The Anniversary Quilt: Commemorating the 175th Anniversary of the University of Chester

Fiona Roberts, the Alumni and Development Manager at the University of Chester, recently gathered together a group of volunteers to discuss the possibility of working together to create a quilt. She explained:

“In 2014, the University of Chester will be celebrating its 175^th anniversary, which makes it one of the longest established higher education institutions in the country.  There will be a calendar of events throughout the year, welcoming many alumni to return to their alma mater.  These will range from a service in Chester Cathedral, to sports tournaments to balls with music and fireworks: something for everyone, reflecting the diversity of our students over the years.

However, parties and performances will pass and it has been acknowledged that a more lasting testament to the University is required: something which can be seen for many years ahead. 

The concept of a quilted commemorative wall hanging was suggested and approved, so I invited staff and students interested in quilting to get together and pool ideas.  An informal group was formed in April 2013, planning to create a commemorative quilt depicting aspects of the institution and influences over the 175 years.  Alumni and local quilters have also been invited, and it is anticipated that the quilt will comprise a variety of textiles, depending on the skills and interpretations made by the contributors. In total, there are nearly 20 people willing to give their time and talent to our project!

 

Each member has made their own decision on what they would like to do, and how they wish to interpret the theme.  Some are focusing on campus buildings or activities, others on the city and other local influencing factors.  There are few rules, though everyone needs to produce a block which measures 14 inches when completed!  The quilt will feature the coat of arms in the centre, meaning there must be an odd number of blocks. 

The crest is a very detailed image, and will therefore be represented in cross-stitch.  The sashing and posts will be decided when the blocks have been assembled, but everyone agreed that they would like to incorporate the University colours, black, red and white.

The project is scheduled to be completed by June 2014 and the quilt will be exhibited at the various campuses of the University of Chester during the anniversary year (2014-15).  When taking into account interpretation, and wanting visitors to enjoy our efforts, each contributor will be invited to write a short passage about their design – why they chose it, how they designed and stitched it which will be accompanied by a photograph of their block. We envisage a little booklet to accompany the quilt, sharing what we have created and the journey that we took to achieve our goal.”

Fiona gave everyone an idea of the challenges ahead as she showed the work she’d done on a patchwork quilt, explaining how the design had developed and indicating some of the difficulties of getting the dimensions right!

 

Some members of the quilting group explain what they have chosen to sew, and why:

 

Felicity Davies:  Briefly, the story of my block choice – I originally chose the River Dee because it is an iconic part of Chester and I felt it would provide a good subject for a panel, but I also wanted to include something that would represent the department within which I work, which is Careers and Employability.

 

As I drew out my design sketch, using the Old Dee Bridge as a design element, I realised that the bridge symbolises how the Careers and Employability department is like a bridge in the way it helps students to cross over from studying to employment.

Felicity felt inspired to begin work immediately with the following result:

Amy Jones:  I plan to design a square based on the Amber ‘Peace’ cross which was designed by one of our alumni, Frederick Starkey. I published a story in the first edition of The Cestrian that I worked on, called ‘The amber cross: a peaceful reminder’ so I know all about its history. I also think it ties in nicely within my role within the University, as I deal with alumni and alumni stories daily.

I wanted to incorporate flowers into my design as many of the alumni that I speak to, always recall how well the gardens and grounds were maintained on campus. I’ve never done any sewing or quilting before, as my crafting interests lie within card making and scrapbooking, so I’ve no idea how it will pan out! I’ve bought myself a sewing machine and I have some scraps of material…I just need some thread and I can get started!

 

Liz Johnson:   Karen Boyle and I spent several lunchtimes putting ideas together around the Warrington campus and Warrington the town. We came up with lots of ideas; then tried to sketch mock-ups of the ones we thought would have the most visual impact. As the Warrington Wolves train on the campus (literally outside my window) we decided their emblem would make a good strong square with primrose and blue as the main colours.

