Reproduction research - Tassel

For a few years I have been looking on and off for some idea of what kind of knots make up the tassels on my vintage Punto Umbro cushion that I talked about here.

The tassel is made up of a needle lace covered head with 20 little knots covering the top part and five legs which each have 18 of the same little knots on them.

I've been to thread stores in Italy and asked lots of people. Everyone who had an idea, I tried out with no real success. Always close but not exact.

Recently while looking up something else (as usually happens with research) I stumbled across a photo of something pretty close to my tassel in Rosalba Pepi & Maria Rita Faleri's lovely book on Tassels. Who knows why I didn't notice it before.

Anyway, I started looking seriously through knot books and online.

I made a few different types of knots in paracord first...

Then a few in cotone povero cotton yarn...

I like the Turk's Head knot but it was a bit too round and I also liked the Monkey Fist Knot but it didn't have enough facets.

This is a close up of the head of my tassel with all it's little knots:

Then I thought: am I making this too complicated? This tassel was made near the beginning of the 20th century - what was available to embroiderers then? There is one knot explained in the DMC Encyclopedia (scroll down to the bottom) and one in the Italian Book of Women's Work which I showed you here. I tried them both. They were the closest yet to mine.

Still, they took me some time to work and the thought of taking an hour to make each knot when I had 92 to make motivated me to investigate YouTube, now that I had the name "Chinese Knot" at least to reference. Well, I lost a few days watching YouTube videos but I finally settled on Suzen Millodot's Double Chinese Button Knot tied on a single cord because it's pretty close and because it's relatively easy. I won't know for sure until I get better at making the knot.

I added the French knots as picots in the four corners of the bottom like the ones on my tassel and I'd say that with some practise, I could be happy with these.

Here's a bottom view for comparison:

Double Chinese Button Knot

Now, I really liked the Monkey Fist knot with picots too but that will be for a tassel not related to this one. I show you a photo of a single and then a group of four knotted together just in case you might like to make some for yourself!

Monkey Fist Knot with French Knot picots

Four Monkey Fist Knots with Picots tied together.

If you know what knot it really is on my tassel, will you leave a comment below and let me know?

Triple Knotted Tassel

As mentioned in this post, I decided to try to make a tassel from Rosalba Pepi's latest book on Catherine de'Medici Embroidery. Now I'm not going to give away her instructions but I just want to show you another way to achieve knotted tassels which we've discussed before.

So, I've cut a 4m length of 100% cotton Cotone Povero yarn to make the second leg of this tassel. I tied a knot at each end because after all the knotting, the ends tend to become quite unravelled and messy and you lose a lot of your length. Sometimes all you need is just another inch and if it's unravelled and destroyed it can be frustrating. Let's call this long thread the main body thread just because it may become confusing later as to what I'm referring to.

First leg of the tassel completed.

The reason that the main body thread has to be so long is that all those knots upon knots consume a lot of yarn. By the way, kitchen string works nicely if you want to try this method out before investing in some yarn.

Since this tassel requires two legs be made out of the main body thread, I measure out to the half way point (marking it for now with a paper clip) and start a little to the right of it. The centre of the main body thread will, after being folded in half, be where we'll need to attach the "handle" of the tassel so I need to leave a little space for that.

Let me note here that there are no detailed step-by-step instructions in Rosalba's book, so I'm stumbling along on my own. I'm sure there is probably a better way to do this, and it could also be that I'm doing it totally wrong. In other words this is not the authoritative guide to this technique!

The first thing we need to do is make a series of big knots for what will form the head of the tassel.

I made four knots side-by-side

and then made them all into one knot (let's call it a doubled knot).

The end result didn't seem big enough to me so I then made another three more doubled knots

and tied all four into one tripled knot.

Of course you can go on and on and achieve even bigger knots this way but I stopped here. The resulting tripled knot is an interesting little uneven blob.

