Blog

Volume 2 of the Bloomsbury World Encyclopedia of Embroidery will be published in January 2021.In early January 2021 the second volume of the Bloomsbury World Encyclopedia of Embroidery will become available. It is about hand embroidery from Central Asia, the Iranian plateau and the Indian Sub-Continent. More details can be found here.

In the meantime the TRC in Leiden is working on two more volumes, namely, embroidery from Scandinavia and Western Europe, and hand embroidery from Sub-Saharan Africa. We were just wondering if anyone has examples of African embroidery they would be willing to donate to the TRC Collection? Or could you send photographs?

Any 'stories' behind the suitable embroideries and textiles are also needed. Who made the pieces, what materials, threads and techniques did the makers use, and were the designs symbolic? What did the piece mean to the makers and users?

Last Wednesday (9th December) I took part in the TRC workshop on pre-industrial sewing stitches, given by by Dorothee Olthof. I’m interested in archaeology and in all sorts of hand stitching, and I was not disappointed.

Dorothee focussed on early medieval styles of hand stitching for garments. She introduced the subject with a PowerPoint presentation and showed us some modern replicas of early medieval garments, especially head coverings from various museum and archaeological collections.

Photograph of the TRC workshop on pre-industrial sewing techniques, 9 December 2020.

Amelia Bloomer (1818-1894), American dress reformer and suffragist, in the costume named after her.The weather is becoming cold and grey here in the Netherlands. But there’s a 1920s white summer dress (TRC 2007.0710) in the TRC collection here in Leiden that reminds me of warmer days, and tennis and tea parties in the garden. This dress looks simple and light-weight, but there is a long history of controversy and social change behind it.

Women won the right to vote in the Netherlands in 1919, and in 1920 in the US. Alongside decades of struggle for the vote was a fight for dress reform in women’s clothing. In 1850s America, the suffragist Amelia Bloomer scandalized society by throwing away her whale bone corsets, petticoats, tight long sleeved bodices and long heavy skirts. Instead she wore a more comfortable short dress over loose trousers (sometimes called Turkish trousers). This costume may have been based on the loose dress and leggings of some Native American women. Though Amelia did not invent the costume it was immediately dubbed the ‘Bloomer’, as she wore it publicly and popularized it through her newspaper, including publishing a pattern of how to sew the dress.

Women who wore the costume were called ‘Bloomers’. They were ridiculed and accused of mannishness and subversion. Yet they also found friends among health reformers and those in the medical profession who criticized tight corsets and restrictive clothing as dangerous to women’s health. In the Netherlands, too, there was a Vereeninging voor Verbetering van Vrouwen (-en kinder) Kleding (Union for the Reform of Women’s and Children’s Clothing), which published a monthly magazine from 1899 to 1909.

At the end of May of this year, Fatima Abbadi wrote a blog (click here) about the charuga, which is a mantle-like garment knotted at the shoulder and worn at festive occasions among the Christian community in northern Iraq. The TRC commissioned the sewing and embroidering of a charuga, by a local embroideress, called Suzan Sukari. A few days ago we were informed that the garment has been completed (see the attached photograph), and we soon hope to show it in our TRC Gallery in Leiden.

Fatima Abbadi sent us the following blog, which is based on her recent conversations with the embroiderer.

Suzan Sukari is one of the last embroiderers from the Iraqi town of Qaraqosh who still embroiders the traditional charuga, with much love and devotion. She is doing so despite all the struggles that she faces every day, including the difficulty in finding textiles and threads, the lack of demand due to the economical crisis and the decline in the willingness of the younger generation to wear this traditional garment.

A charuga being made in northern Iraq by Suzan Sukari for the TRC in Leiden.

What do a Chinese imperial embroidered cloud collar – vibrant in colours and highly detailed-  and a Communist worker suit - monochromatic blue, adorned with a bright red Mao pin - have in common?

Not only are they part of the Chinese collection of the TRC in Leiden, they also give a contrasting reflection of the changes that took place in China over a hundred years, from imperial times to the People’s Republic of China. In addition to their apparent esthetic differences, the two pieces however reveal different political and personal orientations in very graphic manners.

Early 20th century 'Cloud Collar' from imperial China. TRC 2004.0108).

Native American, Ojibwe (Minnesota) shirt, 2019 (TRC 2019.1605).November is Native American Heritage month in the US. Its aim is to highlight the traditions and modern cultures of Native Americans, including indigenous textile traditions.

A ribbon shirt (TRC 2019.1605), made in 2019 expressly for the TRC collection by Ojibwe textile artist Jenny Kappenman, also illustrates this connection between tradition and modernity. This traditional garment features coloured ribbons representing the Four Directions. But it is made from a non-traditional synthetic fabric that sports a floral motif, imitating traditional Ojibwe beadwork.

Pin cushion dating from 1826 from the Gouda region in The Netherlands. Initials (of the married couple?) and the date are indicated by pin heads (TRC 2020.4732a).On the 13th October we published a blog about tomato pin cushions and since then we have had a couple more pin events at the TRC! We have recently, for example, been given various twentieth century pin cushions, including a tomato with strawberry (TRC 2020.4781) form and a long strawberry (TRC 2020.4782) filled with emery sand (to keep the pin sharp and prevent rusting).

Then this weekend we were sent a pin cushion (TRC 2020.4732a and 4732b) by Christa van Veersen. It dates to the early 19th century and it is made from blue silk and linen damask. It has a design, on the blue silk side, of a date and initials. More specifically, the series of initials and a date of 1826 are made out of pin heads with a spherical shape. The pin cushion came with a bag made from a blue and white checked linen cloth.

On 24 October 1811, while on his way from Amsterdam to The Hague, Napoleon Bonaparte stopped briefly at a stately canal house along the Rapenburg (No. 48) in Leiden. The house still rises majestically opposite the medieval Academy Building of Leiden University. It is located some hundred metres from the place where his younger brother, Louis Napoleon, as King of Holland, had visited the site where on 12 January 1807 a ship loaded with gun powder had exploded, thereby devastating part of the inner city of Leiden.

Last week, the Textile Research Centre (TRC) in Leiden, located at a ten minutes' walk from the Rapenburg, received a fragment, kindly donated by Kees van der Zwan, of what may have been the pall that covered Napoleon's coffin. The cloth was allegedly used when Napoleon's remains were transported back from St. Helena in the southern Atlantic (his place of exile from 1815 until his death in 1821) to France, on board the frigate La Belle Poule. This occurred in the second half of 1840, and Napoleon's remains were eventually laid to rest in the Domes des Invalides in Paris.

Fragment of broadcloth (to the left), purportedly cut from a pall of Napoleon's coffin in 1840/1841. To the right is a piece of paper with a text in Dutch identifying the piece of cloth (TRC 2020.4528).