Those Tudors Keep Me in Stitches

These blog entries come from an iPad that Lizbeth left at my house when she went off to London for the summer. She asked me to post them for her if she ended up doing any traveling in areas where she might have difficulty accessing wifi. I’d say that being trapped in Tudor times, fits that bill.

So while Liz is otherwise engaged I’ll help out by cleaning up her notes and posting whenever I get a chance.

Laurel Shimer

Stop on by my art journal, The Simple Romantic to read and listen in to The Sewing Chronicles of Lady Liz: Secret Diary of a Time Traveling Maide,  the story of Liz's travels back in time to date 

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In the time of England’s Elizabeth I, the merchant class was enjoying new opportunities to travel and make a buck (ok let’s say a pound or a piece of eight) in the export/import business. That’s right, that means that if you were a white male, you might be enjoying new financial opportunities. These men and their families was beginning to rise in society by buying a place in the upper echelons. Sometimes their gold paved the way to marriages that united them with the titled classes. Their upper middle class wives and daughters, who might some day marry a lord, were enjoying some of the new prosperity as well.

It was becoming quite the thing now for women in such households to be educated. The well-red English woman was reading more than her book of Common Prayer and hot-off-the-press Englishe Bible. She was also following artistic movements in Italy, Germany and France. Pattern-books for embroidery were becoming available and new designs emerged from their needles. Naturalistic styalized designs were hot. Flowers, as always, were big. With more freedom of movement, European designs were also influenced by interlaced Islamic arabesque designs.

With pattern books in their hands and money in their pockets, women also created a demand for new styles of embroidery from the professional workshops that provided the sumptuous hangings, that turned their brand new half-timbered houses and stately brick manors into right cozy nests.

Some of their needlework survives. The lovely linen piece above(*) is embroidered in deep pink silk thread, and features an interlaced trellis-work design (think Islamic motif) of carnations and roses worked in outline stitch.

* This gorgeous piece of work is housed at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London