Needlework

[mrissa]

Oh, people. People, people, people, I am so tired of dislike of needlework being used as a stand-in for making a young female character actually interesting. I see this mostly in middle-grade fantasies, mostly. Not so much in YA, although I don’t know if that’s because I’m not seeing as much secondary world YA as I’d like. It sometimes goes

Comments

[fidelioscabinet]

Excuse me while I strike a match and burn some incense in your general direction.

Also, that 'fancy' needlework? It was a treat for when you'd done your share of the mending, plain sewing, and so on that HAD to be done. It was a chance to be creative and inventive and do something besides darn socks and patch things and hem sheets.

Grr.

[oursin]

There's that scene in Little Women in which the March sisters deal with the boredom of hemming sheets by calling each edge the name of a different continent and using that as an educational opportunity. Also, but I can't remember where I read this (one of Charlotte Yonge's perhaps) having one member of the family reading while the others do their plain-sewing, but switching that round. (Though I wonder how poor myopic Ethel May managed sewing...)

According to the Journal of Saw It Somewhere Studies, girls' samplers were about demonstrating their mistressy of a range of types of stitching that were used for various kinds of mending and patching and making clothes, not just pretty embroidery display.

[mrissa]

Right, the sample was the "I will not ruin your stuff if you set me to actual work" display.

[rikibeth]

And cross-stitch wasn't an exercise in decorative futility the way it is now (I love the interesting stitches in crewel-work, but counted-cross drives me bonkers); it was the standard stitch used for putting initials and numbers onto shirts and so on for laundry-marking, to make sure those were worn in rotation so they'd wear evenly, and to tell family members' things apart when the sizes didn't make it instantly apparent

[cissa]

Also- urban families often did not do laundr5y in-house but sent it out. Then the monograms were important to make sure that the sheets, underwear, etc. came back to the families that they came from.

I find it fascinating that a lot of chores we currently have privatized used to- in Victorian urban households, anyway- be farmed out. Laundry, cooking, etc.

[rikibeth]

When I was quite young - this would be before 1975, at the very latest - my parents did not yet own a washing machine large enough to handle king-size sheets, so their bedsheets went out to an actual Chinese laundry, the same one they'd used for more than that when they lived in an apartment and had even less in the way of laundry facilities.

Their laundry number was 59. I still have a few flat sheets of theirs with that marking in them. Yes, I'm going to mend a tear in one, because the old, untreated percale is SO SOFT, unlike anything I can get now.

[cissa]

Ooo! That's fascinating! I grew up in the suburbs, with no handy laundries like that around, but we had a washer and dryer in the basement. And I got stuck with most of the ironing. :P I have pretty much never ironed since.

I have had reasonable luck with high-thread-count all-cotton sheets, esp. in the 400-600 range. They've broken in nicely. The 1000 count, though is really stiff; I don't know what it would take, and I'm not sure I care to bother to find out! -Although I may dye them.

[rikibeth]

This was in the suburbs! The Chinese laundry was in Waltham, MA, in a little cluster of stores that couldn't even really be called a strip mall -- just a few adjacent shops that shared a few off-street parking spaces in front of them.

And we had a washer and dryer - it's just that for the first few years we lived in that house, the washer had a fairly small capacity, and king-size sheets wouldn't fit. So the laundry it was.

[mrissa]

Oh golly yes. Baking bread is one of the things that's stereotyped as "women's work," but there's a reason that Baker and Baxter are profession-names: urban people quite often did not bake their own bread. (And things like French toast/poor knights, bread pudding, etc. came about because even the people who did bake their own bread didn't always have a fresh loaf every day.) It is not even remotely a coincidence that my late grandmother who spent the entirety of her childhood on a farm is the one whose bread recipe I have, while my grandmother whose family moved to town and my great-grandmother who was an urban businesswoman never, to the best of my knowledge, regularly baked bread from scratch.

[nineveh_uk]

As someone who is myopic, I manage hand-sewing very well :-) Long sight, on the other hand, must have been hopeless. And it must have been awful for everyone by candlelight/oil-lamps (perhaps one knitted in the evenings?). I sew at weekends precisely because anything beyond darning or hemming is a challenge without daylight.

[fidelioscabinet]

There's a bit in the opening scene of Heyer's The Quiet Gentleman where the heroine gives up on embroidery and switches to knitting because the light's bad.

Some households fell back in the evenings on what were called 'working candles' which were presumably brighter than ordinary ones, and all those elegant mirrors, especially the convex bullseye models, were there to magnify whatever lights were used by reflection.
I suspect a lot of people just put the fine work aside.

[robling_t]

and switches to knitting because the light's bad.

Although one has to have the knack of knitting without looking, which isn't necessarily something everyone can pick up -- I know a fair number of knitters who can, but even after *MUMBLEMUMBLE* years at it that's just never going to be part of my knitting skillset...

[fidelioscabinet]

Well, it was a sock, in a single color, so I suspect she was not only painfully familiar with her pattern but could have managed with only occasional peeks.

[robling_t]

It's not so much about the pattern as "where the hell is the tip of my needle?", though; it takes a certain kind of kinesthetic sense to be able to hit the target without looking at it, and I for one simply don't have the wiring to do it, god knows I've tried. (Can't touch-type either.) OTOH, at least I catch mistakes more or less right as I'm making them and not three inches later like my touch-knitting friends... :)