We talked about making the block as a quilt but decided that cross-stitch would make a clearer image. I had been to see the Lewis Carroll windows at Daresbury Church a few weekends ago, and that also used lots of blue and yellow in the designs. One of the ideas we had was to use silk painting for one of the squares. We thought the stained glass would work really well as a silk square and so we have incorporated three of the Alice in Wonderland figures into the block.

 

 

 

Wendy Fiander:   I am currently thinking about the designs for 2 squares for the quilt – whether I manage to produce 2, or even 1, remains to be seen, of course.  The themes of these squares are sustainability and international, both of which seem to me to be important areas of growth and development for the University at the moment – so these squares are recording features which have prominence now, rather than historically, so that trends in these areas can be followed in the future from as they have been portrayed at this point in time.

 

 

I have been involved in several initiatives to contribute to the sustainability agenda for the University, notably the managed printing strategy, videoconferencing, power saving for computers and the Green Impact Scheme, so have an interest and some insight into activity in the area.  I don’t want my design to just be a collection of generic logos, but would like it to reflect the actual work being done at Chester, which is proving a challenge.  I think the design will develop further, am keen to welcome feedback and good ideas from other people and will, of course, liaise closely with the University Sustainability Manager to ensure that the current activity is portrayed correctly.

The international square seemed quite an easy concept to work with, and a fairly obvious design to do, which was its attraction to me.  I consulted with the Dean of the International Office to ensure that our ideas aligned, and will continue to do so over the work on the square.  I have experimented with light sensitive fabric to see if this would be a way of getting a world and UK outline onto fabric as the basis for the design, but have now decided to purchase fabric which is already printed with the world map in the correct scale to fit on the square and embellish this with detail about the University partnerships and other connections worldwide.

Deborah Wynne is charting the progress of the quilt and will post updates as the story develops....

 

GEORGE ELIOT’S DRESSES

BLACK SILK MOURNING DRESS, c. 1839, SILK TAFFETA, COLLARLESS, FRONT OPENING,

AT: WWW.AUGUSTA-AUCTIONS.COM

In ‘The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton’, George Eliot’s narrator asserts:

‘I wish to stir your sympathy with commonplace troubles – to win your tears for real sorrow: sorrow such as may live next door to you – such as walks neither in rags nor in velvet, but in very ordinary decent apparel.’

It’s appropriate that Eliot chooses clothing to illustrate her manifesto for the ordinary, the commonplace, the everyday; clothes are often used in her novels as a way of representing her characters’ personalities, as well as their social status. Amos Barton’s wife, Milly, wears an ‘old frayed black silk’ which, despite its worn fabric and sober colour, seems ‘to repose on her bust and limbs with a placid elegance and sense of distinction’. In a single sentence, Eliot gives us information about Milly’s economic situation (she’s too poor, as a curate’s wife, to buy or wear more expensive or less durable fabrics), about her personal qualities (she’s calm, serene – note the words ‘repose’ and ‘placid’ – and has a natural elegance which communicates itself despite the slightly tatty dress), and about her social status (Milly conveys that sense of distinction, or gentility, belonging to a curate’s wife in the way she wears her modest apparel). Many of Eliot’s more well-known female characters are similarly signified by dress: Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch, Dinah Morris in Adam Bede, and Mirah Lapidoth in Daniel Deronda all wear plain clothes that communicate their modesty, moral integrity and intellectual seriousness. Conversely, many of Eliot’s flighty, amoral female characters display these character traits in the clothes they wear: consider the green ‘Lamia’ ensemble worn by Gwendolen Harleth, Hetty Sorrel’s red cloak [for more on red cloaks in literature, see Sue Elsley’s post, below] and the pastel finery of Rosamond Vincy.

Milly’s old frayed black silk makes several appearances in ‘Amos Barton’. Despite her fondness of dress, a ‘pretty woman’s weakness’, as Eliot describes it, Milly is compelled to ‘economical millinery’ by her financial situation. When the soup tureen empties itself on her ‘newly-turned black silk’, we are offered a glimpse of the measures taken by impoverished gentility to preserve a respectable surface. The worn silk that has become dulled with age and wear is ‘turned’ outside-in, so that the less worn reverse of the fabric is on display. For the rural middle classes of the 1830s, buying clothes ready-made was rare, and the names of fabrics were interchangeable with the articles of clothing made from them. When Milly’s host makes her a reparatory gift of ‘a handsome black silk’, also referred to as ‘the present of a gown’, it’s likely that what she receives is a length of black silk from which to make – or have made – a new dress.

