Text/iles

"the mission of the Sampler Archive Project is to create an online searchable database of information and images for all known American samplers and related girlhood embroideries." http://samplerarchive.org/

"The project focuses on women’s clothing and accessories worn in America from 1770 to 1930." http://historicdress.org/

Texts and Textiles conference

• abstracts: http://www.english.cam.ac.uk/cmt/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/Texts-and-Textiles-abstracts.pdf
• write-up of the conference: http://www.english.cam.ac.uk/cmt/?page_id=2630

Common Threads, cloth books: http://www.booklyn.org/artists/Candace%20Hicks,%20Austin,%20Texas.php

Joy Boutrup,'Multiple-strand bookmarkers and other book-connected textiles', in: Care and conservation of manuscripts 13 (2012), 327-340.

Heather Wolfe, on filing with strings: http://collation.folger.edu/2013/03/filing-seventeenth-century-style/

see Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, page 21:

"I make landscapes out of what I feel. I make holidays of my sensations. I can easily understand women who embroider out of sorrow or who crochet because life exists. My elderly aunt would play solitaire throughout the endless evening. These confessions of what I feel are my solitaire. I don't interpret them like those who read cards to tell the future. I don't probe them, because in solitaire the cards don't have any special significance. I unwind myself like a multicolored skein, or I make string figures of myself, like those woven on spread fingers and passed from child to child. I take care only that my thumb not miss its loop. Then I turn over my hand and the figure changes. And I start over.

"To live is to crochet according to a pattern that we were given. But while doing it the mind is at liberty, and all enchanted princes can stroll in their parks between one and another plunge of the hooked ivory needle. Needlework of things .... Intervals ... Nothing.... "

Mary Lamb, "On Needle-work" -- "In December 1814 Mary wrote an article entitled "On Needle-work", published in the New British Lady's Magazine the following year under the pseudonym Sempronia.[26] The article argued that sewing should be made a recognized profession in order to give independence to women whose only skill and way of making a living was sewing, which at the time was something they were mostly obliged to do as part of their household duties."

"Sept. 10th, my dream of being naked, and my skyn all overwrowght with work like some kinde of tuft mockado, with crosses blew and red; and on my left arme, abowt the arme, in a wreath, this word I red" -- 1579, John Dee's diary http://www.gutenberg.org/files/19553/19553-h/19553-h.htm

http://erikkwakkel.tumblr.com/post/52258862048/broidery-on-a-medieval-page-holes-in-the-pages-of

Manuscript at British Library, Sloane MS 2740 -- charming little incomplete book with instructions on how to do various embroidery motifs; most of it is how to do letters for a sampler; various symbols/codes are employed; other instructions show how to make different types of purse strings, a flower, different knots, "ye Katheren wheele," "the Cheuerne," etc.