I forgot to tell you when I was last posting about Selby, to look out for the Washington Window in the abbey. It is to be found in the south clerestory window of the choir and is the original 14th century glass. Here is the full description for you: When Glover the Herald visited Selby in 1584-5 he described the escutcheon as 'Argent, two bars and in chief three mullets pierced, gules'. The shield is white with two red bars across and three red mullets (spur-rowels) in chief, each with a hole in the centre. This piercing is necessary to the true representation of the Washington mullets. At Great Brington in Northamptonshire, where the first President's ancestors formerly dwelt, the Arms are also represented with pierced mullets, the colours being identical with Selby though the shield is much smaller. In 1891 Harpers magazine showed two seals and a book-plate used by Washington which are virtually exact replicas of the Wessington family coat of arms. The Washington shield at Selby probably represents some kind of benefaction made to the Abbey to commemorate John Wessington, Prior of Durham (1416~1446) the most distinguished collateral ancestor of George Washington. John Wessington made important additions to Hemmingborough church which was a collegiate under Durham. Beneath the battlement of the tower at Hemmingborough is a succession of washing tubs or tuns ...... a rebus of the priors name!
This 18th century Indo-Portuguese table carpet is embroidered in point majolique in polychrome silk and has a central medallion with a parrot in a flowering shrub. It is surrounded by twining flower stems and four peacocks. Measuring nearly 2 meteres by 1 metre it had an estimate of €400-€600 and realized €1,900 on 6 July this year.
This worn 19th century embroidered cloth section measuring 80cm x 34cm from Fez had an estimate of €60-€80 and achieved €40 at auction.
Another example is this Ottoman Balkan linen skirt, bodice and headress of around 1900 embroidered with polychrome wool. Estimated at €80-€120 the lot sold for €180. To visit the Duburaux site, click here.
Lesley Turpin-Delport and Nicola Delport-Wepener, designers, stitchers and authors of Embroidered Flora and Fauna will be holding a 2 day workshop in stumpwork and related dimensional techniques in Bath at the home of Lynne Roche (the maker of those fabulous dolls) on 18 & 19 October 2012. There are just a few places remaining. Click here to request more details.
In 1709, a Frenchman, Francois-Xavier Bon de Saint Hilaire, used the minute, naturally golden thread spun by a Malagasy spider to gloves and stockings for France's Sun King Louis XIV. A hundred years later Raimondo de Termeyer, a Spaniard working in Italy, produced stockings for the Emperor Napoleon and a shawl for his first wife, Empress Josephine using this same magical thread.
Now, we too, some two hundred years later can marvel at this astonishing thread in all its respendent glory at the V&A Museum in London between 25 January and 5 June 2012. Simon Peers and Nicholas Godley, a textile artist and a designer-entrepreneur respectively, have created a shimmering golden cape from spider silk.
They say that to create the textiles, spiders are collected each morning and harnessed in specially conceived ‘silking’ contraptions. Trained handlers extract the silk from 24 spiders at a time. Unlike mulberry silk from silkworms, in which the pupa is killed in its cocoon, the spiders are returned to the wild at the end of each day. After ‘silking’, the silk is taken on cones to the silk weaving workshop where skilled weavers have mastered the special tensile properties of the silk. In the so-called Malagasy textile, each warp is made from 96 spun strands of spider silk and each brocading weft has 10 of those threads together – so 960 strands in total.
It takes the silk from 23,000 spiders to weave 25 grammes of silk, and there are 1.5kg of silk in the cape. The 4 metre long woven textile was made from the silk of more than a million female Golden Orb spiders and it took 80 people five years to collect the spiders to silk for the thread. For more details of the exhibition, click here.
Thank you to Jennifer H and Becky from Washington for pointing out a previous exhibition in the American Museum of Natural History. Now you can see a video!
