Favorite Things: Red Work (and Backsides!)

When I was getting ready to write this post, I looked around the studio, then the living room, then the cookbook shelf, looking for this book.  Then I remembered that I don't own it, I just had it on permanent faculty check out when I was at SAIC.   Oh the glory days of the faculty six month library loan period with unlimited renewals.   It was sad to return my favorites last December.   

Redwork is: red embroidery on fabric.  Duh.  It is exactly what it sounds like.  It is always this particular color of turkey red and it is always usually simple line drawings, sometimes with text.  Lots of it was made by tracing book and newspaper images in the 19th and early 20th century.  I have a big collection of it, including English, German, Czech, and Hungarian text examples.   These are the newest additions, gifted to me by my friend Frances last May.   Anybody know the language (or better yet the translation?)

I love  the backsides of embroidery.  A whole different blurry magic world happens back there.  In my work, it's a wild tangled mess, in these beautiful red work examples, it's a softer version of the front.