The Woven Coverlets of Norway

The Woven Coverlets of Norway
Author: Katherine Larson
Publisher:
Total Pages: 191
Release: 2001
Genre: Antiques & Collectibles
ISBN: 9780295981314

Showcases one of Norway's most beautiful and enduring folk arts.

The Age of Homespun

The Age of Homespun
Author: Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 514
Release: 2009-08-26
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0307416860

They began their existence as everyday objects, but in the hands of award-winning historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, fourteen domestic items from preindustrial America–ranging from a linen tablecloth to an unfinished sock–relinquish their stories and offer profound insights into our history. In an age when even meals are rarely made from scratch, homespun easily acquires the glow of nostalgia. The objects Ulrich investigates unravel those simplified illusions, revealing important clues to the culture and people who made them. Ulrich uses an Indian basket to explore the uneasy coexistence of native and colonial Americans. A piece of silk embroidery reveals racial and class distinctions, and two old spinning wheels illuminate the connections between colonial cloth-making and war. Pulling these divergent threads together, Ulrich demonstrates how early Americans made, used, sold, and saved textiles in order to assert their identities, shape relationships, and create history.

Overshot

Overshot
Author: Susan Falls
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Total Pages: 213
Release: 2020-03-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0820357723

Woven coverlets have appeared in several guises within the history of folk textiles. Created on four-harness looms, coverlets made in the nineteenth-century American South typically featured colored wool and cotton threads woven into striking geometric patterns. Although they are not as well known as other textiles and domestic objects, “overshot” coverlets were, and continue to be, significant examples of material culture that require tremendous skill and creativity to produce. They also express currents of conformity and dissent. In addition to being pleasing to the eye and hand, “overshot” coverlets have advanced a variety of social and political ends. At times exhibited in slave quarters along the seaboard in Georgia and South Carolina in association with plantation properties, they also appear in piedmont areas attached to the antebellum yeomanry, in the context of nationalist craft revivals, and in white-box contemporary art. With Overshot, Susan Falls and Jessica R. Smith analyze what we can learn by examining the exhibition and interpretation of these materials within American public history. By showing how geometric overshot coverlets can be understood in relationship to the global economy and within politicized cultural movements, Falls and Smith demonstrate how these erstwhile domestic, utilitarian objects explode the art/craft dichotomy, belong to a rich narrative of historical art forms, and tell us far more about American culture today than simply representing a nostalgic past, particularly with regard to ideas about race, class, nationalism, women’s labor, and the separation of private versus public spaces.

The Queen's Embroiderer

The Queen's Embroiderer
Author: Joan DeJean
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 407
Release: 2018-05-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1632864746

From the author of How Paris Became Paris, a sweeping history of high finance, the origins of high fashion, and a pair of star-crossed lovers in 18th-century France. Paris, 1719. The stock market is surging and the world's first millionaires are buying everything in sight. Against this backdrop, two families, the Magoulets and the Chevrots, rose to prominence only to plummet in the first stock market crash. One family built its name on the burgeoning financial industry, the other as master embroiderers for Queen Marie-Thérèse and her husband, King Louis XIV. Both patriarchs were ruthless money-mongers, determined to strike it rich by arranging marriages for their children. But in a Shakespearean twist, two of their children fell in love. To remain together, Louise Magoulet and Louis Chevrot fought their fathers' rage and abuse. A real-life heroine, Louise took on Magoulet, Chevrot, the police, an army regiment, and the French Indies Company to stay with the man she loved. Following these families from 1600 until the Revolution of 1789, Joan DeJean recreates the larger-than-life personalities of Versailles, where displaying wealth was a power game; the sordid cells of the Bastille; the Louisiana territory, where Frenchwomen were forcibly sent to marry colonists; and the legendary "Wall Street of Paris," Rue Quincampoix, a world of high finance uncannily similar to what we know now. The Queen's Embroiderer is both a story of star-crossed love in the most beautiful city in the world and a cautionary tale of greed and the dangerous lure of windfall profits. And every bit of it is true.

Handwoven Baby Blankets

Handwoven Baby Blankets
Author: Tom Knisely
Publisher: Stackpole Books
Total Pages: 113
Release: 2015-11-15
Genre: Crafts & Hobbies
ISBN: 0811762793

What better way to welcome that precious, tiny new person than with a luxurious, handwoven blanket! These beautiful, colorful designs will appeal to today's contemporary moms, as well as lovers of traditional weaves.

Textile Art from Southern Appalachia

Textile Art from Southern Appalachia
Author: Kathleen Curtis Wilson
Publisher: The Overmountain Press
Total Pages: 124
Release: 2001
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9781570721984

Features forty-four coverlets and two quilts made by hand weavers who lived in Western North Carolina, Eastern Kentucky, East Tennessee, and Southwest Virginia. Ms. Wilson has spent many years researching southern Appalachian overshot coverlet weaving.