Puncetto books

After getting lost in the mail, returned to sender and resent out, four books on Puncetto have finally arrived at Italian Needlecrafts.

Since these books are very hard to find and to purchase for those of us outside of Italy, I wanted to wait until they were available from a reliable website with PayPal options for payment before telling you about them. Many of you have asked for more about Puncetto needle lace and finally I can tell you something.

If you're wondering which one to start with, it should be this one, Puncetto Valsesiano, Manuale di Base by Anna Axerio:


It has the basics. While the text is in Italian, there are lots of step-by-step photos. I think the hardest part about making Puncetto needle lace is tension and keeping track of where you are.

I know I get lost in the counting all the time so my samples are definitely not worth showing you! I have watched my Mom knit and to avoid getting lost, she keeps a pad of paper and pencil beside her. She draws lines and other symbols to represent the number of stitches and which individual types of stitches she does per row when she's doing something particularly complicated. I am thinking that I might adopt this method at least until I get the hang of Puncetto.

The book has images of the symbols used in patterns, the different parts of the design, the basic stitches, how to add a new thread when you run out, how to start on the edge of fabric, how to start freestyle (like in the video here), then many patterns of varying difficulty and pictures of finished pieces, how to do arcs with picots similar to these that I showed you before:

... and finally how to insert Puncetto pieces into fabric.

At present, as far as I know there is no specific book in English on Puncetto needle lace. As mentioned in a previous post there are some pages in old needlework manuals (in English) which will help you out with the basics of the actual stitch but they don't have patterns or explain in detail how to build a design.

This book has everything you would need to make yourself many, many pieces of this beautiful needle lace. The other books listed at Italian Needlecrafts are specific to their subjects and explain with lots of diagrams and pictures how to execute more complicated (and delightful!) patterns. They do not however, have any instructions on the basics.

Italia Invita Forum - Part One - 2003

I have been putting off telling you about the Italia Invita Forum because I was waiting for them to release information about the next event. Now that they have, I can tell you about this amazing bi-annual event now held in Parma, Italy and a bit of it's history.

Italia Invita, which means Italy Invites, was started by five Italian women in October of 2001 with the aim of "promoting contact and rapport between the Italian lace and embroidery entities, inheritors of the tradition, and analogous entities abroad". Italy has a long history with embroidery and lace. The idea of Italia Invita was to take from the past and carry into the future the priceless patrimony of Italian needlework; possibly rediscovering techniques which had fallen by the wayside, bringing to light for the world the treasures of Italian textile arts.

These women (Antonia Busi, Fiorella Gaggi, Cristina Notore, Rosalba Pepi and Thessy Schoenholzer Nichols) proposed the ambitious idea of holding a bi-annual event and inviting the world to Italy. The first Forum was to be held May 9th to 11th, 2003 in the town of Bellaria Igea Marina in the north-eastern part of Italy, near Rimini.

When I discovered this, I nearly lost my mind. I had been struggling to find any scrap of information about Italian needlework until then with almost no results. I wanted to drop everything and leave for Italy. I had been at a new job only a few months and had no savings to speak of, certainly nothing that would permit me to risk losing my job or to buy plane tickets. My daughter was 12 and refused to even think of travel... and so I became a voyeur. The internet was all I had and it was still relatively poor in information. I had my subscription to RAKAM, an Italian needlework magazine and I searched for articles about the Forum everywhere, even going to my local library and sitting in the reading lounge pouring over Italian newspapers. I belonged to an Italian cross-stitch message board and read with envy the plans the Italian girls were making to go to the Forum. I begged them all to tell me everything without leaving any small detail out.

The 1st edition of the Italia Invita International Forum of Lace and Embroidery was host to 19 countries, exhibited over 50 needleart techniques and had more than 1500 visitors. It was attended by embroidery and lace schools and associations; there were private collections and over 20 merchant booths selling supplies. The girls of my message board came back with fabulous tales of beautiful techniques, how much they bought, things they'd seen that until then, they had only heard of and they had been able to take workshops on embroidery and lace techniques!

It was at this point in time that I discovered a girl named Agnese who wrote a column for the guide website SuperEva called "Not only cross stitch" (SuperEva is similar to About.com). Agnese listed all the techniques that had been on display at the Forum which I diligently copied down. This gave me a real starting point to target my random searches for information and add to the lists that I had been making from the pages of RAKAM.

It was also from Agnese's column that I learned about the CD-ROM that Italia Invita had made about the Forum. I wrote a letter to them in what I'm sure was terrible Italian asking how I could purchase the CD-ROM.

