your used in europe like lycan and moss and i think i do believe and i i'm like i said i'm a novice and i'm learning that most of the scottish samplers the reds and those were dyed with lichens and mosses but if you know if you have information please share i would love to know what you know and i would make it available to everyone but anyway uh so this color red was used and it adhered to certain fibers better than others it seemed to really like wool and the the famous red coats in england their uniforms were dyed with this coach neal the guards at buckingham palace and and around london their clothing was originally dyed with this coach meal so it was a very um prevalent and profitable uh business to be involved in was the dying of of fibers okay another thing that was used was the root of a plant called the matter plant and i'm going to show you a picture i'm going to pop a picture in so you can see what it looks like so these natural dyes were used until about 1868 for red for the color red and at that time after 1868 a german chemist discovered a formula to make a synthetic dye that was color fast and the goal of course throughout all this time has been to have a color fast die that didn't fade or travel into other fibers around it when it got wet so the original red in quilts often lead you to the time period that it was that that quote was made and i suspect that might be true with samplers as well and i'm still learning about that if you know please share i'd love to know but uh solid red in quilts is very it's very hard to identify the time period because solid red was used throughout the 1800s and i might like i said before my area of study that i i'm most interested in is the end of the 1700s through the 1800s and up till the 1900s and i and i do love things in the 1900s as well but i'm i'm really drawn to the early 1800s late 1700s up until maybe the mid-1800s and that just seems to be what i like so uh anyway so we we talked about the insect and the plant and and back to the matter plant the matter plant was it was the root that was used to create the dyes and the dyes were various shades of red depending on the mordant so you would get things from a brick red all the way to the bright in quilting what we call is turkey red that really vibrant cherry red and of course we have all that variety and floss as well so um all right stitching with red i think probably almost everything i stitch has some form of red in it i think i mentioned that a minute ago uh i know a couple episodes back daisy k primitives i believe it was yes episode 14 she showed her collection of reds so obviously she loves red and i thought that was so effective and helpful and i was talking to a friend of mine in tucson and she said well i've been collecting reds and she said let me send you some samples so i have to show you what she sent me this is ruth my friend ruth and she is also a quilter but she made this gorgeous array of red floss and she added a couple others in here that we had been talking about as well but i wanted you to see this these reds they're all named something that is very true you know that you would associate with the color red but not sure that you can see quite as well as i can but these reds range from brick all the way down to almost a brown and i'm just going to hold this here because you might want to take a picture this is a really great conglomeration of reds that are very muted and i believe really good for reproduction samplers now having said that i think red really plays with the colors around it and also plays with the linen that it's on so i don't know that you can always say i'm only going to use this red you know one certain red because i do think it's color dependent um i don't know if you can tell this one it's very orangey this one's a lot more pinky and then this one's very brown so anyway i just thought that was so sweet and i had to share that with you that she took the time to make that for me and actually i could actually pull some of those off now i want to of course collect them all but i did want to show you the reds i do have and i am working on a red band sampler which i'll show you here and that band sampler i played with using one strand of floss and then i tried two and i was much happier so i'm sticking with the two i did not do it in the silk which probably would have been i would have been happy with the one strand of silk but anyway so i i have several projects going with red and i pulled them out so i i did have to put little labels on them so i didn't they didn't lose their place this is for a project that i'm going to talk about the jesse watson in a minute a lot of people have worked on that this is a vicki clayton silk it's called omg red this is gloria oops all right so i've got some dmc reds in here this one is 321 which i find i think is very similar to this red that i'm using in ann got which is called ribbon red and then there's this cosmo red which kind of is more tomatoey maybe a little more orangey i love this red i'm using this on the my band sampler schoolhouse red by general arts and then we get into the deeper shades this is anchor number 44. and then this one of course i'm using in a new project that i'll show you next time called cupid lots of variegation and the last one i'm using in a new project and this is dmc 816. so i just thought that was kind of fun to see the variety of reds and another tool that you may want to have at your disposal is this dmc floss book it i think it changes periodically every time they come out with new floss they update it but it has real floss and you can compare if you want to do a floss conversion pardon my hand you can compare the floss here with something else that you might have in your stash if the chart calls for a dmc you can and you want to get it use of silk and so i decided to invest in this