PieceWork Back Issue

Animals from the Nowotny Collection
The Nowotny Shop in Vienna, Austria, purveyors of needlework supplies for nearly 200 years, has a strong record of commissioning leading designers to create original patterns. A collection of some of these historic charts, excerpted from Raffaella Serena’s Animal Embroideries and Patterns from 19th Century Vienna, are presented here. For information on how to win a copy of Animal Embroideries and Patterns from 19th Century Vienna, see page 26.
By Raffaella Serena

Plush-Stitch Animals
The plush stitch was a popular means of creating raised, sculpted embroidery in Berlin woolwork during the mid-nineteenth century. Three animal embroideries from the collection of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, Behring Center, are fine examples of this technique.
By Sheryl De Jong

The Cattley Animals
The Cattley children of Ealing, a London suburb, had a collection of stuffed animals, including nine bears, three rabbits, a dog, and an elephant named Pumpie, which they clothed and treated as members of the family. In the l970s, the last surviving Cattley sibling donated the collection, along with watercolor paintings of the animals, to the Museum of Childhood at Bethnal Green.
By Deborah Pulliam

Lacy Griffins, Tigers, Bears, and Peacocks
Some of the earliest surviving pieces of lace are neither delicate nor floral but depict animals and mythical beasts often adapted from illustrations in medieval bestiaries or German and Italian pattern books from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
By Elaine Merritt

Enchanting Half Dolls
During the mid-nineteenth century, molded porcelain, bisque, plaster, wood, wax, papier-mâché, and composition-compound half dolls fitted with gathered fabric skirts were used to protect powder puffs and clothes brushes or serve as pincushions. Well-preserved examples can be worth hundreds of dollars to collectors today.
By Mary Polityka Bush

Reflections on Fashion, Dolls, and the Art of Growing Up
An exhibition of the same name at the American Textile History Museum in Lowell, Massachusetts, explores the importance of dolls and fashion in the development of young girls over the past 200 years. This is the first of two articles by the curators of the exhibition.
By Deborah E. Kraak and Barbara C. Abrams

Victorian Life and Knitting
The Weldon’s Practical Needlework series contains not only a glimpse of the fashions and needlework techniques of the Victorian period but also insights into late-nineteenth-century social concerns and attitudes.
By Carol Huebscher Rhoades

Things to Make

A Perforated Paper Box to Cross-Stitch
This project is one of twenty-four projects designed by Ann Caswell for Stitching a Legacy: American Needlework Projects and Stories. Hand-dyed silk threads bring the butterfly motif on this box to life.

Pretty Cuffs to Knit
These cuffs, adapted by Carol Huebscher Rhoades from “Weldon’s Practical Knitter, 15th Series” in Weldon’s Practical Needlework, Volume 5, are knitted with cashmere and silk yarn to provide warmth and comfort on cold winter days.

Stitch in Time
The Upright Cross-Stitch
Deanna Hall West

An Elizabethan-Inspired Band Sampler to Stitch, Part Two
This is the second part of a sampler whose first part appeared in the September/October 2002 issue. Elizabethan motifs and techniques are given new life with today’s flosses and ribbon and bead accents. Designed and stitched
by Jill Cater Nixon.

A Silk Ribbon Frame to Embroider
Flowers stitched with hand-dyed variegated silk ribbon accent this petite frame designed by Deanna Hall West and stitched by
Marie Alton.

A Pincushion Doll to Stitch
Mary Polityka Bush used silk floss to embroider these pincushion skirts with scroll and flower motifs for a porcelain half doll.

WEB PROJECTS

Liner for the Perforated Paper Box to Cross-Stitch (215 KB)