Circa 1917 Vacation Photo Album

I had a request on Instagram for a full scan of this photo album, after I posted a few photos from it awhile back.  Since my life is in flux and I've been on the cusp of moving since last summer, it has taken me this long to do this, as it along with many of my other antique treasures live at my father's house where they are not at risk for moving damage.  I present it to you in full here and I hope it will prove educational.

Now, I'm going to talk about use of these photos before I lose the tl;dr people: Please include a link to this page any time you use these photos.  While I'm not going to charge you for them or anything, and I do want them available for educational purposes, I don't want them ending up decontextualized all over the place where they'll become a nightmare for researchers who don't know where they came from.  If you have any questions, send me an email at fehlel (at) sage (dot) edu

I got this photo album at the Cambridge Antique Mart in Cambridge, MA.  While some of the subjects photographed are labeled with their first names, no last names are included, and so I have no way of knowing who these people were or where they lived.  One of the monuments photographed, Endicott Rock, in New Hampshire, still exists in much the same state as it was photographed here.  The other named place, Lake Winnipesaukee, is nearby in the same state.  Some of the later photos in the album are dated 1917, and the fashion seen in the album is certainly consistent with that date.  The same subjects, for the most part, appear again and again throughout the album, so I am inclined to assume that this was a family photo album for a New Hampshire vacation in 1917.  It shows the relationship between photography and the desire to document one's life and experiences over a century ago.  This behavior is not new to the 21st century, and in fact it gives us valuable insight into the lives of people in the past!  I only hope that family photo albums like this will survive in some form, as I know I have never made one in my life and all my photos are dumped onto my computer and never labeled.  It makes me wonder if future historians will have a hard time studying the post-digital age, and whether it is our responsibility to create content or if that will skew the future's view of history.

No more rambling!  Here is the photo album.  I have photographed it page by page so you see how things were laid out.  Fifty five pages of photo are followed by about twenty blank pages in the back of the album that I have not photographed.  Many of the blank pages show scars of having once had photos glued to them.  I hope these photos were simply moved to another album and not discarded.  What wonders might they have shown?

Please click on the photos to see the full-resolution version.

Elisa's 18th Century Birthday Pocket

For my friend Elisa's birthday in February I decided to create a mid-late 18th century pocket, complete with insane embroidery.  This project was a bit ambitious, because as any embroidery artist can attest, these take significant amounts of time.  All told I probably spent 35-40 hours on this.

In my design and technique I reference extant pockets, both in museum collections, as well as ones that I have examined personally.  The dimensions for this pocket come from Janet Arnold's Patterns of Fashion.

Metropolitan Museum of Art, c1750, 2009.300.2102

Metropolitan Museum of Art, c1796, 1979.346.200

The textile I chose, which would have been quite appropriate, as pockets were usually based on an undyed cotton or linen, was a densely woven off-white linen twill.  If you've looked closely at the examples above, the embroidery design I created won't surprise you that much.  Because I didn't have time to order silk embroidery thread, I unplied DMC cotton thread, which due to its glossy texture (a result of mercerization) is not a bad silk stand-in.  Throughout this entire project, I only used three stitches, which was not unusual either: stem stitch, satin stitch, and bullion stitch.

Above you can see the design in progress, with most things already outlined in stem stitch and some satin stitching already completed.  I stretched my linen over an embroidery frame to keep it taut while I stitched and to avoid the "squinching" effect that can happen with unsupported embroidery projects.

The curling leaves at the bottom took a decent amount of time.  I was very careful in my color selection to choose only colors that could have been produced with natural dyes.  No neons!

Here is the completed embroidery after I removed it from the frame.  The whole piece is about twice as long as the frame is, so it was actually the first time I saw the entire thing complete, the rest having been eaten up by the frame's rollers while the worked on the final areas.  The little dots in the flowers at the bottom are the bullion knots.  The final pocket has three layers: the back, the front, and an intermediate layer paired with the front layer to protect the back of the embroidery.

Before I applied the edge binding, everything was basted in place.  This keeps things from "walking" around and turning into puckered areas later.  This is a common problem with multilayered pieces.  This basting was done before I cut the entry slit so that, when I did cut it, the cut edges would stay perfectly aligned.

In order to hide my stitching, I stitched the right sides of the pocket and edge binding together on the front side, and then pressed and slip stitched it down on the back.  My embroidery was a little closer to the edge binding along the slit edge than I would have liked!

Here is the finished thing!  For the ties I substituted braided ties for the typical twill tape ones.  I've seen only rare examples with this type of waist suspension ties, probably because twill tape stands up to more stress, but it occurred to me that an 18th century pocket can be rather difficult to wear nowadays except when one is dressed up in an 18th century dress.  The prettier ties allow this pocket to be tied over one's shoulder and carried as a purse.

That's it, all!  If you're looking to make your own 18th century pocket, you can use similar steps to my own and create one in a few hours, minus the embroidery of course.  It is up to you how decorated you want your pocket, or if it matters that much to you.  The pocket I wear under MY 18th century dress is NOT embroidered!