Next Felicia book is out!

Robin and Felicia go to Lavenham, in Suffolk, to paint a betrothal picture of the son of clothier Roger Pettiman.  They little expect to be involved in the investigation of the disappearance of the bride's parents! They also little expect to discover 'goings ons' as it would be described in Suffolk that would, according to Felicia's assessment, not be out of place in the sophisticated and vice-ridden Venice. 

I've decided to stick with the wood-cut look for the cover, this one I haven't emphasised the foreground figures with heavy pen.  The dyer in the background is taken from a late 15th century woodcut. 

I've tried, as always, to be as accurate as possible in what I include about the dye and fabric trade, this book is dedicated to my mother who first nurtured my interests both in fabric and history and indeed their combination, having studied the wool trade as part of her Tailoring examinations.  As a small child I went with her around many Suffolk villages noting 'Wool churches' and helping rub brasses commemorating clothiers and wool merchants, so this has grown partly out of some of my earliest memories. 

Patchwork in history.

Please note: this is about patchwork, NOT about quilting.  In American parlance the two are synonymous but are not always so in Britain and certainly they started out as different skills.  Quilting is an ancient art used to increase warmth or armour protection; patchwork is a way to use up left over cloth.

The earliest literary suggestion of patchwork also refers to quilting, a counterpane of two sorts of silk in a checkerboard pattern, and embroidered about the edge. “quilt…of a check-board pattern of two sorts of silk cloth, well-made and rich…Around appears the new flower”appears in La Lai del Desire a French poem describing a bridal bed in the late 12th century.  It implies that the art was already known. 

It is possible that the concept of marrying more than one type of fabric with another came from the appliqué work brought back by crusaders from the Holy Land, and certainly the appliqué of heraldic devices and in church embroideries became common.  Subsequently the craze for particoloured clothing spread to the upper classes at least.  Some appliqué work may have been quilted in the Trapunto fashion, to raise just the applied shape, where a slit is cut behind the applied piece and wadding inserted, the small slit then sewn up. 

Etymological research into the word 'patch' gives some very interesting results: I use the excellent online etymological dictionary which if anything errs on the side of caution when I have cross referenced. 

Patch: 

[1] "piece of cloth used to mend another material," late 14c., of obscure origin, perhaps a variant of pece, pieche, from O.N.Fr. pieche (see piece, (n.)), or from an unrecorded Old English word

[2] "fool, clown," 1540s, perhaps from It. pazzo "fool," which is possibly from O.H.G. barzjan "to rave." Form perhaps influenced by folk etymology derivation from patch, (n.1), on notion of a fool's patched garb. But Buck says pazzo is originally euphemistic, and from L. patiens "suffering," in medical use, "the patient."

By Shakespeare's time the use of the word 'patch' for a fool was widespread enough for it to be applied as a description in Merchant of Venice regarding Laurence Gobbo; though particoloured clothes relating to the official fool or jester were usually called motley, remaining with Shakespeare in Twelfth Night the jester Feste declares that he wears not motley in his head - his foolery is his profession, he is no fool in his own thoughts.  Again in As you like it the quote 'Motley's the only wear' can be found.
However the official fools and their motley have earlier origins.
Camille Cognac, the acknowledged expert on crazy quilts,draws parallels with the Comedia del'arte of Venice's carnival, originating in 1162 as quoted by Cindy Brick author of Crazy Quilts - History - Techniques - Embroidery Motifs.   The characters include Harlequin, a magical faery character who is dressed in a multicoloured and patched costume, formalised in pattern later in history [and made famous by the Wedgewood figurines] . 'the patches could be remnants of other, richer clothes. Sometimes the colours on Harlequin's clothes are evenly divided....but on other occasions he appears in a suit of basted-together patches that look much like crazy patchwork'.

So it is established that patchwork in a crazy form and maybe more regular joining of simple shapes such as squares may go back in England to the 12th century; Celia Eddy, a British quilt historian also says, again establishing the differences between patchwork and quilting in the early years:

"As in most parts of the world, patchwork and quilting were originally two distinct techniques, serving both functional and decorative purposes. In poorer households, patchwork would have been an important way of prolonging the life of fabrics, which in pre-industrial days were labour-intensively produced in the home and would only have been discarded as a last resort. More affluent homes, as written records show, tended to own highly decorative quilts and quilted clothing which were partly designed to display the wealth and importance of their owners."

the first physical evidence we have of a patchwork coverlet is that of Anne Hathaway.  Anne Hathaway owned a counterpane made of odd shaped, and often long thin patches sewn down onto a base of some kind; from what I could see, the work had begun at one end and worked to the other, each piece overlapping the one before slightly.  As well as covering some edges this would also have the practical effect of increasing the layers.  Having myself  made crazy patchwork curtains with much overlapping, and holding the edges with herringbone stitch I can attest to the efficacy of the extra layers in keeping warmth in and cold out!   However such counterpanes could also prolong the life of thin sheets or blankets with adding the extra cloth and it seems reasonable to suppose that such use of scraps must have occurred to thrifty goodwives long before Anne Hathaway! 