it's large so that's another fun tool to have at your at your disposal um i did so i love you you all know i love books i love research but i also love historical fiction and i did come across a book and i ordered it and it didn't come yet but i decided to to shoot my video anyway and i'm i'm sure it's going to be good it's called a perfect red by amy butler greenfield and it's in historical fiction about empire espionage and the quest for the color of desire and so it talks all about the colors of red and the dies and the the bugs and how how the different products that were used to create red were moved around the world kind of like if you've ever studied the spices of the world and how they transferred it's the same concept as motifs and designs in samplers and quilts how do these images how do how do these floral images start in one place and end up over here and it's of course people traveling it's commerce it's uh people being moved sharing ideas i just find that fascinating and i find the stories behind the people who are doing all this fascinating as well so i'm gonna pop a picture in you know you know i i'm a quilter and i've quilted for quite some time and i do have quite a collection of fabric and instead of laying it all out for you i just thought i'd videotape a little bit of it on the shelf i store my fabric by color uh and i have a lot so don't hold it against me i'm going to end up having a lot of floss too because that's just my thing and i know you can relate so i'm going to show that video right here so you can see from that fabric collection that the fabric also ranges in that shade from brick to vibrant red to what we call in the quilt world garibaldi red to turkey red and then into the more claret burgundy shades so and it all was dependent on the source of the dye and the mordant and the fiber and you know from stitching that linen can depending on the fiber count even be it be dyed with the same dye and and have a different effect so a higher count linen dyed in the same dye with a lower count linen will come out differently all right so red and quilts like i said was popular all across the century of the 1800s and it is very hard to date um so how can we how can we talk about red without talking about an a motif that comes to mind in quilts and samplers that is red and just kind of something that you is on your mind this time of year springtime and that is the strawberry and i know um let's see crafty cottage stitches jeanette and heather are hosting a strawberry social they're doing a sew along a stitch along with your chart having a strawberry in it and i think that's so wonderful i love it um strawberries have shown up in needlework probably as soon as needlework started strawberries are named for the way they strew across the land and so strawberry is probably a form of the word strewberry and they they show up in artwork in architecture they're even on the rim of the strawberry leaf is on the rim of many early crowns they pop up in the 1300s and they're still popular today they have a lot of symbolism the three leaves relate to the trinity are symbolic of the trinity and people used them to represent that the five-petaled flower represents the wounds of christ and strawberries also represent venus the goddess of love so they were wild until about the 14th century and then they became cultivated in gardens and they were used for medicinal purposes they were used to cure depression colic and the quenching of thirst and something i read said that thomas woolsey created the delicacy of strawberries and cream for king henry viii and how many of you are familiar with this nursery rhyme curly locks curly locks i got this on wikipedia curly locks curly locks will thou be mine thou shall not wash the dishes nor yet feed the swine but sit on a cushion and sew a fine seam and feed upon strawberries sugar and cream so that that nursery room is from england and i didn't not i did not find the date on it maybe perhaps somebody knows when that was written and apparently there's a scottish version as well so anyway okay see i diverse into all kinds of little pads and okay cross stitch patterns cross stitches with strawberries i'm probably working on three projects right now that have borders cross stitch borders that are strawberries so that's just a given that you know many many patterns have strawberries and one of the ones that i want to show you that i have not started yet but is this isabella fox and you can see these are really predominant you know they're very bold strawberries they're all one color some of them are layered pink white red anyway and i do have a couple antique samplers with strawberries that i might pop in at the end of this so you can see i didn't bring them in the room with me i have this lovely pair of pin cube pattern a pair of pin cubes pattern by um with my needle and that little nursery rhyme the little verse i read to you is is um stitched onto these pin cubes and i will talk about pin cubes and the history of pin cubes at some time when i talk about pins but it's covered with strawberries and just know for now that it's you know very significant and that it fits in with that time period they were pin cubes were popular in the victorian era and strawberries have kind of been popular and needlework throughout so another fabulous strawberry pattern by with my needle ellen thank you ellen is strawberry so fair and it's a needle roll and i really really want to make this i'm hunting for i think i want kind of a denim blue to put that on to stitch it on and it's just delicious and darling i love the the little um either pin or needle holder there and it's got a place for your scissors it's just adorable and it's got this little drawstring pouch to put supplies in and i think it will fit into my stitchery basket so that's definitely going to be a start i'm