The Whitworth Textile Archive

 

This post reflects on a visit to The Whitworth textile archive in Manchester as part of The Textile Society events in May 2023

Close up of heavily darned Eygption tunic

Last weekend brought three Textile Society events to Manchester, one of which involved a visit to the textile archive and study room at The Whitworth. I've visited the gallery many times but I wasn't aware of how extensive the archive is, how easy it is to arrange access or how many textile-related books are in the study room! 

I had used a couple of items from the online archive as input for a previous project on darning so I was very excited to see that the archivists had included two darning-related items amongst the selection of artefacts they had pulled out for us to look at. 

The first, and one I'd spent a good amount of time looking closely at one a computer screen, was an Egyptian tunic for a child from around the 600s. It was so heavily worn and darned that in places, the base hessian-type fabric had disappeared and just the darning threads were visible. The whole item was completely covered in stitches. It's an extreme example of visible mending and it was fantastic to see it in reality and be able to really look up close. 

Egyptian tunic in The Whitworth archive

The second darning item was a darning and mending sampler from the 1800s, with incredibly fine mending and darning stitches and not dissimilar to the samplers I spent a long time studying in my previous project. I really do find it mind-boggling that these were stitched by hand - the stitches and so fine and regular that the patience, the steady hand and attention to detail are almost inconceivable now that we take sewing machines and other developments for granted.

Close up of darning sampler from The Whitworth textile archive

Finally, two items completely unrelated to mending and darning but I couldn't not mention them due to their loveliness. The first is a blouse from around 1600. It was thought to have been the bodice on a dress but at some point it has been unceremoniously hacked away from the rest of the garment, but the embroidery was so fresh-looking that it had a very contemporary appearance. 

Embroidered bodice, The Whitworth

The second was a silk mosaic by Lucienne Day. I came across her mosaics when researching artists in year 1 when I was surprised by how different these are from her perhaps more familiar printed textiles. This V&A article on the mosaics provides a detailed analysis of these works. It was very exciting to be able to see one in all its glorious detail and colour up close. It reminded me of the mosaic-type collage I had played with on my current project - had I not been so far into the project it might have changed my direction significantly! 

Lucienne Day silk mosaic, The Whitworth vs. 'patchwork' collage based on plant growth and spread

All images are author's own