Auction Roundup - Or "Things I've Lost Lately"

Sometimes there are amazing things that come up on auction and you just have to throw your hat in the ring to see if you can grab it.  Unfortunately, I lost all of these lovelies (which made me sad) but the prices were just above what I could do (wouldn't it be lovely to be able to spend the gas, house, car, insurance, etc. money on these things!!).

The first is a 17th century whitework sampler that was being sold by Fryer & Brown. This one has the well known band of a woman and man at the top that has been found in some earlier pattern books.  It is not clear if this had been cut from a larger finished or unfinished sampler, as has happened many times.  There are more pictures on the auction site.

The second loss is an amazing sampler (it went for over $20,000) wrought by a Quaker girl.  This sampler was an unknown piece in a grouping that Lynne Anderson has been studying and so it is a gem not only because of its beauty but that it adds to the considerable story she has been building.  (I am awaiting the book!).  It is a match to several of my favorite samplers, including the match in the MFA Boston collection.  There has been scant work on English Samplers and so any work is a major contribution to identify the history of how these pieces came to be and their teachers.  Check out the pictures with details on the auction site.

The UK Whirlwind

As I write this, we have just finished the UK Casket Tour and have been down in the lounge saying our good-byes.  It was a wonderful tour and we saw so many items!  I was thinking that this one 11-day period was as good as 10-years of research trips for me, and the best part of it was that I was able to share it with 42 other people!

I'll do a bit of a overview over the next few weeks, but first I must get home and take care of my family.  Seems a bit of chaos has reigned and the husband is now sending me pathetic messages about how there are no band-aids in the house and he scraped his finger bringing my boxes in.  Seems that the mother of the house is needed to swoop in and set all right again.   No rest for the weary!

But to tease, I will share an image of one of the objects we saw at the Fashion Museum in Bath.

Glove 23391&A from the Fashion Museum, Bath.  1615-1625, The Spence Collection

This glove is leather with metal thread embroidery on the surface.  A griffin and a camel form the design in a stylized arch decoration.  The threads are in lovely condition, and the close up below makes you drool over the super small purls they had to work with!  

Glove 23391&A from the Fashion Museum, Bath.  1615-1625, The Spence Collection

Thistle Threads Closed until Oct 25th

I am off to the UK this week to join many casketeers on a trek around England and Scotland visiting collections and taking copious pictures of lovely examples - we will try to share some if the hotel wi-fi cooperates!  So I won't be able to do any shipping until October 25th.

I am very happy to be heading off - and tremendously relieved as I wasn't sure I would make it.  I had a crazy health scare that started on Sept 12th is under control finally, the last week has been a blur of meds and doctors and poison control.  Only last weekend, I couldn't get out of bed due to a bad drug reaction to something I likely shouldn't have been prescribed.  I was incredibly lucky not to have a stroke or heart attack by Sunday.  A change in doctors mid-week and by today I was healthy again.  Quite a scare for me and my family - and certainly made the prep work for the trip very hard as well as keeping up with emails/shipments.  I lost 10 lbs in five days and finally my thinking is clearing up.  When I get back - DNA tests (a new thing) to determine the extent of the drug sensitivities (a life-long problem that most doctors were ignoring and assigning as some sort of new-age resistance to taking meds) and maybe life-alert tags (Can you embroidery a holder for those?).  

So I am pretty happy today - everything looks pretty crisp and blue - life is good!  Taking tomorrow off to travel with my family and do something fun.  And I might embroider too!  

So if you have emailed me recently and I didn't respond or if I sent your order to the wrong address - I apologize - I wasn't myself and I will work to get things taken care of as soon as I get back.