Right well, Monday’s newsletter got the response I was sort of expecting, and confirmed that a number of people feel the same way I do about Instagram. So for an experimental time, I am going to treat this newsletter like an Instagram account and see what happens. If it works, grand. If it doesn’t - there are always solutions. Thank you to everyone who replied.
Another piece I found on the weekend, or rather pieces, is this set of samplers.
And here I am going to add a small edit (and in the title!) as I just noticed that there is a date I have overlooked on the main sampler which seems to read 1923. So this is not late 19th but early 20th, although to be honest in rural France very little changed in terms of technology, even though the Great War intervened. If anything, many rural women became even more dependent on their ability to do piecework for big stores in affluent cities, because so many young men were lost to that war, and social security was a thing of the future)
These were done by a girl named Renée Rethor, and at time of writing they are for sale on the website, but I thought deserved to be commemorated and shown more widely. It’s not unusual to find samplers, what is unusual is finding so many from the same person all together, with so many different examples on them. Usually samplers are just the simple alphabets that people like to frame, and Renée has made us one of those, and here it is.
Unusually, although the lining is quite fine 19th century printed indiennes cotton, the exterior is not pure linen but a jute and linen mètis, and it is not just a sampler, but a little wallet which originally had two milk-glass closures (one has been lost to time).
But it’s the reverse side of this sampler, and the other pieces which I find more fascinating. The reverse side, where the remaining button is, shows a variety of plain and faggotting stitches, whilst the other pieces show various stitches, buttonholes and closures. Renée was obviously quite young, it shows up in the unevenness and slight lack of delicacy of some of her stitching. When you think that she probably would have first held a needle and thread around the age of 5, and that by the time she was 12 or 13 she would have been expected to be turning out competent, professional pieces of clothing if she was a peasant girl, you can guess that she was perhaps 8 to 10 when she made these pieces.
In a video interview recorded with a group of three bobbin-lace makers from the upper Loire region in the 1970’s when all three were in their late 80’s to mid-90’s (if you are not sure what bobbin lace is, below are two examples of very simple bobbin lace currently on the website - it can b a lot more complex than these two but these are to hand right now), the interviewer asks how old they were when they first started to learn. Five, replies one, six, reply the other two. By 10 or 11 they were helping to supplement the family income by piecework lacemaking, working to patterns which might have been given to them by big department stores, being paid very poorly for the trimmings that they made for shops like Le Bon Marché. (All the time they are speaking, they are also making lace, their hands an absolute blur).
What is especially interesting to me is the less-visible stitching on these samplers. There are a number of different examples of joining two pieces of fabric together so that it sits flat and perfect. I quite often find similar joins in hemp or linen workshirts. Nobody wasted fabric back in the day, especially not if it were handwoven, and I have found shirts and chemises which have been minutely pieced together from several different pieces and qualities of cloth. So mastering these seams was important, because a badly-joined seam would rub against the skin when it was made from handwoven linen or hemp.
The back of one of the samplers also shows how a cotton tape reinforcement or binding might be laid to cover a seam or hold a drawstring on the interior of a garment.
I do like Renée’s double ‘R’s on everything. She existed. Poor kid. I hope she enjoyed sewing.
I love your passion- for your work, for France, for all things old, beautiful, hand crafted- and especially your passion and courtage for standing up for the truth , for human rights, for justice and for people who are not in a position to speak for themselves. FREE PALESTINE!
Love your passion Johanna.
This lacework reminds me of the beautiful lacework my Sicilian uncle’s mother used to create when I was a young child. She produced some amazing pieces but unfortunately her skill and knowledge died with her because no one was interested in learning from her.