Saturday, July 9, 2011

The Little Girl's Sewing Book

A friend lent me this little book, The Little Girls Sewing Book, and although it does not have a publication date in it, the graphics and style suggest it is from the turn of the century.  When the Arts and Crafts Movement was a strong influence, and embroidery was still considered an important craft.  Although young girls were taught embroidery in schools at this time, it was also still passed from Mother to daughter as well.  These must have been precious times spent together don't you think as skills were passed on, colour preferences discussed, personal likes and dislikes learned, so much more meaningful than sitting and watching television together.



 The book has many embroidery projects in it.

The Lambkin bag could be a good starting project.


  Projects to make curtains, bed linen, and rugs for the doll house.



 With patterns and instructions for each project it is a wonderful resource and I thought we could work through some of the projects together.  So if you want to pick up some skills, let me know and we can start with one of the simple projects.  I can put together a little pack of the materials you will need and send them out to you, and then post about the steps as I work through it, and you can watch when you have the time and work on your sample.  Then when you are finished, we can post photographs of your finished project and we can all see how you went.  It would be a great thing for you and Izzy to do Carolyn, and a good way for you to start getting an understanding of embroidery Hannah Bananah so that you are ready for more complicated designs. 


This offer is open to anyone who reads this post, so if you are interested in joining in do let me know what you think and what you would like to do.  

7 comments:

  1. Can I? I know I'm not a little girl... But the title makes it sound a lot less intimidating teehee

    ReplyDelete
  2. Yes of course you can, besides if you read the post I wrote about how boys and men are taking up embroidery now, and even exhibiting their work in the Objectspace Art Gallery in Ponsonby, you would know that its not girlie anymore to do embroidery. When you get home we can pick out a good starter project. I am hoping Hannah, Izzy and Carolyn are going to do it with us too.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Cute, sounds like fun! Will be a good break from all the computer work me and Francis have lined up at uni :) Will get him to pick up materials for me too when hes in Tauranga this week.

    ReplyDelete
  4. So cool Holly, excellent and well done wonderful followers, that's two confirmed students about to set out and explore a whole new world.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Oh neat .. another awesome project for me to follow in your blog - sorry too busy designing and making new costumes (I am going tribal next year!) but will love to follow it.

    Love to all you wonderful fabricators ......

    ReplyDelete
  6. Hey yes yes yes I would love that JoJo! Gorgeous idea and you are right a lovely thing to do with Izzy. Thank you will look forward to getting started! x

    ReplyDelete
  7. Cool, right well that is a nice little group to start off with then. I will gather all the materials together and post them out to everyone as soon as I can. This is going to be fun.

    ReplyDelete