Centers of Embroiderey and Lace in St Gallen Switzerland

Glad you liked Anna Williams quilts.  They are amazing, aren't they.  And her story is one that we all would love to have, someone important discovers that we have amazing quilts laying around at home and creates a genre of us.  Right?

Everyone is asking me how Frank is enjoying retirement.  I realized the other day that he spends as much time in his office as he did when he was creating his work reports and handling customers.  Although now he has found YouTube.  It is an addiction.

I have a few more things to show you from the Germany/France trip.  Click on the photos to make them enlarge.  You will see details more easily that way.

Today I want to share some museums we went through.  We had private tours in English in all of them.

In St Gallen Switzerland there was the Textilmuseum which held thousands of exhibits from the antique lace found in the Egyptian Coptic tombs to Michelle Obama expensive laces for her and her daughters dresses and Pippa Middleton's wedding dress.

There are also historical embroideries from the 14th Century.  This area was part of the Industrial Revolution taking place across Europe.  St. Gallen was the center for lacemaking and design work on textiles.  The Museum itself was founded in 1878 to collect and preserve the over 200,000 designs for textiles and laces.

If you go to www.sammlung.textilmuseum.ch you can see some of the incredibly preserved patterns in their collections.  Designers from across the world access their database and visit the museum to gather information for creating new and modern designs in their own work today.

The St. Gallen area was the center for embroidery as well as textile weaving design.  The School for Embroidery Designs was in existence as early as the 1300s for boys who could be trained to create the artistic designs that would become the intricate laces.  

Eleanor of Aquitaine (1137-1152) was famous for her embroidery which included strands of gold threads.  

From the Middle Ages heavily embroidered coats and dresses were worn by nobility.  One worker accidentally dropped an embroidered piece into a bucket of acetone.  While he watched the cotton cloth around the stitches dissolved.  Lace was discovered.








This is a lace making machine.  It is currently used by artists working on grants from the Museum working under the Artist in Residence.

I you look closely, there is a pattern on this machine with a series of umbrellas on the machine right now.


The machine is a Jacquard Punch that utilizes punch cards as loom directors.  I remember those punch cards from college computer courses, not fun!




As we moved into the fabric pattern design area we learned about MiraX

The main exhibit currently hosted is about a company called MiraX.  They designed furniture, fabrics and the future!  This company paved the way for IKEA to become a leading design corporation.

Verner Panton in one of the worlds most influential designers of furniture and interior designers.  He created the Panton Chair.  You've probably sat in one before.

There were rooms of textiles that documented the design progression as decades from the 70s to present day.   

 The first collection was so radical with its bright saturated colors and strong motifs.  The collection contained the total elements of interior design including carpets that matched the textiles.

 

 Each room of the building brought us into another decade, another incredible design concept.

The movement evolved into creations using Illusionism as their focus.  These are 2 dimensional fabrics that look very dimensional, don't they?  

The designs utilized the concept of Trompe l'oeil.  As quilters we use Trompe l'oeil to create embroidery designs with a look of a realistic flower cut from a piece of material and embroidered on the piece.  

And we all remember the Op Art of the 70's.

And the 80's and 90's brought a more organic feel.  We all thought the brown piece looked similar to the Shroud of Turin!


More tomorrow...…...