Beauty in the House…

Yesterday on  whim, after telling the staff at my Father’s favorite restaurant about his passing, I stopped at the local antique store, with the hope of finding a copy of Priscilla Magazine or Home Needlework or somesuch (I’m an antique publications fanatic).

Instead, I found this treasure. As usual, you can click the pictures for more detail. I highly recommend it. The stitching is exquisite.) It’s  about 22 by 22 inches, still with the original price tag of 50 cents from Kindall. So I need to go do some research and track it down.

The design reflects much of the art needlework done in the 1890s through about 1910 in the U.S. This one is poppies. It’s stitched on linen in a thick filament silk – not twisted at all,  it looks like they put enough strands in the needle to be about the equivalent of 4-5 strands of cotton floss. But because it’s so much softer, it blends much better than that much cotton would.  I’m sure that this was packaged in this size as thread… I’ve seen the advertisements for it.

As you can see, it’s not faded at all, and the stitching is exquisite. There is a small triangular  voided area in the poppies shown above, where the petals meet, that I thought was an error, but then I realized that all of the poppies in that position have identical voided areas.  It was designed to be made into a pillow – the linen to back the pillow is attached to the embroidered linen, ready to be made.

Coveting the threads I can no longer get, and feeling very pleased with myself for finding this.

Edited 3/12/11 to add the photo of the poppy with the voided spot.