On I merrily went attaching other lengths of thread with tripled knots by piercing through the main body thread, making doubled knots on either side of groupings of small knotted lengths like I made here which are attached by threading them on to the main body thread like beads.

The only thing to note was that I ended off the completed side of the main body thread with a tripled knot and didn't tie another knot on the main body thread to secure it so in no time at all while I was working on the other side, it came undone!

Of course I had already trimmed the main body thread and therefore I didn't have enough length to re-tie the ending triple knot again, nor to secure it with another single knot.

Argh!

Long about this time the tripled knots that I'd made on short lengths of thread and attached by piercing the main body thread also came undone as they didn't have a knot at the end of their lengths to secure them either.

Double argh!!

I went back and checked out the first leg that I had completed previously (first photo above) and sure enough all the triple knots at the end of all their lengths came undone easily.

Triple argh!!!

At this point I must confess I threw the whole thing in the stitching garbage can which contains thread and fabric and paper only. Muttering to myself I went off in frustration to do something else.

Later, with a cooler head, I dug it out and cut off the parts that had undone. I attached new lengths of thread with a weaver's knot to the main body thread and remade the missing parts. As this is all constructed of knots over knots, no one will ever see where I attached new lengths of yarn!

Here it is, I could have left more space between the head and the first part of the skirt and the head itself is quite irregular (Rosalba's is so much better!). All in all, I like it, I would make another one. What do you think?

Catherine de'Medici Embroidery - New book and some experiments

A couple of months ago this new book by Rosalba Pepi came out on Catherine de'Medici Embroidery. I have just recently gotten my hands on a copy of this over 120 page volume. I've told you a bit about Catherine de'Medici Embroidery in a few previous posts so you already know that it's a technique that I admire. I've written a bit about Rosalba Pepi of the Laboratorio Tessile di Alice in Castiglion Fiorentino, in the province of Arezzo in previous posts as well. She is also someone that I admire.

Rosalba has a very creative mind when it comes to textiles and has taken ancient traditional techniques like Trapunto and Catherine de' Medici Embroidery and made them delightfully contemporary: see one of her kits here and one of her books here. She was a part of the publication of this essential book on Tassels too.

Rosalba loves to work in breathtaking silk threads dyed with natural materials. Make yourself a cuppa and explore the website of the Laboratorio Tessile di Alice which has Italian and English language versions - you will be delighted by Rosalba's works.

Back to this book: The first section is a few pages on the history of the running stitch with photos of contemporary and early 20th century Catherine de'Medici Embroidery works among other things and a bit about the history of traditional materials used, colours and ideas for application of this technique. (Text in Italian) There follows an instructional section with clear diagrams for executing different pattern lines and starting and finishing working threads. There are some ideas and instructions for edge finishings and tassels too - as well as the care and maintenance of stitched pieces and the tools required for executing the work. The remaining 3/4 of the book is choc-full of over 75 charted patterns and motifs and colour photos of finished works.

There are no precise project instructions but that didn't stop me from deciding on a table runner project anyway. Inspired by Rosalba's use of indigo-dyed silk yarn, I ran off yesterday to my local knitting shop with a ball of Cotone Povero - the traditional cotton yarn used in Catherine de'Medici Embroidery and a piece of undyed modern Buratto linen fabric from Sotema. I found a 17%silk/83%cotton blend of yarn called Night Sea from Misti Alpaca which is slightly thicker than the Cotone Povero yarn but will work nicely all the same. Last night I stitched a bit of a sample border on a scrap of undyed Buratto.

Can you find my stitching error?

Worried about the colour running, I soaked the embroidery in cold water (the label says it's to be washed at 30 degrees) and Marsiglia (Marseille) soap for about an hour. The water was a bit blue but I can't detect any bleed marks on the fabric, at least it doesn't show up so much that it catches the eye. However when I ironed it dry face-down on a white towel, it left some blue on the towel. The hank of yarn is now soaking in a tub of soap and water and I'll be rinsing it until no more blue comes out.

