Three Faves from the Diligent Needle Exhibit

The great thing about visiting museums is that I never know what will strike me when I go.  Yet invariably,  each time I visit there is always something that sets my heart racing and my mind spinning with new ideas and desire.

It's most definitely fodder for the creative soul and so I give you the three pieces that made an impression on me when I visited the Diligent Needle exhibit at Winterthur Museum this past weekend.

By far, this drawnwork and needlelace sampler was my absolute favorite and it hasn't left my mind since I've gotten home...

Note the drawnwork flower basket that overreaches the stitched sawtooth border.  

Worked by Jane Little in 1793, probably in Chester County, Pennsylvania...

It is stitched with silk thread on linen ground.

And the basket combines embroidery with drawnwork and silk ribbon accents...isn't it sweet?

As are the drawnwork and needlelace flowers that it contains...

The ruched silk ribbons that were used to border the needlelace flower medallions just add to the loveliness of this sampler.  

My second favorite is this wool and silk needlework picture on canvas most likely stitched in America or Britain between 1880-1910...

I was struck by the filament silk over a petit point-style tent stitch.  I'd never seen the two combined like that and it gave me pause...

But check out this close up of the butterfly in the upper right corner.  Though I imagine that the colors have faded over time, the shading gives movement to both the butterfly and the background.    And the way that the eye of the butterfly is stitched gives it an anthropomorphic appearance.

There were lots of artistic choices made by the stitcher in this piece that elevated the work beyond a mere embroidered representation of a picture.  

Lastly, there was this silk bedcover professionally embroidered in England or France in the 1800s.

The central medallion depicts an ancient emblem known as the "pelican in her piety"...

A symbol of self-sacrifice associated with motherhood.

The rest of the bedcover is floral vines beautifully rendered.  

The spiky sepal of this rose is wonderful...

The Diligent Needle exhibit runs through July 5, 2015.  I hope you get a chance to travel there yourselves.

Happy stitching everyone!