Anne Hathaway's bedsteat at Shottery, Stratford-upon-Avon showing her crazy patchwork coverlet. From 'Creative Patchwork' by June Field

It is the transition from crazy patchwork, or sewn together squares etc to English style pieced patchwork which is hard to establish.

First, for the benefit of American readers I should perhaps define 'English Patchwork'.
This involves the cutting of paper shapes around which the fabric is folded and tacked, the folded edges to be sewn together with whip stitch.  The common shape is the hexagon, not a shape to be tackled without a template of paper to hold it together.

paper hexagon pinned to fabric in throes of being tacked on

several hexagons joined, showing paper holding those on the outside, and paper removed from middle hexagons

It is common practice now to remove the paper shapes once a hexagon is surrounded by others [and there are various techniques for dealing with the outermost edge when one gets there including the brute force one of taking all the paper out and treating the edge as an uneven edge to be seamed into a backing]; however this was not always the case, and the rag-heavy paper that was used remained in the garment or counterpane as an extra layer, also effectively adding a kind of quilting.

here's one I made earlier...

The earliest surviving geometric patchwork that can be reliable dated is the 1718 quilt found in 2000.  This is less geometric than the hexagon quilt though each piece, including the curved pieces, is pieced over paper and has appliqué as well; see it here.  Levens Hall in Cumbria claims a date of around 1708 for their quilted patchwork made from scraps of imported Indian chintz.  It is hard to prove the roots of the hexagon patchwork pattern.  The popular 'grandmother's garden' certainly dates to the late 18th century and the V&A actually produce a reproduction print of one dated 1797-1830 here.  Essentially a series of rosettes are made, each around a central hexagon, which are then joined with neutral coloured hexagons between to separate them into 'flowers' on a 'ground'.
Godey's Ladies' book published a hexagon pattern in 1830 when it was fashionable to do things in an English way, but it had been around already for a very long time. 

In Jane Austen's time the piecing of geometric shapes was well established tending towards hexagons or diamonds; with diamonds, larger and smaller pieces could be used so long as the larger diamonds had a precise geometric relation to the smaller ones such as the quilt made by Jane Austen and her mother with input from Cassandra.  More can be found  out about that here.  Her quilt has a trellis between the diamonds but this is not always necessary. 

A brief history of printing cloth from the Medieval to Jane Austen’s time

Pictures mostly  taken from ‘English Printed Textiles’, V&A

English Printed Textiles, 1720-1836

Block Printing

Cennino Cennini of Padua wrote a treatise on the ‘Method of painting cloths by means of using moulds’ early in the 15^th century.  The idea of painting cloths was already well established, as a cheap means to ape the expensively woven tapestries of the better off; bed curtains of the better off merchants were more likely to be painted than woven or embroidered.  This was the use of a wood block to print, and the method had been used in the Rhineland already for 300 years.

For furnishings it did not take long to apply glue instead of paint and powdered wool scattered on the glue aped voided velvets so popular in the early Renaissance.

These early printed cloths were not colour-fast and could not be washed as the colours would wash out.  Indian hand-painted cottons of the early 17^th century  that were colour-fast showed that it could be done; but it took until the 1670’s to perfect, either fairly simultaneously invented in France, Holland and England, or somebody had an excellent industrial espionage in place. 

A crimp was placed in the printing industry by a series of legislations to protect weavers of fancy cloths in the early 18^th century, prohibiting the printing of cotton cloth for home consumption, that was not to be removed until 1774. 

However despite this, the middle of the 18^th century  saw the invention of the copper plate for printing, which permitted a greater size and complexity of the repeats available. 

Even on block printed fabrics, the use of different mordants printed on to the fabric could produce very different colours.  

A mordant is a ‘tooth’ to cause a dye to bind to cloth, and different mordants can affect the precise colour the dye turns out. This effect was used by roller printing a design onto a cloth with more than one different mordants, the cloth then dyed as a piece and the way the dye reacted with each mordant making a pattern of variants on the dye.  One of the popular colours treated this way was drab, a brownish yellow through to yellowish brown made of quercitron, from oak bark [after 1783].   Madder is another colour to which this technique can be applied giving a range of colours of red-orange, chocolate brown, black and lavender and it was the Indian techniques using this that were introduced into Europe.  Other colours might be added by hand.