In the meantime, I decided to try one of the tassels from the book using the traditional Cotone Povero yarn.

This is the first of two legs that will be tied together to make the tassel:

This tassel is made of knots on top of knots. I'm going to photograph the process of the second leg so I'll save that for a future post.

In Europe you can purchase this book directly from NuovaS1 the publisher via bank transfer. To pay with PayPal, check out Tombolo Disegni, click on "Libri/Books", then "Libri Ricamo", then "Assisi, Caterina de Medici, Ricamo a Treccia e Nappine" - its about halfway down the page. Send an email to order.

New Book on Italian Tassels

Rosalba Pepi and Maria Rita Faleri with Thessy Schoenholzer Nichols have just released their latest publication on Italian Tassels! It is a book called Nappe, forme di ornamento tessile [Tassels, forms of textile ornament].
(I've already sent my letter to Santa!)


The text is in both Italian and English.

You can go here to look at a few of the pages and see how the book is laid out (click on the picture of the cover to get started, then click the bottom right-hand corner to flip the pages).

There is a history section with photos of ancient tassels, you can zoom in and read some of it by clicking on the pages.

Then there are instructions and diagrams for making 30 different tassels.

For those in Italy, you can order the book directly from the website here, payment is by money transfer.

For those of us outside of Italy, Elena is carrying it on her website Italian Needlecrafts and she accepts PayPal (there are also a couple of different pages to look at there).

Knotted Tassel II

Recently a friend from Italy sent me a small kit as a gift. I decided to document making the project here. It is a knotted tassel - I love making these and each one is a little different from the other.

The kit is from the Laboratorio Tessile di Alice. Two very talented women are responsible for this workshop/embroidery school: Rosalba Pepi and Paola Baldetti. The Laboratorio's main home is in the 14th century Church of St. Stephen in via San Lazzo in Castiglion Fiorentino near Arezzo, Italy. Now a cultural centre, this church's interior walls are covered in frescos from the late 14th and early 15th centuries. The other seat of the Laboratorio is the 18th century Villa Candida in Viale Roma no. 21, in Foligno, Italy which is also home to a sporting club. Can you imagine going to a needlework class in one or the other of these fantastic settings?

In a recent issue of one of the Italian needlework magazines, I don't remember if it was RAKAM or Ricamo Italiano, there was a photo of a tassel sampler on the wall. A frame with a coloured background and different tassels pinned to it. I really like that idea and was thinking to work my way through the tassels in the book Nappe e Pendagli by Giuseppa Federici... it is still in the idea process but if I do decide to do it, I'll show you how it goes along.

Back to the kit! It is very simple, a piece of cardboard with a photo of the finished knotted tassel on one side and the instructions on the back, some Cotone Povero, (cotton yarn) and a ceramic bead.


The cotton is precut into six three-stranded lengths with a knot at one end, all ready to get you started on making your knots!


There is also one long length for stringing the pieces together.

I made a series of knots on each length about 1 cm apart and cut them every second knot to get six groups of 20 knotted pieces.


Next I took the long length and doubled it, then put it into a needle and knotted one end. Then I strung the pieces on in groups of 20, placing a knot before and after each group with about 1 cm between each group.


I always pierce the middle of a strand for the first and last piece so they don't slip over the knot that is supposed to hold them in groups.

Then I cut between the fifth and fourth groups so that I had a length with four groups and a length with two groups still on the end of the length in my needle.

I inserted the needle with the two groups on its length through the hole in the bead, made a loop the size I wanted for hanging the tassel and passed the needle through the hole in the bead again, making sure to hang on to the loop on top to keep it the desired size. I caught the length with four groups around the middle; that is: with two groups on either side so that now I had three lengths hanging below the bead with two groups each. I passed the needle back through the bead. At this point it says to overcast the loop that will be used for hanging the tassel. I don't usually do this, but I will do it here as I'm always game for new things!