Here is a scan of the cover art for the CD-ROM:


Eventually I sent a money order and the CD-ROM finally arrived after months of waiting, worrying and anticipation... but it was formatted for the PC – I have always had Macintosh computers. When I successfully got my mother to leave her PC I sat down expecting the whole CD to be in Italian but was elated to discover that it was in Italian and English! What a bonus! Not only could I read and understand completely (the CD-ROM was very well translated by Vima deMarchi Micheli, Patricia Girolami and Marina Martin) but now I knew the English words for the Italian techniques, stitches, materials, tools... I now had the names of teachers, schools, associations that I could investigate. Some of the techniques exhibited had a photo, some historical and technical information, not all the works were shown and I found out later that this was because the CD-ROM was produced before the Forum in order to be given out at the event and so the embroideries and laces that were actually exhibited could not be photographed beforehand. Still, this was the mother lode of all finds for me and kept me fascinated for many, many hours. I hung out at my Mom's house quite a lot in those days, stealing every minute that she wasn't at her computer.

There is a French website about lace that made five pages of pictures and reports about the 2003 Forum. You can still see them today. Click on anything in blue with an underline to see other pictures, at the bottom right-hand corner of each page click on "suite" to go to the next page.

Tomorrow we'll talk about the 2005 edition of the Forum...

Italia Invita - Part Two - 2005

Italia Invita - Part Three - 2007

Italia Invita - Part Four - 2009

Italia Invita - Part Five - 2011

Things we would never dream of doing today...

The following two pieces are samples of borders that one could buy by the metre in Bologna, Italy around the middle of the twentieth century. I'm guessing that one picked out one's preferred motifs when commissioning a tablecloth or other stitched item. If anyone can offer other information, please – please leave a comment below!

After the end of the Aemilia Ars Society in the late 1930s and the bombing of their shop during the Second World War, a woman by the name of Maria Garagnani (1904–1989) purchased the store and had it restored. By employing former teachers and students of the defunct Society, the store produced and sold many different kinds of needlework. The store logo is stamped on the labels.

The label here says that this border cost 18 Lire per metre.


And this border cost 10 Lire per metre.


In 1950 there were 625 Lire to one US dollar.

By today's terminology these are samples of Punto Antico Embroidery and Reticello needle lace. A row of Four-Sided Stitch is used to separate the rows of Punto Antico motifs stitched in Curl Stitch, Buttonhole Stitch, Eyelets, Satin Stitch and Bullion Knots. The Reticello needle lace area is bordered with Overcast Stitch, the needle lace motifs are done in Detached Buttonhole Stitch, Needleweaving, Buttonhole Stitch, Overcast bars and Picots.

Could you ever contemplate stitching metres and metres of this?!

These two pieces and a few other samples are among the collection of needlework at the Poldi Pezzoli Museum in Milan, Italy.

You can learn more about Maria Garagnani at Tuttoricamo. Look under the "Prominent Characters" heading, then under the column heading "...yesterday".

There is an article about the history of the Aemilia Ars Society in the May/June 2009 issue of Piecework magazine.

Thanks to Stefania for the photos!

Fine Italian Whitework

I wanted to tell you a little bit about some Whitework that I saw last year in Verona.

The Don Mazza Museum is very tiny, to pass by on the street, you wouldn't know it was there. Luckily a lady who lives in Verona had already phoned and arranged for a guided tour for us on my last day before going home.

Though the museum seems small there are actually many, many beautiful works to look at. I think we were there for over 3 hours.

Father Don Mazza (1790 - 1865) started a women's institute in Verona in 1828 which was also a boarding school for needy children. Embroidery was part of the education program and the istitute cultivated its own silk worms and produced its own silk threads for its embroideries. Don Mazza was quite the perfectionist and the embroideries had to be of very high quality. In another post I will go into more detail about the incredible threadpainting and other embroideries that the students produced.

One of the pieces that we found very interesting was a Whitework handkerchief mounted on the wall in a frame.

I couldn't get it all in the picture without the glare of the lights but the top edge was the same as the bottom:


Here's a corner, notice all the flower centres are voided and filled with little needle lace designs:


The monogram was exquisitely done:


All four edges were the same designs, flawlessly executed and opposing corners were the same. Though all four corners had the same designs, the flowers were filled differently at diagonal opposite corners making it even more interesting to look at:


I was fascinated by every part of this amazing work, even the leaves were all filled with different stitches:


I stood in front of this work for a very long time. I wished for a magnifying glass. I may have left nose-prints on the glass... The linen was so fine, and the thread too. Each detail was a joy to behold. But for a bit of wear in the centre and some tiny holes here and there, the handkerchief was in great shape.

Antique Pattern Books

In the early twentieth century Italian needlework scholar Elisa Ricci edited the reprints of five 16th century pattern books for embroidery and lace.

Last year these reprints were collected together and reprinted again in one volume called Disegni per Merletti e Ricami [Designs for Lace and Embroidery] edited by Bianca Rosa Bellomo. Pattern books included in this volume are: I singolari e nuovi disegni per lavori di biancheria by Federico Vinciolo, La vera perfectione del disegno per punti e ricami by Giovanni Ostaus, Il Burato: libri de Ricami by Alessandro Paganino, and two by Giovanandrea Vavassore: Opera nuova universale intitolata Corona di Ricami and Esemplario di lavori: che insegna alle donne il modo e l'ordine di lavorare.