Like Eliot, many authors use descriptions of clothes to provide insight into characters’ lives. As Daniel Miller argues in Stuff, clothing is not superficial; rather, it makes us what we think we are. Similarly, our responses to characters are often mediated by the clothes they’re wearing. Which literary character’s clothes most interest or excite you, and what information is given by their author’s description of them?

Jen Davis, University of Chester 

Stitching a Green and Pleasant Land

This map of Britain was embroidered seventy years ago by Joan, a young woman who would one day become my mother. Her war really began when she and a friend, with the Nazi threat increasing daily, and impelled by a mixture of bravado, patriotism and the desire for some excitement in their lives, enlisted in the Women's Royal Air Force. Eventually, half way through the war and with her appetite for excitement completely sated, Joan found herself engaged in work of such importance that home leave was not an option. Instead, she spent her brief leisure hours stitching a map of the British Isles. In simplistic terms she amused herself by working a pre-printed design; but it could also be argued that she, and others, escaped from grim wartime reality by crafting an idealised image of a place which, when anchored by silk thread, could become a once-and-future land coloured by nostalgia and hope.

 

Measuring twenty-four by eighteen inches the map is large enough for its triple coastline to encircle more than sixty little symbols of British-ness. Regional identities are celebrated as part of a whole United Kingdom by icons such as the rose, thistle, daffodil and shamrock, the English cyclist and fox, the kilted Scottish shepherd and Highland cow, the 'traditionally' dressed Welsh lady and Caernarvon Castle, and the pig and linen of Northern Ireland. This Britain is a busy and primarily bucolic place; a Cornish fisherman lands a huge lobster, a West Country farmer sows his ploughed fields, in the Eastern Lowlands another digs among potatoes and cabbages, hay is stacked in regional styles, apple trees and conifers promise a harvest of fruit and wood, cheerful little boats sail among leaping fish in the North Sea, while a whale even wallows happily in the Bristol Channel. Factory chimneys smoking in the North and the Midlands, and the coal seams and slag heaps of Tyneside and Wales  make minimal reference to  the presence of industry in an otherwise agrarian idyll.

 

But the barrage balloon floating over St Paul's Cathedral, the intrusion of a corner of France in threateningly close proximity to the white cliffs of Dover, and the flotilla of  ships steaming towards the Continent are all indicators of the historical context in which the map was sewn. Perhaps most significantly, the top right corner of the picture is filled by an heraldic shield, topped by a crown and supported by the lion and the unicorn, above which fly the flags of the Navy, Army and Air Force. When I look at this section I think of my grandmother, a policeman's  wife whose three offspring each served in one of the armed forces, allowing her to glow with vicarious pride at having 'done her 'bit'.

Joan Witt

Joan's map is no exquisite work of art. Embroidered mainly in simple chain stitch and satin stitch it is not even comparable in craftsmanship with the samplers worked by earlier generations of little girls. However, it is a historical testament to wartime myth-making; an evocation of a Golden Age Britain to be loved and fought for. Now, on an emotive level it has the visceral appeal of all folk art, but for me it offers a tangible link to my mother and a glimpse into the life she lived before we met.     

Dr Sue Elsley

 

 

 

Escapism through haberdashery in Fukunaga’s Jane Eyre.

In Cary Fukunaga’s 2011 adaptation of Jane Eyre, the representations of confinement in the novel are captured through the use of imposing structures, towering hedges, enclosing boundary walls, shrouding darkness and the dull and restricting costumes worn by the female characters.

The barren landscape of the North, surrounding the remote dwelling of Thornfield Hall, seems to have seeped into the woman’s clothing, the colour palette of the female employees, predominately consisting of overcast grey, earth brown and the ominous deep blue grey of storm clouds. The women are further constrained by their confining corsets, tightly coiled hair or concealing caps.