I found that overcasting the loop was the hardest part of the whole thing! In the end I managed it and did my last stitch as a Buttonhole stitch to lock the overcasting in place. Then I plunged the needle through the bead one more time (my lumpy Buttonhole stitch ended up hiding in the hole of the bead). On the other side of the bead I made a knot close to the bead and cut the thread.

Now comparing my knotted tassel with the one in the photo, I notice that the loop on top in the picture is quite small and there is another piece of thread looped into it for hanging. Oh well, mine is quite twisty and I like it!


At this point you can move the pieces in the groups around so that they are going every which-way and for added fluffiness, get them wet and let them dry. You get a super fluffy tassel!

You can get the book Nappe e Pendagli from Tombolo Disegni: click on "Libri/Books", then "Libri/Ricamo", then "Ricamo Italiani", the text is in Italian – send an email request to order.

(p.s.: my tassel doesn't look like the photo in the kit because my idea of 1 cm was probably twice as long as it should have been! With smaller pieces, you get the effect of the individual groups whereas mine is a bit of a blob! – I need more practice!)

Trapunto

Guess what arrived in the mail today?


The catalogue from the Guicciardini Trapunto Quilt exhibit at the Palazzo Davanzati in Florence! A very kind friend picked one up for me when she went to the exhibit. It is soft-cover and about 135 pages, the text is in Italian.

Every detail of the restoration of this amazing piece has been documented. The catalogue includes some history of the quilt, the story that is depicted on it and the difficulties encountered in making a copy of it and it's other part which is preserved at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. There is much more contained in this one volume than I've been able to piece together over a decade!

A detail of the quilt before the restoration...


...and after!


I have been unable to determine if a book was released after the copy of the London part was finished in 2007 by the House of Boutis. If you know of anything, please leave me a comment below!

These two quilts have inspired many embroiderers over time.

As mentioned in a previous post, the Club del Punto in Croce sponsored the International Exhibition of Textile Art inspired by the Guicciardini Quilt in Florence in October of 2006.

When I attended the 2007 Italia Invita Lace and Embroidery Forum, the booth of the association Laboratorio Tessile di Alice had an all Trapunto display with some pieces inspired by the Guicciardini Quilts.

The Italian needlework magazine Ricamo Italiano has some free patterns for download also inspired by the designs found on the Guicciardini Quilts.


Rosalba Pepi of the association Laboratorio Tessile di Alice put out a book called: Trapunto Fiorentino in 2008. The text is in Italian but it is packed with large colour photographs of step-by-step instructions and various projects of increasing difficulty from Christmas Tree ornaments to curtains! You can get this book from Tombolo Disegni. Click on "Libri/Books", then "Ricamo Boutis e Trapunto". Send an email request to order.

Italian Kits

One of the things I wanted most when trying to learn about Italian needlework in the beginning of my research was a kit... I thought a kit would give me a little window into all aspects of a technique. I imagined a little packet with a design, technical instructions, some Italian fabric and threads with the right needle for the embroidery.

Italian kits, if you can find them, are, for the most part, not anything like that. Most people I wrote to told me they didn't make kits. Since we're talking about 10 years ago, most people didn't have books about their specialty technique either. No one had any written instructions that they wanted to give out, even if you were willing to pay.

When I did find "kits" they consisted mostly of a blurry picture of the finished product, sometimes with a separate drawn design (rarely at actual size), a list of the stitches used and the fabrics and threads recommended (no colours were ever listed precisely either). To be fair, the kits weren't made for going outside of Italy, so it is logical that they wouldn't have details about things Italians would already know, or be able to find out relatively easily. In a time of few websites and even fewer email addresses, this was a slow and often disappointing process for me. Even when I managed to assemble all required materials I then couldn't proceed for lack of instructions.

Making things from the magazines was equally disappointing. More often than not the stitches weren't explained or only some of the project was, for example the central motif but not the hemstitching.

