Micheal & Elizabeth Feller - the Needlework Collection 1 – Book review

I can’t believe it has taken me two years to catch up with this sumptuously illustrated book, especially since I have another book by the same publishers which I have reviewed on here.

Micheal and Elizabeth Feller are collectors of needlework, and this first volume of their collection covers mainly seventeenth century items.  Volume 2 published in 2012 covers the later items in the collection.  The book is extremely well illustrated with lots of close ups and details, and is divided into three parts.

The first part, pages 1-124 entitled the early English works, is authored by Mary M. Brooks and covers a wide range of seventeenth century needlework items including panels, mirror frames, book covers, boxes, cushions, small bags, gloves, coifs and forehead cloths and men’s caps. These items are in a range of embroidery techniques typical of the seventeenth century, from raised work to beadwork, and from blackwork to petit point.

The second part, authored by the collector Elizabeth Feller is entitled other times other places. This is only 20 pages long and covers as it says some European and later examples in the collection.

The final part, by Jacqueline Holdsworth covers the early samplers, these are all seventeenth century, and include all styles: band and spot, whitework and polychrome. The inside of the dust cover of the book is a charted design for a reproduction of a 1687 sampler by Dorothy Ward that is in the collection.

Several pages from the book are available as a preview at http://www.needleprintsociety.com/Christmas%20Feller%20Collection.html and give a good idea of the layout with each item in the collection having a photograph of the whole item, photographs of one or two details, and an explanatory text.

Micheal & Elizabeth Feller - the Needlework Collection 1, by Mary M. Brooks, Elizabeth Feller and Jacqueline Holdsworth. 2011. Needleprint, ISBN 978-0955208652 (0955208653) £47. Amazon may tell you it is out of print, but it appears to be still available direct from the publishers. http://needleprint.blogspot.co.uk/. Well worth the money.

The Judith Hayle Samplers

Back in 2001 I went to an exhibition of embroideries at Dorchester Museum, it was called The point of the Needle. They had a series of talks, and one of the speakers was Edwina Ehrman of the Museum of London. Her talk was fascinating; she had been researching Judith Hayle, and her daughter Rebecca Thomson, who taught needlework in Ipswich at the end of the seventeenth century, beginning of the eighteenth century. I didn’t realise until recently that in 2007 Edwina published a book, “The Judith Hayle Samplers.” (ISBN 978 0 9552086 0 7)

Why is Judith Hayle so interesting? First, she is the first teacher to be named on a sampler. Elizabeth Meadow’s 1691 sampler says, “Elizabeth Meadows is my name and with my needle I wrought the same and Juda Hayle was my dame.” Secondly a lot, fifteen or sixteen, samplers produced by pupils of her and her daughter survive. Finally Edwina has been able to find out a vast amount about both Judith and Rebecca and their pupils.

Judith Hayle was born in Ipswich in 1649, married in 1669, and was left a widow with six or seven children in 1685. Edwina does not know when she started teaching, but the first samplers with her name were produced in 1691. When she died in 1706 she left a will, and the inventory indicates that at that time she was running a shop and from the contents, “bone lace- head rowle & wyers & musling & forms, Lynnen horses & other odd nifles,” she was producing headdresses.  Her pupils were, for the most part, not the offspring of gentry, they were the children of mercers, drapers, weavers, malsters and yeomen, the emerging middle classes.

The book is 91 pages long, well illustrated with lots of colour photographs, and has a fascinating story to tell. Well worth it. The story continues for in 2010 an unknown Judith Hayle sampler, dated 1696, was sold at auction. Further information on the book is at http://www.needleprint.com/books.html