Sew What?

Welcome to "Sew What?"!

May 14, 2020 Season 1 Episode 1
Sew What?
Welcome to "Sew What?"!
Show Notes Transcript

Welcome to "Sew What?" In this episode, Isabella introduces herself and what this podcast will be about. Woohoo!

Music is Kevin MacLeod's "Monkeys Spinning Monkeys."

Whatsup stitches!!! Welcome to “Sew What,” a podcast about the history of women’s needlework. I’m Isabella Rosner, the host of this hopefully good podcast. I’m excited you’re here and that we’re about to get into some incredible tales about girls and women who stitched, and the stories they left behind. 

Here’s a little about me. I was a weird teen stuck in Los Angeles who was obsessed with classic literature and brooding period drama men like Colin Firth and Richard Armitage and truly stunning period drama women like Michelle Dockery and Gillian Anderson. I did my undergrad in New York City because I was thirsty for some east coast history and seasons. 

I then did my master’s in England because, as you can tell, I’ve always been a really over the top Anglophile and I’ve been a member of the Jane Austen Society of North America since I was 14, so living in England was my destiny. And now I’m back in England, specifically in London doing my PhD! My undergrad and master’s degrees were in art history because it was as close as I could get to studying decorative arts and material culture objects. Now I’m in the history department of my university because material culture is a subject that is more of a mixture of areas like art history, anthropology, archaeology, and history than it is just one discreet subject. 

I’m studying Quaker women’s decorative arts before 1800. I’m not a Quaker, but I’m just really excited about how decorative Quaker art was for centuries before it got really austere. I’m looking at 17th-century English needlework and 18th-century Philadelphia wax and shellwork. I could talk about my project forever but that’s not what we’re here for! (Unless it is. In which case contact me let’s chat I love friends). 

Basically, I’m starting this podcast because I’m VERY passionate about textiles, and women’s needlework specifically. Needlework is a bit of a weird term that isn’t often used so here, I’ll define it for you: it is literally any work made with a needle. Embroidery, sewing, knitting, crocheting, whatever. If you’re using a needle to make a stitched object, it’s needlework. 

I loooooooove needlework. Anyone who knows me will tell you it’s like 95% of what I talk about. My textile-loving self has been lucky enough to work in textile and costume collections in museums in the US and UK and hoo boy the JOY I find when I get to spend time with needlework. Lil embroidered pictures! Quilts! Embroidered boxes! Beadwork baskets! Knitting! Crochet! Weaving! You name it, I am a huge, HUGE fan. 

I specialise in seventeenth-century English domestic needlework but would like to think I’m preeeeeetty knowledgeable about embroidery from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries generally.

I find that embroidered objects can tell us so much about the girls and women who stitched them. This is most obvious when it comes to things like schoolgirl samplers. Samplers are pieces of embroidery which were usually produced by girls and young women to practice or display their stitching skills. These were common from the 17th century to the beginning of the 20th and often included alphabets, figures, motifs, and sometimes inscriptions including names, ages, Bible verses, etc. 

I like samplers because they tell stories about their makers better than almost any other type of object. They are really helpful because they often include a lot of genealogical information. A huge number of samplers include a maker’s name, her age, the year she finished her sampler, and sometimes the name of her needlework teacher, the school she went to, or the village, town, or city she lived in. These details make it relatively easy to figure out who these stitchers were. 

And what’s the appeal of figuring out who these girls and women were? Well, oftentimes embroidered objects give voice to girls and women who history has brushed aside. A lot of times, needlework is the only thing we can remember these individuals by. Researching these textiles gives a voice to girls and women who have been, to say it dramatically, dismissed by history. I think when it comes down to it, I love stories and textiles are a really beautiful, thought provoking way of piecing narratives together. And, on a more existential level, I think I love studying this stuff because I hope that hundreds of years from now people will carry on looking at and loving every day objects made and used by every day people like you and me.

And as we probably all know, needlework has been hugely neglected by history because it’s quote women’s work. It’s tied in with the art versus craft debate, a centuries old discourse about a supposed hierarchy of arts. The quote hierarchy of arts puts art almost entirely made by men, paintings and sculpture, at the forefront. They’re considered much more important and significant than media like textiles, jewellery, woodwork, etc. It was accepted that ”art” is for men and craft for women. That’s dumb and pointless and unfair but that’s how it was categorized for hundreds of years. Only in the last few decades have scholars started analysing women’s work. I hope this podcast can get more people to care about and study these objects. It’s time women’s work, what others may consider craft but I consider art, gets the attention it deserves. A future episode will look at the historical context of women’s work and scholarship around it, focusing on past and present attitudes towards needlework as fine art. Feminism!! Politics!!! The study of needlework has it all. 

Most of this podcast will focus on embroidery, clearly my greatest love, but sometimes I’ll talk about sewing, weaving, crochet, or knitting. The podcast will work like this: in every episode I’ll discuss several samplers or other examples of needlework, as well as who made them. I aim to stitch together not only the objects and who made them, but also makers and samplers that, at first glance, don’t seem related. 

My stories will be about girls and women of a variety of ages, geographical locations, races, socioeconomic statuses, and sexualities. Topics to come include orphan samplers, the needlework Mary Queen of Scots’ made during her captivity, needlework education for African American girls, Mexican samplers, and math, science, and geography through embroidery. 

Next episode will be called “Text and Protest” and will look at two fire-y nineteenth-century samplers separated by the Atlantic Ocean, so get hyped for that. Learning about needlework is both fun AND flirty!!! Hopefully eventually I will have museum professionals, professors, and/or skilled stitchers come in and chat with me about some rad objects, all with the end goal of rediscovering and celebrating girls and women who stitched decades and centuries ago. 

This podcast is obviously brand new and I’m a tiny baby when it comes to podcasting, clearly, so thank you for listening! And as you can tell, I’ll be talking about legitimately important and interesting things but in a light, pretty casual tone, solely because of who I am as a person. That is just a warning for you who are expecting a very professional and polished tone. This is not the podcast you’re looking for. I really enjoy bringing historic objects to life through fun and colloquialisms, and I hope you do too! 

Follow this podcast at sewwhatpodcast on Twitter and Instagram. That’s s e w w h a t p o d c a s t. This’ll be really helpful, as that’s where I’ll be posting my sources and images of the objects I discuss. You’ll want to check those out, as verbal descriptions can only do so much. I will sometimes talk about objects I’ve seen first hand that don’t have images online, so if you want to see the objects I’m talking about, this podcast’s Twitter and Instagram are the places to be. 

 And if you want more embroidery content, follow my Instagram account @historicembroidery. I try to post all sorts of objects from a variety of countries and time periods. So fun!!

Thanks for listening! Now go out and stitch some stories. Maybe eventually I’ll come up with a less cringeworthy end line.
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Thanks to producer Alex Forster for his recording and administrative help and Kameron Johnson for his graphic art skills and recording recommendations. And thank you to the internet for the royalty-free music because I can’t afford to pay for music. The song is “Monkeys Spinning Monkeys” by Kevin MacLeod. What a good song title.