clew's reviews: a book log

American Arts and Crafts Textiles, Ayres, Hansen, McPherson, McPherson

Mostly a coffee-table book with pictures of pillows, curtains from preserved Arts and Crafts houses, designs published by embroidery companies and art magazines. Few of the pictures are big and flat-aspect enough to use directly as patterns.

The text is gently informative on many heads: development form Victorian mores, relation to settlement houses, invention of new flosses and dyes, how to use & launder old textiles.

I think it's a pity there aren't more clothes represented; there are many contemporaneous illustrations of Arts and Crafts clothing, but they are awfully romantic and it's hard for me to guess what people actually wore. It isn't surprising that fewer dresses have survived than dresser-cloths, but it's a pity the survivors aren't shown on mannequins; they're kind of shapeless, and I wonder whether they were drapey and Pre-Raphaelite or boxy and proto-modernist.

ISBN: 0-8109-0434-9 So wrote clew in History (20th c.).