challenging i'm challenged finding the right linen i love it and then of course i had to order this as soon as i saw it not so much for the strawberry element i do i do love it i do love it made up into a strawberry i have two little squirrels that chase around my backyard i have a fur couple fur trees in my backyard and they loop around it so i had to get it for them but i also love the houses and i love the red work so i may end up popping it into a strawberry format or just frame those frame a squirrel and a reverse image of him and put him in a frame i'm not sure yet i love that so cute all right and then i have a dear friend who is a quilt designer and she also does cross stitch designs and she has a free um chart that you can find on moda stitch pink and it's a pink band sampler it's by brenda riddle here's the floss that she uses but look at this lovely little band you could ex you could just use the strawberry you could use all three you can extend it and you can do whatever you want and this is a free download on the moda website so hope i hope you can make that available to yourself uh as far as quilts go there's one strawberry pattern that i just that stands out in my mind that i've been working on off and on for years because it's quite quite a project and this this may still be available [Music] but you may have to get it um through the secondary market or through a quilt shop but this is a reproduction of a strawberry quilt that was made between 1840 and 1860 it looks an awful lot like those little stitched strawberries so that of course makes me very excited because i love making these connections anyway terry clothier thompson i don't uh has just done a fabulous job with reproducing antique quilts and um you can you could make one block and make it into a pillow if you're a quilter now it's got reverse applique and lots of applique so there therefore i have not done a whole ton of it i've got a ton prepped but i'll show you this this is how big it is here's one block so i've got the so don't hold me to it one day i'll have it done but that's that's my strawberry quilt that i hope to work on and i'm gonna pop in a picture here of the one of the quilts that was behind me in my one of my earlier videos um one of the blocks has some strawberries so i'll just pop a picture in here of of that all right and so how could we leave this uh video talking about strawberries without talking about a couple other cool strawberry things um this i just i can't even use it i just think it's so beautiful this is a strawberry waxer and this is oh boy brenda gervais no stacy nash she has a whole bunch and you probably seen them but i just think i just love it i hang it up it's just so lovely can't even use it and then i want to show you some strawberry emery's and a strawberry emery i have an earlier video before i found out about flosstube i was doing videos on that i was calling a very fine notion where i would talk about an antique needlework tool and the history behind it and so i don't want to if you watch those i don't want to overkill it but and i'll link it below so you can watch it talks about strawberries and tomato pin cushions on their their history this one uh is kind of a treasure it's full of very it's full of emery it's got the adorable little stitched cap but a lot of people think that the emery which is kind of a sand that's inside of these was to sharpen the needles but actually they would take the the needle and run it sideways back and forth through the through the emery like that to clean off burrs and tarnish and rust because you know needles were not you know needles were treasures earlier on you they weren't readily available you didn't have hordes of needles i got you today um and you didn't throw your needle away easily so anyway and then this is another one that i've collected and i found i just think it's so interesting and then of course i i do have a pile of tomato pin cushions but i just i just pulled one out because it has the tomato and the emery attached and i i always grab those if i find them at a thrift store antique store garage sale i love them when they're full of pins made me really happy all right and then of course i had to make i had to make some tomatoes um here's my cutlery basket of tomatoes but uh this one is more like a turnip i used a textured velvet to make this one and then the cap is as well and i don't i didn't finish it with fancy stitches i left them kind of primitive they're just fun and you can you can you know there's a whole world of dying and and over dying and um antiquing with with tea and coffee but you can make these relatively easily even if you don't own a sewing machine or don't want to use a sewing machine they're just fun all different sizes all different fabrics i did i made these with some friends when i lived in texas that was that's a very happy memory this one's kind of neat because the fabric kind of represents the the outside of a strawberry and so strawberries have been so idealized because they are a fruit that's sweet and delicious with a beautiful shape when you cut them they look like a heart they also you know don't have they seeds the seeds are like those teeny tiny little things on the outside and they don't they do kind of get stuck in your teeth but they're i love this one so anyway i wanted to share that with you um i have a couple new books that i purchased i really don't make money off of some about books i just love having resources in my collection this one i just got haven't read it yet george's girlhood embroidery so it's an american sampler book lots of pictures lots of information and each each chapter is about a girl and they give you the story of the girl some of these i wish were charts i saw a chart recently look very similar to that i'd like some of these have a lot of words and you can see okay so