On the surface these female characters seem more concerned with practically than fashion, befitting their subservient status; however upon closer inspection it would seem they are attempting to escape the drudgery of their circumstances through haberdashery.

Both Jane and Mrs Fairfax have a propensity to drape themselves with delicate floral shawls and wear lace collars and cuffs, when plain cotton would have been more serviceable, especially as there is nobody to impress with these attempts at fashionable enhancement, as both Mrs Fairfax’s and Jane’s positions within the household would make interaction with suitable gentleman practically impossible.

It is perhaps more understandable for Jane to enhance her appearance, as it would reflect a wish to appear more desirable to Mr Rochester. The fashion choices of Mrs Fairfax are perhaps more complex. Mrs Fairfax would have little expenditure, as she resides on the generosity of the estate and perhaps wishes to alleviate or escape her drudgery through fashion. With only desolate moorland, and her sex limiting her opportunities to see past the limits of the horizon (as the youthful Jane laments) makes it seem as if Mrs Fairfax is resigned to her fate of living out what remains of her life in a household which is not her own, surrounded by her meagre possessions. Her only comfort might be the luxuries she allows herself in her fashion choices.

In the picture we can see the lace fichu, which is worn for Jane’s tragic marriage ceremony; it is intricately embroidered, but what is perhaps most startling and poignant about the costume, is the apron, which is most noticeably apparent in the scene where Jane is introduced to Adele; the women are shown seated with their backs to a window, where the lead work, makes it appear as if they are encaged.

The apron is intricately and colourfully embroidered with flowers; a whimsical choice for a housekeeper, who should seem almost unapproachable to staff, in order to maintain her authority within the servant hierarchy.  Yet these flowers seem almost wistful, as they are worn by a woman who is past the bloom of youth, and it hints at a longing for perpetual flora, which would be absent for the majority of the year, and when in blossom only able to be appreciated through the pane of a window, while looking out onto the master’s garden.

 

Emma Westwood (Jane Austen Society Member)

White guys in suits: capitalism, costume and violence in the Wild West

In the 1990s, Western movies like Dances with Wolves (1990), Unforgiven (1992) and Wyatt Earp (1994) self-consciously challenged the mythology of the American frontier. The ‘conquest’ of native peoples was redefined as genocide, and heroic gunfighters were exposed as shady characters. This desire for rawness and honesty was reflected in their visual style. The pristine candy colours and gingham bonnets of 1950s movies, with lawmen dressed like TV Country-and-Western singers, gave way to murky, stained, sepia-brown costumes based on authentic nineteenth-century photographs.

            Set in an Arizona mining town in 1881-82, Tombstone (1993) retold the story of Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, and the so-called gunfight at the OK Corral. Tombstone did not attempt to rewrite history or expose legendary lawman Earp as a brutal killer. Instead, what really set Tombstone apart were its costumes.

Michael F. Blake’s Hollywood and the OK Corral (2007) explains how the film developed its unique look – almost by accident. In the 1980s-90s, many filmmakers were hiring costumes manufactured to depict a generic, ahistoric Wild West, not always caring about developments in fashion and technology across the nineteenth century: accuracy was less important than a vague old-timey feel and, in the 1990s, this meant ‘authentically’ grimy brown rags. However, with so many Westerns being made at once, there were not enough brown rags to go around. When designer Joseph Porro visited the Hollywood costume stores to clothe the cast of Tombstone, the cupboard was bare.

Tombstone’s costumes had to be made from scratch. Relying now on his own research, Porro discovered that sepia photographs are not entirely reliable, and that the Wild West was not actually brown. He and screenwriter Kevin Jarre embraced the fact that, in the 1880s, Americans were in love with the vibrant, clashing colours produced by new aniline dyes: purple, turquoise, magenta, crimson… In the tough mining town of Tombstone, Arizona, people had an insatiable appetite for novelty and colour, and they were willing to pay for it.

