Crazy Embroidery 6: More Machine Embroidery

 

Photo from Algona, Iowa showing a man demonstrating machine

embroidery and possibly selling the examples of birds, butterflies

and florals on the wall.

We've discussed the large and productive Schiffli hand-guided embroidery machines

that could produce multiples of a design.

Stitching a monogram on a simple machine

1866 ad---family machines could embroider

At a far smaller scale sewing machine companies hired operators to

demonstrate how to do machine embroidery on your home machine.

The Iowa man has several of the popular images for

crazy quilts on his wall. Cat tails, lilies and golden rod

are often seen on crazy quilts.

Here a woman demonstrates similar embroidery on a White machine...

in a booth at a fair or trade show.

Perhaps they sold these "Art Work" examples to use in crazy quilts. Or the demonstrators showed you how to do it on your own machine. Surely some of the embroidered patches we see might be hand-guided embroidery done by the quiltmaker herself.

McMinn County Living History Museum Collection

How to tell machine embroidery done on a home machine from actual hand embroidery?

Again....????

Front & reverse of a pansy slip from ebay

Perhaps looking at the back of the floral would offer clues but we rarely see the back of the slips on these early crazy quilts as they are so often stitched to a foundation fabric.

Filson Historical Society, Kentucky

Attributed to Leviann Webb

Tomorrow: The Final Installment

Piece Embroidery

Kentucky Museum at Western Kentucky University

Attributed to Anna Maria Lively

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.

Machine-embroidered horse on blue

Top left: Kursheedt catalog peacock.

They may have done variations on the bird but

we know the peacock with the turned head is theirs.

It would be nice to have an index to the popular slips but we still don't have many catalog images.

You might learn to recognize a style in the machine appliques. Rather long satin stitches, well drawn

images, well executed. Variegated thread or not.

From Pam Weeks at the New England Quilt Museum

The fancier embroidery on many of these crazies is often backed by black silk or velvet.

So much so that a sub-style developed in which black florals were featured.

Crib quilt

New York project & the Quilt Index

International Quilt Museum Collection

https://www.internationalquiltmuseum.org/quilt/19970070764

We also see a minor style category incorporating strips of

floral embroidery probably done on the Schiffli machine.

1911, Spokane, Washington

About which more later.

Tomorrow: Machine embroidery on a smaller scale

  

Crazy Embroidery 4: Kursheedt's Embroidery

Examples of Kursheedt's machine embroidery?

Fancy Silk Pillow made with a machine-embroidered water lily on silk available for purchase

from Kursheedt's embroidery factory.

Kursheedt's was probably the largest US manufacturer of machine embroidery 

designed to be incorporated into sewing projects.

The Kursheedt building in New York today,

minus a few upper stories.

Kursheedt's was a family business, run by men descended from New Yorker Gershom Mendes Seixas (1745–1816).

Silhouette about 1840 by well-known artist Auguste Edouart.

Kursheedt's was often mentioned in the press of the mid 1880s.

"If ladies have no time to embroider...they will find the Kursheedt's embroidered color silk appliques most convenient."

Ladies' Home Journal, 1895 

"Satisfactory results with but little personal exertion" and

Kursheedt's Standard silk embroidered lilac spray.

An inspector concerned with child factory labor counted 184 employees

at the embroidery business, the majority women working on embroidery machines.

(about which more tomorrow.)

The Kursheedts manufactured all sorts of dress trim in their New York city factories, mostly in the cast iron district: SoHo. 

University of Pennsylvania Libraries

Lace was probably their biggest seller but embroidered appliques were certainly a large market. What to call them? Probably the best technical term is slip. Slips are embroidery stitched to a canvas or other surface. The embroidery can be trimmed and slipped onto a larger textile.

The Victoria & Albert Museum has quite a collection

of 17th-century slips.

"Motives for applied work"

Today they are called "patches." Embroidered patches remain a big business.

Often with a fusible backing, attachable with an iron.

Quilt dated 1888

In the crazy quilt era you stitched them to a fabric for your design.

One way to tell a slip is the small stitches securing the image to

the background.

And as they noticed at the International Quilt Museum some were better

than others at attaching them.

Louise Tiemann has found two pages of Kursheedt's catalog of embroidered appliques as ads.

The company published a quarterly magazine, a catalog with "copious illustrations of [our] Manufactures." But she's found only two or three copies of this ephemera (efemina, as I saw it misspelled once---Nothing more ephemeral that publications for females.) 

The publication had something to do with Butterick. Kursheedt's may have taken over an older Butterick magazine.

Louise's collection

Cover to Volume 7 1892.

There have got to be more copies out there. 

Kursheedt's was certainly not the only company selling embroidered slips and silks.

But this is very ephemeral information.

We see evidence of other companies in their catalogs.

The information is not as clear as Kursheedt's.

Strawbridge & Clothier's department store in Philadelphia advertised these "Corsages."

Are they 3-d fake flowers or embroidered flatwork to add to clothing and needlework?

And if they were the latter, did Strawbridge & Clothier manufacture them or buy them from a factory like Kursheedt's?

Tomorrow: Machine Embroidery

See posts I've done on applique slips---not embroidered---here:

http://civilwarquilts.blogspot.com/2020/06/21st-century-slips.html

http://barbarabrackman.blogspot.com/2020/05/mary-miller-taylor-quilt-4-1832.html

Collection of Judith Shanks

This album quilt made for Rebecca Solomons has several blocks dated 1852-1853 made by Kursheedt cousins, descendants of the Seixas family who located in Charleston, South Carolina.