Sewing Basket

CAMERA ROLLING, SPEED…AND ACTION: EXHIBITING THE CONSERVATION OF BANNERS THROUGH FILM The Textile Conservation Studio (TCS) based at the People’s History Museum in Manchester, United Kingdom has been a centre for the conservation of banners since 1990. A survey undertaken to analyze the effectiveness of the public’s access to the TCS through a panoramic viewing window prompted debate amongst the museum’s exhibition and conservation teams. In response, a film project was initiated to demonstrate some of the skills and time involved when conserving a banner. This paper will report the collaborative efforts of completing the film project. Specifically, this article presents the outcomes of filming the conservation of the Amalgamated Stevedores Labour Protection League banner ca. 1918; a two-sided, oil painted silk banner designed by George Tutill. This case study introduces the overall aims and objectives of the exhibition manager as well as the challenges faced by the textile conservator in presenting and ensuring that appropriate footage was captured for public understanding. Further outcomes include the relationship between the film producer and the textile conservator and their collaboration during filming. Trust and flexibility involving all parties was essential in order to make the project work and to allow for a successful learning process for all involved.

2011

2014

The paper discusses the history of Susannah Swan's "wampum bag." She was among the captives taken during a French and Indian raid on Haverill, Massachusetts in 1697. She was released two years later bring the bag with her. The bag is one of the very rare decorated twined bags that survives from 17th century New England and is among the best documented. It descended in Sussanah's family; she herself probably retold the story of her captivity until her death in the mid-18th century. The oral traditional preserved the bag through the mid-19th century when a family member in southern Albany County, NY converted the bag into a sewing basket.

Commonly regarded merely as exercise in "marking" for linens, embroidered samplers might better be considered as escritoires containing a wealth of personal, social and economic information about their makers and their milieus. This paper argues that samplers may be used to located historical cultural changes in the underlying discursive practices affecting the lives of young women. Based on typology, I identify three distinct sampler genres as linked to the historical periods of antiquity through the late Middle Ages, the early Renaissance to the late 16th century, and the 17th to the 19th centuries. This paper concentrates on the last period, examining New England colonial samplers to illustrate their value as visual rhetorical documents that reflect both the underlying Puritan cultural emphasis on universal literacy and the feminine cultural discourse of the period. In the process, I suggest that New England women achieved near-universal situational literacy by 1775, further supporting this contention with evidence from statutes, the book industry, and the rise of women's academies. From a child's first lettering sampler to the complex academy samplers that touted the virtues of Republican motherhood, samplers acted to shape a girl's group identity even as she wrought her own personality into her work. Consequently, I conclude that: (i) as often ubiquitous items of girls' lives, samplers and other embroideries should be regarded as historical documents that are uniquely reflective of cultural mores; and (ii) the methodology for so doing requires a more precise categorization of embroideries according to their discursive functions.

Rebay-Salisbury, K., Brysbaert, A., and Foxhall, L. (eds) 2014. Knowledge Networks and Craft Traditions in the Ancient World: Material Crossovers. London: Routledge., 2014

This edited volume investigates knowledge networks based on materials and associated technologies in Prehistoric Europe and the Classical Mediterranean. It emphasizes the significance of material objects to the construction, maintenance, and collapse of networks of various forms – which are central to explanations of cultural contact and change. Focusing on the materiality of objects and on the way in which materials are used adds a multidimensional quality to networks. The properties, functions, and styles of different materials are intrinsically linked to the way in which knowledge flows and technologies are transmitted. Transmission of technologies from one craft to another is one of the main drivers of innovation, whilst sharing knowledge is enabled and limited by the extent of associated social networks in place. Archeological research has oftentimes been limited to studying objects made of one particular material in depth, be it lithic materials, ceramics, textiles, glass, metal, wood or others. The knowledge flow and transfer between crafts that deal with different materials have oftentimes been overlooked. This book takes a fresh approach to the reconstruction of knowledge networks by integrating two or more craft traditions in each of its chapters. The authors, well-known experts and early career researchers, provide concise case studies that cover a wide range of materials. The scope of the book extends from networks of craft traditions to implications for society in a wider sense: materials, objects, and the technologies used to make and distribute them are interwoven with social meaning. People make objects, but objects make people – the materiality of objects shapes our understanding of the world and our place within it. In this book, objects are treated as clues to social networks of different sorts that can be contrasted and compared, both spatially and diachronically.

Museums, archives, and libraries are important places of re-connection and re-animation for Indigenous peoples and communities. Ethnographic collections held within these sites tell very particular histories about the colonial experience, including how Native culture was transformed into forms of exclusive property through practices of research, collecting, and documentation. The Penobscot Nation is one of many tribes grappling with the reality that it is the legal owner neither of the material culture held in institutions nor of the representations of culture, the photographs, manuscripts, and other audio visual materials that were collected by researchers over the long period of colonial engagement. As non-owners of materials that record their images, voices, histories, and ideas, the Penobscot Nation has to negotiate against the weight of powerful legal orders that reflect colonial idioms of control and authority over Native peoples and the representations of their cultures. This article explores the range of strategies that the Penobscot Nation has developed to maneuver around the legacies of legal and social exclusions in access to, and therefore decision-making about, the future uses of these cultural materials. [