            Tombstone is surely one of the best-dressed Westerns ever made. The lawmen and gamblers dress as 1880’s men-about town, wearing silk-cravats, bowler-hats and immaculately starched collars. History may know them as ‘Wild West gunfighters’, but Porro’s designs acknowledge that the Earp brothers and Doc Holliday saw themselves as modern businessmen, not thugs. Through dress, they identify themselves as the bearers of progress, urbanisation, capitalism and order.

Scene from Tombstone (1993), director: George P. Cosmatos

By contrast, the outlaw cowboys dress in garish, eccentric costumes, their rustic styles marking them as reactionary and antisocial. Sharp tailoring and personal hygiene must triumph over chaos. This is more profound than it seems, as recent research suggests the ‘gunfight at the OK Corral’ was not ‘good vs. evil’, but modern capitalism using police to conquer the frontier by force. In Tombstone, the white guys in suits always win.

How important is historical accuracy in costume? In this film, the outlaw cowboys wear red sashes to give the impression that they were a modern criminal gang. In fact, the ‘Cow-boys’ operating in Arizona were merely a loose, shifting population of cattle-rustlers, bandits, and small-time ranchers, and they did not wear ‘gang colours’. However, these historically-inaccurate sashes allow the film to engage with 1990’s anxieties about policing modern urban gangs, just as the Earp/Holliday movies of the 1940s, 50s and 70s reflected America’s anxieties about Hiroshima, the Cold War, or Vietnam respectively. These movies have always raised questions about the legitimacy – and the essential Americanness – of using violence to enforce order: the historically-inaccurate ‘gang colours’ in Tombstone draw audiences back to those historically-authentic questions.

Forced by necessity to make everything afresh, Tombstone’s costume designers subverted the expectations of 1990’s audiences by reminding them that people in the ‘Olden Days’ did not see themselves as the quaint, dowdy figures fossilised in sepia photographs. Rather, they were sophisticated, stylish, excited by new technology and fashion, and grappling self-consciously with the pressures of modernity.

Sources:

‘Awful Arizona’, Denver Republican, May 22, 1882

Michael F. Blake, Hollywood and the OK Corral: Portrayals of the Gunfight and Wyatt Earp (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2007) [most of this textile story is drawn from Blake’s interviews with people who worked on Tombstone)

Gary Roberts, Doc Holliday: the Life and Legend (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2006)

Casey Tefertiller, Wyatt Earp: the Life Behind the Legend (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1997)

 

Dr Alex Tankard University of Chester

http://wildwestdandy.blogspot.co.uk/

Red-Cloak Magic

Shakespeare defined the fashion template for the stereotypical witch when he portrayed his weird sisterhood in Macbeth as 'black, and midnight hags', thereby allowing any New Elizabethan child to advertise her Trick-or-Treat credentials by wearing a cardboard cone and a black plastic bin bag, as she begs from door-to-door in naïve parody of the malevolent beldams invented by seventeenth-century witch hunters. But my favourite witches are those savvy, self-confident matrons in red cloaks, whose witchery was woven into fictional texts by Victorian writers unafraid to rework threads drawn from the witch trials and to interweave them with fairy and gypsy imagery.

For instance, Mary de Morgan's Fairy Taboret is kin to the magical beings whose preference for bright colours, especially red, was noted by nineteenth-century folklorists, but she also bears the traditional witch-marks of a hooked nose, long chin, and the ability to fly and become invisible. In the sparkling fairytale, ‘A Toy Princess’, she rescues her royal godchild from a life of suffocating propriety and replaces her with a submissive, monosyllabic doll, to the delight of the Princess and of her subjects whose wooden mentalities are reflected by the fabric of the puppet. So, cloaked by the colour redolent of danger and of female transgression, a feminist agenda was smuggled into the Victorian nursery.

