{"id":262,"date":"2010-02-09T17:06:58","date_gmt":"2010-02-09T14:06:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vettycreations.com.au\/white-threads\/?p=262"},"modified":"2010-02-09T17:06:58","modified_gmt":"2010-02-09T14:06:58","slug":"mountmellick-and-silk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/vettycreations.com.au\/white-threads\/2010\/02\/09\/mountmellick-and-silk\/","title":{"rendered":"Mountmellick and silk"},"content":{"rendered":"

This morning I was catching up with Mary Corbet’s Needle’nThread<\/a>, where she revisited an older post of hers on society silk. This was because the author of a book and expert on the subject, Donna Cardwell<\/a>, contacted her regarding the post.<\/p>\n

In her comment, Donna mentioned that there were many different types of silk thread used in those days, and listed a number of them, including something called “Mountmellick silk”.<\/p>\n

Mountmellick silk?!<\/p>\n

What on earth??<\/p>\n

Mountmellick embroidery is whitework embroidery, using white cotton satin jean fabric, with matt (non shiny) cotton thread. Silk thread, however, is shiny and is obviously not cotton. How therefore, do the two relate?<\/p>\n

My suggestion is that this was an effort on the part of silk manufacturers to market more of their thread. There is no relationship between Mountmellick embroidery and silk thread, but they were attempting to make one.<\/p>\n

My further reading on “Mountmellick silk” has revealed that it was white thread, and the suggestion was made that if you wanted to work Mountmellick in colour, then you should use a different type of silk that came in a variety of colours. (Personally I would never advise working Mountmellick in colour, as one of the things that makes Mountmellick embroidery its own style, is that it is ALWAYS whitework.)<\/p>\n

In the dim dark recesses of my mind (and I can’t check this easily as I am away from my office and all my notes on the subject) I seem to remember that at some point, one of the silk manufacturers produced a booklet on Mountmellick embroidery. I have never seen this booklet (though I’d most definitely like to!) and have always wondered how a silk manufacturer handled the subject. My suspicion is that they promoted their silk threads in conjunction with Mountmellick embroidery, therefore making it a less-than-traditional interpretation of the style of needlework.<\/p>\n

Silk embroidery is lovely. Mountmellick embroidery is lovely. However, the two styles are separate, and in the interests of keeping Mountmellick traditional in style, they should not be combined.<\/p>\n

Here endeth the lesson. (Yes, I realise that was a very preachy post!)<\/p>\n

NB: By discussing this subject, I am not intending to make out that Donna Cardwell does not know what she is talking about – that is not my intention at all! I completely acknowledge that Donna was simply telling Mary the different types of silk that were available during the time when society silk was popular. I do not think that this suggests that Donna recommends using silk thread for Mountmellick embroidery. Having never talked with Donna about this, I do not know her opinion on the matter, and maybe she doesn’t actually have one, anyway.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This morning I was catching up with Mary Corbet’s Needle’nThread, where she revisited an older post of hers on society silk. This was because the author of a book and expert on the subject, Donna Cardwell, contacted her regarding the post.<\/p>\n

In her comment, Donna mentioned that there were many different types of silk thread […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29,10,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-262","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-historical-embroidery","category-mountmellick-embroidery","category-whitework","odd"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/vettycreations.com.au\/white-threads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/262","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/vettycreations.com.au\/white-threads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/vettycreations.com.au\/white-threads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/vettycreations.com.au\/white-threads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/vettycreations.com.au\/white-threads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=262"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/vettycreations.com.au\/white-threads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/262\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":265,"href":"http:\/\/vettycreations.com.au\/white-threads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/262\/revisions\/265"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/vettycreations.com.au\/white-threads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=262"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/vettycreations.com.au\/white-threads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=262"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/vettycreations.com.au\/white-threads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=262"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}