Sometimes on a Saturday, I will try to find something visually inspiring in an online museum collection and post a link to it on the Vetty Creations Facebook page. For me, inspiration often comes from historical needlework.
There are a few museums that I like to go to for reference and inspiration in their online collection. These include:
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
The Victoria and Albert Museum
Digitalt Museum, Norway
Digitalt Museum, Sweden
Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, AKA The Powerhouse Museum
The Cooper Hewitt Museum
If wanting to look at collections elsewhere, I will usually try to see if there are ethnographic museums or museums of costume, or folk museums for a particular country, city or region. These often have the sorts of things I am looking for.
Do you have a favourite museum with an online collection that includes textiles and/or embroidery? Could you share the link with us so that we can go and have a sticky beak too? It would be great to put together a much more exhaustive list than the one I’ve started us off with!
White Threads is the blog of Yvette Stanton, the author, designer, publisher behind Vetty Creations' quality needlework books and embroidery products.
Good idea! I have a few Dutch collections for you.
This is from my local museum in Rotterdam: http://museumrotterdam.nl/collectie/zoekresultaten/0/16/&search=merklap (searched for ‘merklap’ ‘which is sampler, ‘borduren’ (embroidery) didn’t get many hits) and the collection of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam can be found here: https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/search? again look for ‘borduur’ ‘borduren’ or ‘merklap’. Textile is ‘Textiel’ in Dutch. You can also try searching the data base in English but the result will probably somewhat limited.
And not strictly a searchable collection but a lovely overview from the Dutch Sampler Museum can be found here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/7182232@N03/
Thanks so much, Nicole! I’ll be taking a look at them later in the day. 🙂
I’ve been collecting some of these on Pinterest at https://www.pinterest.com/laura2kathleen/museum-collections-with-images-textiles/
Please take them to add to your list.
Thank you Laura, that’s very kind! (And a wonderful resource!)
The Vesterheim Museum in Decorah, Iowa has a nice on-line collection of Norwegian textiles & art –
http://collections.vesterheim.org/
They have a few detail shots of the on-line items, sadly no high resolution shots though.
There was a write-up in the paper a while back. Only a small amount of their collection is on display at any one time. Apparently, if you make advance arrangements, you can study their entire collection. I’m not sure if that’s for general public or only for “serious research” though.
I forgot to say – thanks for the museum links. I knew of the V&A, but not the others.
Thanks Gail! I’ve added it to the list. Most appreciated. I’ve wanted to visit that museum (in person) for years. One day. The curatorial staff have been very helpful to me in the past when writing magazine articles.