Barbara Brackman's MATERIAL CULTURE: Crazy Embroidery 5: Hand-Guided Machine Embroidery

Sunday, April 9, 2023

Crazy Embroidery 5: Hand-Guided Machine Embroidery

Machine-embroidered pansies using variably shaded thread. About 1890.

Schiffli Embroidery Machine in Calais, France, about 1900

In 1863 Isaak Gröbli of Switzerland developed the Schiffli Embroidery Machine. Schiffli means "Little Boat" a reference to the shape of the shuttle on the underside of the cloth. A history of the machine tells us:

"Over time, more and more needles and corresponding shuttles were added to the machine, so that a much wider piece of cloth could be embroidered simultaneously. After several years, the machine developed into the automatic Schiffli machine that could sew in any direction. The design is controlled by a pantograph arm, which the operator uses to follow the design drawing. The cloth is attached to a frame that moves, while the needles stay in one place."

The pantograph arm remains the operator's control tool.

The tracing is labor intensive but with many needles one machine

produces many embroidereries as the image is traced.

Here a Swiss woman using the arm from the Textielmuseum St Gallen.

St Gall or St Gallen has been the heart of Swiss embroidery for generations.

I found the modern photo at the site of the Textile Research Centre (TRC) at Leiden in the Netherlands.

A few years ago they did a show on machine-embroidered World War I postcard souvenirs.

https://trc-leiden.nl/trc-digital-exhibition/index.php/silk-embroidered-postcards/item/69-the-hand-embroidery-machine

They describe the postcards as "hand embroidered" because the operator does move the arm around
by hand but a better term might be "Hand-guided Machine Embroidery."

On the theme of the romantic and spurious propaganda so important during WWI they tell us the postcards were "said to be the work of Belgian and French refugee women, as a means to eke out a meagre existence. However, it is evident that the embroidery was carried out by commercial firms using hand embroidery machines."

Related items were European premiums in tobacco products like cigarettes. Above: front and back of a poppy machine appliqued to a gauze. Ebay photo.

Schiffli machines still produce hand-guided machine embroidery.

We just don't add the swatches to our quilts anymore.

Much of the embroidered floral and animal details in the crazy quilts

must have been done on those machines.

Switzerland, which had a true hand embroidery tradition, specialized in producing the shuttle machines. Kursheedt's began importing the Swiss machines in 1873.

H. Bosshardt, working for Kursheedt's, patented improvements

on the shuttle machine in 1912.

How to tell if the details on your crazy quilt were hand embroidered by the maker or purchased from a machine embroidery manufacturer?

If the image was technically a slip to be stitched to another piece of fabric, there is evidence of the stitches securing the slip.

The butterfly here is a slip, manufactured to be added to another material. The quiltmaker was not

too skillful or knowledgeable about how to do that. Large red stitches were not the acceptable technique.

It's certainly easier to tell when the quiltmaker is not good at this.

International Quilt Museum Collection

Mary M. Hernandred Ricard's My Crazy Dream

The securing stitches are often invisible or almost so.

An absence of the securing embroidery stitches is no clue to hand embroidery by the quiltmaker, however. The jockey and horse are probably machine embroidered on a black silk background fabric that was trimmed and pieced in crazy-style. A clue here is the skill and detail in the image.