"Stitches in Time", a Sad Goodbye & a Happy Hello

 

Carolina

Since I'm in the midst of designing and stitching patterns that reflect my interest in vintage textiles, I  was happy to come upon a recent article in the Wall Street Journal about an exhibition at the Met featuring such fabrics.

Here is an excerpt -

Stitches in Time: A History of Fabric

An exhibit opening Sept. 16 tells the story of history and economics through three centuries of fabric.  By Stephanie Cohen

In 2005, during a Matisse exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, American Decorative Arts curator Amelia Peck was asked to help explain the origins of a particular piece of blue printed fabric depicted in many of the master painter's works.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

A cotton Wentke coat from mid-18th century Netherlands.

The fabric swatch had long been a mystery to textile scholars. All the known pieces of its type—variations of a blue and white printed-floral design—were in museums in America, and scholars had for years assumed it was an early example of American printed fabric. When a British excise label was found on one such fabric swatch in the 1950s, scholars decided it had been made in England and exported, although no piece had ever been found in the U.K. Now a swatch had turned up in France, where Matisse had bought it, and she was intrigued.

Ms. Peck began researching the fabric. In the Met's library, she found a book about Indian fabrics brought to Europe by the Dutch East India Company and realized that the blue and white pattern had been made in India for a European or American consumer.
"I'd been an American textile specialist for 30 years, and I'd never thought about them in the context of the bigger world," she says. Most scholars had assumed colonial American textiles had come from England. ....

the rest of the article can be read through the Wall Street Journal's online site, sorry it won't link, just google Stitches in Time: A History in Fabric.  There is also an online exhibit at the Met, featuring floral patterned textiles.

And now a sad goodbye.  We recently lost our eleven year old German Shepherd, Zoe, to age and illness.  This was the third such heart wrenching farewell we'd experienced in the last three years and that day I thought, that's it, no more dogs.  My heart can't take such things any more.

Our Zoe

However, the next morning dawned and all around the house were the memories of happy dog times and the lack of a dog bed by the woodstove and a dog dish in the laundry room was even harder to bear so we began our search for the next Gracewood dog to love.  It turns out he was born just two days before we lost our Zoe.  He is a Chesapeake Bay Retreiver and is somewhere in the heap of puppies in the photo below.

Somewhere in this pile of puppies is 'Jasper'

We can't wait to take the five hour drive over to Wenatchee, just this side of the Cascade mountains, to pick up 'Jasper'.  It is going to be a challenge to go from years with three older dogs to a brand new puppy with all of his enthusiasm and energy, but thankfully with this addition to the family Terry is home full time now and will have the joy of being a much bigger part of  'puppy life'.

Zoe would not have actually liked having a young puppy in the house, but we're sure she would be happy that our hearts will find some ease in loving another dog.