A Floral muff: Working from an C18 Pattern

This week I have handed over a commission piece for Lucy Adlington of History Wardrobe, which has been fascinating to work on a number of levels. Lucy asked me to make a partially completed embroidery piece for a new series of lectures, “Ladies of Leisure”, exploring pleasures and pastimes in the era of Jane Austen. It is intended as a sample of embroidery that might have been done at the time. 

We discussed several patterns and decided on an embroidered muff pattern published in The Lady’s Magazine in October 1775, which was actually 2 months before Jane Austen’s birth (16^th December), so very appropriate!

The pattern is labelled “half the size”, suggesting that it was intended to be stitched twice top to bottom, which would indeed make a piece about the right size for a muff. So I printed it off twice and tried it – to find that the pattern did not match!

If you look at the photo you see that the gentle wave of the lozenge grid takes an abrupt kick at the join between the patterns. The match between the top and bottom of the daffodils isn’t great either. 

To be fair to the designer and engraver (almost certainly both male), the magazine had only been publishing patterns for 5 years at this point, and I think this was the first to actually state it needed to be used twice. Other patterns might have needed to be doubled to reach right round the hem of a gown, say, but were much easier patterns to match. 

There was no quick way of duplicating the pattern either, without drawing it out again, so producing a second one to place next to the first (to check it out) would have been time-consuming. To us, used to printing or photocopying, it seems like a daft mistake to make, but we need to put it in context with the times. 

Another aspect of the pattern also irritated me when I first started using the Lady’s Magazine patterns some years ago. Nowadays we are used to copy-and-paste, tracing paper, light boxes and other modern conveniences when we draw out a pattern, and I was scornful of the irregularities in the patterns. Look at the patterns in the original: sizes and positions of flowers, leaves and buds are often slightly different in each repeat of the flowers. The second daffodil from the left is missing a bud completely. 

But we need to remember that the only way to make this design was to ENGRAVE EACH SEPARATE FLOWER AND LEAF by hand. Onto a copper plate.  If you consider that the gentlemen designing and engraving the pattern had probably never even picked up a needle in their lives, let alone done any embroidery, it’s difficult to blame them overmuch. I would challenge you to draw out even a simple flower several times, by hand, and get them identical! We are so used to digitalisation and its conveniences, it’s easy to forget. I have tried to stay true to the original design rather than re-drawing it, apart from the changes to the lozenge grid, which would have looked silly if I had left it as the original. I wonder what the C18 users of the pattern did? Sadly we don’t have an extant piece with this pattern: it would be fascinating to compare them.

(It possible it was never made up. It’s a complex and quite time-consuming pattern to embroider, and the fault in the pattern repeat may have put C18 embroiderers off!)

To work my version, I used ivory silk satin fabric, backed by ramie. Silk Satin was a very popular fabric for muffs, especially summer ones. It shows the silk embroidery off beautifully. Ramie is a textile made from a plant in the nettle family (Boehmeria nivea); the fibre has been used for textiles for at least 6000 years. It’s very similar to linen, and in fact is hard to distinguish from linen in archaeological specimens. For me it works well as a substitute for the fine linen that is very difficult to obtain nowadays. 

The pattern was drawn out on tracing paper (with the slight modifications), then traced onto the fabric using a light box. I used a Pigma Micron 003 archival marker pen, which is permanent, and doesn’t bleed into the fabric. A Georgian embroiderer would probably have used ink, applied with a pen or fine brush. She might have held the pattern and fabric up to the window, or used prick-and-pounce. Or even worked with a candle on the floor under her frame – wearing a long skirt and petticoat! The H&S mind boggles! (I’m not making that up, honest, there is a woodcut from 1527 which shows exactly that method. 250 years earlier, but our best source.)

The threads I have used are twisted silk thread, some from Au Ver a Soie (Soie de Paris) and some from The Silk Mill. They are very close to the sort of threads I have seen in museum examples of late 18^th century embroidery. Working with silk thread is lovely. The colours are so bright and saturated, and they are not difficult to work with provided your hands are fairly smooth. Exfoliant works well, plus regular use of hand cream!

I used these flowers for one of the projects in Jane Austen Embroidery (the napkins), so I have had a go at identifying them. Top to bottom: Cobnuts, Wood Avens, Gillyflower (Carnations), wild Forget-me-nots, Violet and Daffodils. Thanks to my pal Yvette, who is a gardener, for her help there!

Stitches used have been typical of the Georgian period, and are much that same as we use today: Outline stitch, Satin stitch, Long-and-short stitch, Straight stitch and French Knots. 

So, here is the muff as handed over to Lucy Adlington this week! It’s just over halfway stitched, and has taken me 110 hours so far. It’s been a bit strange to handover a piece that is clearly unfinished, but that’s what Lucy wants at this stage. Once she has finished with her lectures on this topic, she is going to pass it back to me, and I will finish it off and make it up into a muff for her.