Embroidery and textiles I visited – part 3

If you missed them, you can read parts 1 and 2.

Fotografiska, Stockholm, Sweden

On our holiday, The Husband and The Reader left about a week earlier than The Gymnast and I did, and went to Amsterdam. The Reader really enjoyed using a new camera to take lots and lots of beautiful black and white photographs. She’ll be doing Art in her senior years at school (about to start back this week!) and she really got into B/W photography, which is something she could focus on for her major work. To encourage her in this pursuit, we visited Fotografiska. It was SUCH a wonderful museum. It is a contemporary photographic museum, with changing exhibitions. Some of the ones that we saw could only be described as excellent. There was Martin Schoeller, with a large series of huge up close portraits of both famous and non-famous people. The other two that I loved were “Where the Children Sleep” (which I strangely can’t find reference to on the website, so I can’t say who the photographer was) and Thomas Wågström’s “On Earth”. While this is not a textiles museum, it’s definitely worth visiting if you love beautiful images. The bookshop is large and extensive!

“Exploring the rich world of Estonian Folk Costume” exhibition

Estonian Handicraft House, Pikk 22, Tallinn

We have a friend with Estonian heritage, who visited relatives in Tallinn some years back. We loved seeing their photos, and made a note that we’d also like to visit Tallinn one day. Because Tallinn is just a day trip by ferry from Helsinki, we did it on this trip. We expected that we would just spend the day wandering through the old town, visiting museums (and staying out of the cold!). As it turned out, our attention was diverted by the many shops with hand crafts of many kinds, and we didn’t visit any museums at all!

We went into the Estonian Handicraft House, and I stumbled across a temporary exhibition in the back of the shop. It was an exhibition of folk costumes that have been made at a folk costume school at the Folk Culture Centre. The clothes were beautifully made, and featured lots of embroidery.

Exhibition caption: “Halliste Naise Kostüüm. Luule Nurga 2004 Jäneda”
You can see on this woman’s costume, from Halliste in central Estonia, the drawn thread embroidery on the edges of the blouse, the wool embroidery on the skirt, and embroidery on linen on the towel/apron hanging from the waist. There is also embroidery on the woollen shawl, and on the bag.

The handicraft centre itself sells fabrics, thread and other supplies for making folk costumes.

Kansallismuseo – The National Museum of Finland, Helsinki, Finland

The National Museum of Finland had a display of folk costumes from various parts of Finland, some of which feature embroidery. It also had a badly captioned – no information that I could find! – display of beautiful needlework in display boards. I am still none the wiser about what types of embroidery I saw there, because there was so little information. It was most frustrating, however, it was definitely worth seeing!

Karelian woman. A notable feature of this costume is the embroidered “bib”. It looks a little like smocking, as it is worked on folds of fabric, but it doesn’t end up being elastic like smocking.

Needlework displays – no captions or explanatory information that I could find!

Traditional Finnish needlework. Lots of counted thread work, but not just cross stitch. Also pulled thread work.

This brings to an end my tour of the places that I saw embroidery and textiles on my trip. I saw so many new things and so many interesting things! There is so much to learn.