Project two: Recording and capturing: 1.6 Detail and definition

Whitework embroidery sampler

As with the fire escape chute, the story of this textile item was intensely interesting to me, even before I was able to access it in person.

I think this was because it was connected with two inhabitants of Erddig, Ann Jemima Yorke, the young woman who seems to have made it in about 1765, and the later inhabitant Louisa Matilda Yorke, who found and preserved it about 150 years later:

Because the presumed maker came from an upper middle class family, we have her year of birth as being 1754, the year it is thought the sampler was made as 1765 and the year she died as 1770. If these dates are correct, she would have been about eleven years old when she made this piece. I think it is probably that the whitework embroidery would have been worked over a number of weeks, months or years, and am not sure where the information to give it the date of 1765 came from, but it seems Ann Jemima Yorke was about 16 when she died, so it does seem to be the work of a young girl. This type of work would also have been a way for a young woman of this class to spend her time and fine needlework would be one of her 'accomplishments', one of a number of skills such as French, drawing and dancing which she would be expected to master in order to take up her place in society.

Ann Jemima Yorke. Pastel, gloss, wood and paper, date and artist unknown; photograph Erddig © National Trust / Susanne Gronnow; http://www.nationaltrustcollections.org.uk/object/1149418

It also inspired me to research the histories of samplers per se to see if this dating seems accurate, and to find out more about how these pieces of needlework changed in form and function over a couple of centuries. According to Mary Thomas's Embroidery Book (1936) the sampler in its heyday, the late 16th and early 17th centuries, was an example of stitches and patterns recorded as 'samples' for future work, like notes collected in a notebook, a way of recording patterns from 'rare and precious Italian pattern books'.

This kind of earlier sampler, rather than those more pictorial versions dating from the earlier part of the 19th century, seems to correspond to this piece in the Erddig collection, as it shows a collections of stitches worked on a piece of linen about 8 inches wide, increasing in complexity from top to bottom, as if worked over a period of months or years. I like the way the stitches at the top are simple stitches that almost anyone could master, whereas as we go down the piece the stitches become tinier and more intricate. This makes me wonder how much time (and how many sewing lessons) elapsed from the beginning of the work to its end.

I also like the fact that some of the sections are incomplete, as is the maker, bored with a certain set of stitches, has been in a hurry to move on to the next section and abandons the previous section.

Here I capture some of the minute detail of the stitching towards the top of the piece, as well as some of the words that it suggests to me. I intentionally use a hard pencil (2H) to make a light marking on the ordinary A4 white paper, as a way of capturing the lack of contrast between the creamy white base linen and the cream silk thread of the stitches, as well as it being a reference to the light impact that the maker left on the world, a young woman who died young and whose existence left little traces behind:

Here I use pencil on black paper, as another way of capturing the low contrast between the background material and the stitches, followed by a more contrasting medium of white roller pen on the same black paper, to show the increased contrast of the lacework section of the sampler:

I half-close my eyes to focus on the gaps between the work, the spaces created by what I think is the cutwork of the lower sections of the sampler, using 5B pencil, in quite large scale on sketchbook paper:

Here is my rendering of the reverse of the framed embroidery, where much of the substance of its story can be gleaned:

Here I focus on some of the patterns created by the intricate embroidery, again usingthe white roller ball, but this time on tracing paper (photographed over black paper), in a nod to the delicacy of the fabric created:

Here I have tried to take one of the tiny motifs of the embroidery and scale it up to supersize:

Below is another way I find to capture the spaces in between the embroidery, using the side of a graphite stick:

Another attempt at enlarging the pattern, focusing on a single tiny square of the pattern and enlarging it to supersize:

The below was an effort to capture the fine detail in a section of embroidery, using white gouache paint on tracing paper:

This led me to think about other ways of capturing the same pattern, and I thought I might be able to do this with string, itself a form of yarn. It was quite hard to get enough glue onto the string to stick it down in this way, and working with the full thickness of the string it was quite tricky to manipulate it in the way that I wanted:

So I tried separating some of the ply of the string to see if this would be easier. the below was made with three strands of the original six:

And these were made with two strands (top) and a single strand (bottom):

This in turn led me to think about other ways of portraying this level of detail. So I return to one of the photographs I have taken in close up and start doodling, looking at a section of embroidery and the open and closed spaces it has made:

Then I choose an even smaller section and create a stencil based on this as I am interested in what will happen when this is used both as a rubbing surface and for stencilling through:

Here I tried doing a rubbing onto quite a flimsy packing paper using a black Inktense colour stick:

It was quite hard to keep this paper still while rubbing, and it teared easily, so I changed to a thicker (about 80 gsm) white paper and was quite surprised by the additional texture created by the cardboard itself:

I tried a few variations on this using different colours, ways of moving the stencil around and repeating the pattern:

Then I went on to use the same cardboard stencil for stencilling through, inspired by Rosemary Firth's Developing Ideas Through Sketch Book Projects (date unknown; Amazon). So I use the same stencil to come up with as many different marks as possible, using pencil and different thickness of pen:

I am quite pleased by where this has led me and feel that I could come back to this point and develop these ideas and designs further.