Thomas Hardy borrowed a fragment from the Biblical Witch of Endor when he fashioned Elizabeth Endorsfield in Under the Greenwood Tree. Those villagers who 'look[ed] no further' than her secluded life-style, pointed chin and red cloak' called her, in plain terms, a witch'. 'The charm' which ensures that Fancy Day's father accepts his daughter's love-choice is basically a brew of emotional blackmail and 'common-sense'. Such enchantment is both simple and powerful, spun from a timeless understanding of human nature. Yet its potency lies in the powerful reputation, 'something between distinction and notoriety' attached to this 'shrewd and penetrating' red-cloaked woman.

Most bizarrely, even the saturnine Mr Rochester in Jane Eyre wraps himself in a red cloak in order to read the character of Jane and to draw her to himself. Masquerading as a gypsy who insists on reading the fortunes of his female guests, he appears to them as 'a genuine witch ... in close alliance' with the Devil, or as an aging 'sibyl'. But red-cloak magic is female magic, so while Jane's clear eye penetrates his disguise, Rochester fails to 'read' Jane or to foretell the future.

The Victorian red-cloaked witch is no midnight hag. She is a mature woman, wise, knowing, free spirited, indomitable, often intimidating and sometimes manipulative, but generally inclined to use her magic for beneficent purposes. As a Victorianist and a W ... um ... a woman interested in the image of the witch, I was thrilled to find, when I tore open the bulky parcel sent by my sister who was then living in China, that it contained the most beautiful red alpaca cloak, as soft and cosy as goose-down. Sylvia Townsend Warner's twentieth-century witch, Lolly Willowes, spoke of the grave-clothes once kept tucked away by respectable countrywomen, and secretly offering the promise that 'once more at any rate' those women would be 'worth dressing with care'. She compares those bleak garments with the witch's secreted robes which also offer psychological comfort, but are 'better worth looking at' because, she implies, they allow a woman to live and to fly, if only in her imagination, whenever she chooses. My red cloak is often put to practical use on chilly evenings when my feet stay (relatively) firmly on the ground but, without even bothering to open the wardrobe door, I can also drape the cloak around my shoulders in virtual form whenever I feel compelled to stir life's cauldron a little, or when my imagination feels the urge to fly a bit nearer to the moon.

I think I should also wear it as defiant and disreputable shroud when the time comes!

Dr Sue Elsley

Wearing the world on your back

Kanga is Kiswahili for guinea fowl. It is also a rectangle of cloth worn in East and Southern Africa. The Masai wear kangas as do women and a few men in towns, cities and villages from Nairobi to Dar es Salaam wherever Kiswahili is spoken.  Kanga cloth is printed with text and images that tell you of the political, social, emotional affiliations of the wearer.

Originally a kanga would be fashioned in black or red cloth punctuated with a design of off white or black contrasts. The predominant pattern was a collection of light spots on a dark ground reminiscent of the feathered back of a guinea fowl. In the first display case to the left as you enter room 91 of the British Museum, Kangas from Kenya bear the image of Barack Obama – Kenya’s most famous son, and another of Michael Jackson. Others reveal affiliations to national parties or local politicians.

The kanga has always been made from cotton with the images and inscriptions rendered by hand block printing. The production of Africa’s biggest local textile industry has been outsourced for decades now to India, the most famous designers originating from Gujarat.

In the final display case, an immaculate blue dress, perfect and timeless in its pristine cotton print clothes a wooden model. The full pleated skirt reveals a horizontal pattern repeat bearing the portrait of Albertina Sisulu, MaSisulu, wife of ANC leader Walter. The dress with its blue bodice, white starched collar, three quarter length French sleeves, pleated dirndl skirt, stands tall over the exhibition as a statue in homage to the extraordinary woman who face encircles the wearer. The exhibition is a testament to how culture, politics, admiration and inspiration are woven into the fabric we wear against our skin. 

The exhibition is accompanied by a BM publication written by art historian and Museum curator Chris Spring, author of a number of important texts on contemporary African visual arts, who led the research project underpinning this exhibition.

The author visited ‘African Textiles Today: social fabric of the east and south’ : a temporary exhibition of the Kanga running from Valentine’s day to 21 April 2013 in room 91 of the British Museum in central London, on Sunday 24 March 2013. 

Prof Claire H Griffiths, University of Chester