I discovered some essential things necessary for understanding Italian stitching instructions. No one, no one, could understand why I wanted to reproduce an exact replica of a piece. Wouldn't I like to change it a bit to personalize it? It was expected that I would want to change the size, colours, fabric, threads - even the stitches used to make the design my own. I can tell you that when you show "anglosaxon" stitching instructional books and kits to Italians they are amazed at the detail. I believe this to be a fundamental cultural difference and its an important one. I am at my most comfortable and happiest when being instructed on every step... having to make my own decisions (which could be wrong!) is scary to me and I am very reluctant especially when using expensive threads and fabrics that I went to a lot of trouble to acquire.

I bought an Italian encyclopedia of embroidery and an English one and started to compare stitches, finding that some of them were the same and just had different names. This helped a lot with things that weren't exactly "Italian" techniques.

Over time things have progressed quite a bit but we are still very far from equal. At the Italia Invita Forum in 2007, I purchased all the kits I could find at the various booths hoping to be able to work them out later at home. This is a perfect example of what I'm trying to tell you:


It's a kit I purchased at the Puncetto booth. The stitched sample was an attractive bracelet of red and blue thread. Inside an opaque little bag (not unlike a travel make-up bag) was a colour computer printout of the pattern, with the steps for creating one motif. Nothing about assembly, borders or the filling between motifs and no stitch instructions. There was a fuzzy colour printout of the stitched sample (red and blue) on one side. There were two small balls of Finca no. 12 thread in orange and green and the clasp for the finished bracelet. I don't remember what it cost but I remember thinking that it was expensive, at the same time I bought two books as well with a total cost of 50 euros. Unfortunately neither of the books had instructions either, they were just patterns. Okay, so it is my own fault that I didn't look carefully enough at what I was buying but seriously, I don't think it would have mattered. I would still have bought them all in the hopes of getting home and figuring it out. Here we are three years later and there they sit still waiting for me. Even though by now I've done some experimenting on my own and even taken a two hour lesson and had a friend patiently show me some stitches.

Other kits I bought at the Forum that year were: one that had fabric with the traced design on it, a needle and thread and a colour photo of the finished piece. No stitch instructions; One that was a colour printout of a scan of the finished piece with reference to a book written by the same author. I had the book so I wasn't worried... upon arriving home however I saw that the book had the stitches explained but the composition of the kit was no where to be found, meaning I would need to understand enough about the technique in order to assemble the motifs myself; some came with washed out photocopies of stitch instructions; I have not stitched any of them.

This is not to say that by Italian standards they are not good kits. They are excellent kits if you already know how to stitch the techniques. Every single one would be useful to someone who knew what they were doing. I guess what I learned was that Italian kits are not for beginners and they are not like the kits I am accustomed to in my "anglosaxon" world.

As I said, things are beginning to change. I have a completely amazing Italian kit for a cushion that came with a very professional booklet with all the instructions for the stitches and assembly, Italian linen fabric for the front and back, thread, needles even some tips and tricks...


You can't see in the scan here but there are even English instructions below the Italian... comprehensible English!

Just lately there has been some interest in producing Italian kits for the non-Italian needlework world. These kits, produced by Fiorella Collection, will be on Italian needlework techniques or techniques with an Italian flavour. The booklets will come in Italian, French and English to start and you'll need to specify the language you want as each booklet is produced separately. In order to make them affordable, they are instructional books without the supplies, however they will be sold online where you can order the supplies needed in most cases.

Here is one of two already available:


The booklet even has the instructions for executing the picots along the edges! This work is known as Catherine de'Medici Embroidery and it is a Counted Thread Technique. The design is by Rosalba Pepi from the Laboratorio Tessile di Alice in Castiglion Fiorentino, Italy.

They are the closest thing to what I dreamed of long ago - made by the Italian needlework schools and masters. I hope they catch on as they will be perfect for giving us a little taste of the numerous different Italian needlework techniques.

The times they are a-changin'.

You can get the two Fiorella Collection booklets already available from Elena at Italian Needlecrafts.

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