Note that dyes are largely vegetable or animal  up to the introduction of mineral dyes in the mid 18^th century – but more on dyes another time. For now a quote from the Household Cyclopaedia of 1881 shows that very little changed in broad:

Almost the only dye-stuffs employed by calico printers are indigo, madder, quercitron bark, or weld, ……… but weld is little used, except for delicate greenish yellows. The quercitron bark gives colors equally good; and is much cheaper and more convenient, not requiring so great a heat to fix it. Indigo, not requiring any mordant, is commonly applied at once, either by a block or by a pencil

The part removed mentions the coal tar colours of the great aniline revolution of the 1850’s

Block printed linen and cotton about 1750

printed in madder colours

Plate Printing

The first use of the engraved copper plate to print was in 1752 in Ireland, and rapidly spread.

The cheapest and easiest way to print was in monochrome, especially with the complexity that was available on an engraved copper plate where different densities of a colour might be achieved, generally either red or blue. Extra colours might be added with smaller wood blocks or by hand painting. The best known plate prints are the ‘toiles de Jouy’ from the works of Christopher-Philippe Oberkampf (1738-1815)

Early 19^th Century fabric printed at Jouy-en-Josas in France – this piece is in the Victoria and Albert Museum and more about it can be found at

http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O112664/furnishing-fabric-the-attributes/?print=1#

English examples include mythological and theatrical themes, but peculiarly English are the designs with large flowers and birds, usually printed in one of the colours derived from madder [rich purple, red, or sepia] or in indigo, ‘china blue’ which chemical process remained an English monopoly throughout the 18^th century. Note these are furnishing fabrics not dress fabrics.
For designs the printers often  mixed and matched from disparate sources of other engravings without any seeming concern for the appropriateness of the mix.

Plate-printed cotton 1761 in red with scenes taken from disparate sources - pastoral scene from etching of 1652 by Nicholas Berchem, Peacock from engraving by Josephus Sympson 1740 after a painting by Marmaduke Craddock and stag and dog from 'animals of various species etc' by Francis Barlow.

Plate printed cotton about 1770. The original of the photo was in red but I have colourised it blue to give an impression of the indigo version which it was as likely to be as red.

Cloud

Another technique was to print a pattern onto the warp yarns so that when the fabric was woven it appeared misty.  This fabric was called ‘cloud’ or ‘clouded’ and Jane Austen makes a reference to it in one of her letters, speaking of yellow and white cloud. This example is a modern piece from my own collection of fabrics.

Roller printing of fabrics

See also

 http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/txtn/hd_txtn.htm

As mentioned in my post about the new craze for cotton, roller printing enabled the familiar regency stripe that could also place a diagonal stripe on fabric.  Roller printing was developed in 1780 and one roller machine could print as much as twenty block printers. 

roller printed cotton about 1815. Original printed with indigo discharge and solid green; I've made a best guess. This one could well be a dress fabric

Roller printed cotton about 1820 in red

Roller printing is performed using a machine with a cast iron cylinder mounted on bearings beneath which an engraved copper cylinder picks up colour from a wooden roller revolving in a colour box, excess colour being stripped from it by a blade. The cast iron cylinder is a pressure cylinder to force the cloth onto the engraved copper, and is wrapped in a special material of wool and cotton lapping to allow for some give.  The copper cylinder contains one complete ‘repeat’ of the pattern so that when the fabric is passed through it, the whole length is duly printed.  In the earliest and simplest forms, for additional colours the fabric must be registered precisely onto the fabric; at first this was done by hand applied colour on block prints. Because of this, like the copper plate printing, much is monochrome.  

Later, not until after 1800, machines enabled other rollers bearing different colours; obviously the fewer the colours, the cheaper the cloth.  Block printing did not however disappear, since the size of the pattern repeat was governed by the practical size that a copper roller could be, and so larger designs were still printed by woodblock up to the middle of the 19^th century [dying out in time to be revived by William Morris].  Early roller prints could be no more than 16” for the repeat, the maximum practical circumference of the roller, whereas flat copper plates could be up to 45” square [Barbara Brackman ‘Clues in the Calico’ who does not, however know her diameter from her circumference.  Knew what she meant though.]

Clues in the Calico: A Guide to Identifying and Dating Antique Quilts