For the presentation of Disegni per Merletti e Ricami, Bianca Rosa asked several needlework friends to stitch patterns from the volume in whatever technique they liked. The pieces were then part of a display at the Italia Invita Forum in Parma in May of 2009. The stitched pieces were displayed beside a printout of the pattern chosen from the antique pattern books. It was a delightful display to look at!! (Click on the little photos on the linked page to look closer)

Later in May the works were displayed again in Bologna. It was very difficult to pick which ones to show you so this is a random pick of one design from each author:

Vinciolo:

Ostaus:


Paganino:


Vavassore I:


Vavassore II:


I saw both displays and can tell you that it was fascinating to look at the different interpretations of each pattern. I noticed things in Bologna that I hadn't paid attention to in Parma – I could have looked forever!

You can read more about Elisa Ricci at the Italian Embroidery website Tuttoricamo, click on the British flag for the English pages and look under 'prominent characters'.

Disegni per Merletti e Ricami can be purchased here. (Send an email request.)

Thanks to Elisabetta for the Paganino photo.

Il Ricamo Illustrato - an antique Italian needlework publication

Ines Tamburi of Sarzana, Italy was the director of a bi-monthly embroidery publication called Il Ricamo Illustrato [Embroidery Illustrated] in the early twentieth century. She also ran an embroidery school in Sarzana between 1910 and 1920 and published at least one book on Cutwork (Nuovo Ricamo Doppio Intaglio, 1918) with the Sonzogno publishing house of Milan. I can find no other information at present on this lady.

Check out this elaborately decorated masthead!


There is a particular issue of Il Ricamo Illustrato that I'd like to have but it is quite pricey. The issue is dated April 1, 1929 and is full of delightful designs based on the Italian fable The Adventures of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi.


The bi-monthly publication of Il Ricamo Illustrato was printed on newsprint paper, a huge single sheet, folded – surviving copies are very fragile. The Masthead says that copies were available on the 1st and 15th of every month.

At the bottom of this cover from a September 1927 issue it says: "Something new in embroidery: Il Punto a Macchia, easy and enjoyable work explained inside this issue". The Italian verb 'macchiare' means 'to mark' so Punto a Macchia might be Marking Stitch? That can't be it, Marking Stitch wasn't new in the late 20s... was it? The cover pattern looks more like a design for Broccatello Stitch (see the first two stitch pictures on the linked page).


This cover is from August 1935 and the design has changed with the times. I cannot make out if Ines Tamburi is still the director or not.


There are two issues from 1926 in the "Free Downloads" section of Italian Needlecrafts – more will be added gradually as time permits. While you're there, check out the other lovely things that are on the website.

Guicciardini Quilt

An Italian lady from Bologna has just told me some exciting news. The Guicciardini Trapunto Quilt is finished being restored and is on display from April 26th to July 4th at the Palazzo Davanzati Museum in Florence.

The quilt returns "home" for a few weeks to the Palazzo Davanzati as it was displayed there between 1956 and 1991 in the Peacock Room (Sala dei Pavoni) which is the bedroom display.

The bed in the Sala dei Pavoni where I presume the Guicciardini Quilt will rest during the show:


One of the Peacocks on the wall of the Sala dei Pavoni:


This may be the only chance to see the real thing for a while as it will be returned to storage at the Bargello Museum (in Florence) after the exhibit. A replica stitched by the Club del Punto in Croce (Cross Stitch Club) of Florence will be displayed permanently in its place at the Palazzo Davanzati.

The Club del Punto in Croce (which practices all kinds of needlework, not just Cross Stitch) sponsored the International Exhibition of Textile Art inspired by the Guicciardini Quilt in Florence in October of 2006. All techniques of embroidery and lace were invited to participate. The result was a spectacular collection of needlework. Check out the slideshow of pieces (make sure you set aside 5 minutes or so to view them all): click on "Exhibitions", then "The Guicciardini Quilt" on the left-hand side of the page. Not all the photos are of good quality but you can get a pretty good idea of the amount of work involved in the show.

Some history of the quilt and it's brother (called the Tristan Quilt) at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, and the story of the restoration of the quilt in Florence plus other technical information can be found here but only in Italian. I have written them to ask permission to translate it for you, hopefully they grant it and I'll be able to write a post in the future about it. If not, then I'll sum it up for you in another post. In any case, go through the pages for the pictures!

In the meantime, you can also go to Tuttoricamo and look under the "History" heading for an article and links to more pictures!

Thank you Armida for your pics from the Palazzo Davanzati!
Grazie mille Bianca Rosa!