that's that traveling i mean we all know when when the when the dye has bled and it's heartbreaking i'm sure it was heartbreaking to them as well of course then there's stains and anyway so this is going to be a really fun read because it's you know stories of actual people and i i think that's what i love about about needlework is it's your way of communicating it's your voice it's your way of leaving a piece of yourself behind and that's what these these people did um another book that i was so happy to purchase and i want to thank penny for letting me know about this penny tucker alerted me to this book um and i really haven't had a chance to dive into it yet but imitation and improvement the norfolk sampler tradition joan martin lucacher might not be pronouncing that correctly and this is well it's just an amazing book it talks about genealogy and it starts with the the sampler tradition uh it goes through different styles of samplers different people who created the samplers it talks about darning samplers it's full of history it's full of pictures and then at the very end there's a chart for this gorgeous sampler and the chart is huge which is nice so i'm super excited about these two books to add to my collection and i'm i hope as i read them you know i can share things with you here i just open this and there's that little row of strawberries right there on that on that sample or antique sampler so pretty neat all right if you have books that you love i would so enjoy hearing from you and knowing what you what resources you go to i love it all okay so now i want to show you my um some new starts or just some new things that i've purchased so of course i had to get on the bandwagon because i just loved this little clarissa beaumont that popped up it was a downloadable from little robin 1875 which is you know i kind of like the earlier pieces but this one just it it just looks really fun and so i got a 36 count vintage country mocha and i just pulled dmc floss for it and i just i just stuck them on the ring so you could see the colors but i think it's going to be so much fun there's so many colors to play with uh i i'm soothed by a one color project but i'm also really challenged and invigorated by being able to change threads often so this one will give me i mean some of these are like right next to each other on the color like eight thirty three eight thirty four you know just so you're getting some shading so that's going to be really fun i'm excited about that start i've been really self disciplined i have not started making a stitch on that okay and then the next one i finally got all the materials for was the jesse watson 1816 and a lot of you have already finished this this is hands across the scene it's a downloadable and there's a sew along going on um for autism awareness and i i used to work with people that had speech challenges language communication difficulties and and so it's kind of that that um benefits kids that i really have a heart for so i wanted to join in on that and i got the vicki clayton silks she has a packet that you can purchase and i'm using to die for river stone i think i don't know some of these really blend in with that fabric that linen choice but i don't always mind having things that are very low contrast it just adds to the antique peel so i don't know i may i mean some of these are so close they won't show up at all but i think they're so pretty and i have to say um i don't know there's something about silk it's pretty pretty fun to work with all right then if you saw my instagram post and i think i i think i've mentioned it on instagram but i had ordered this dutch sampler from um needlework expo i just think it's amazing and i saw betsy figurehead started it so i mean those colors are just just color is amazing and i'm using the npi silks i'm sorry they don't show up in here i i find that i like my silks i did have those vicky clayton out but they just get so staticky so i put them in here not a really good viewing and i just put a couple stitches in and i want to know do you when you have a variegated thread do you stitch half crosses all the way and then go back or do you complete them i've completed them and something like you get these really bold white patches but it's all right it's going to be fun i'm really i've got way too many projects already okay and then the last one of course is ann got oh i just love amy gotten she didn't get much attention this month but she got a little bit so and got is the sew along with attic the attic it's a needlework press publication and here's the floss oh that's not so good and i pulled the red out to show you when i was showing you the reds so it's not there but anyway so i made a little bit of progress it's of course there's some more strawberries and i'm just doing a little bit of the border and a little bit of the grass each time so it doesn't end up and i made a mistake on that urn and i'm i just left it so all right well thank you again for joining me um oh my civil war bride or lost groom or bird of paradise quilt whatever name you want to give it is back here my last block is there i still have a few more leaves to applique on i think that block had 50 leaves i am not kidding it's not even that big it's a block so i've been stitching leaves for nights now but anyway thank you so much for joining me thank you so much for commenting subscribe and like and if this was new to you please leave me a comment yay or nay i know this is you know it's not everybody's cup of tea but it sure is mine so thanks for joining me and i hope to see you again next time i post a video until then happy stitching

Channel: Susan Standley Stitch In Time

Views: 6,557

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Id: zWsILSRLFvM

Length: 51min 41sec (3101 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 23 2021