#interrogate your teaspoons

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Darning samplers and other needlework from the Whitelands College Collection, shown in A Remedy for Rents, curated by Vivienne Richmond. 

A Remedy for Rents showcases a rare collection of exceptionally fine needlework by working-class women in the last quarter of the 19th century. As students at Whitelands College, the first all-female teacher training college, now part of the University of Roehampton, the women were training to teach in elementary schools for working-class children and their needlework focused on the production and repair of simple garments and household textiles.

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Contents from Common Sense for Housemaids, by a Lady

Brass, how to clean. Bug poison carefulness, hints on carpets, how to clean.

Clear-starching dress, observations on daily work, housemaids’ fire, how to light.

Floor-cloth, how to clean French polish, how to clean lamps, how to clean mirrors, how to clean

painted walls, how to paper walls, how to pipe-clay, how to prepare sweeping, ways of

scouring floors, ways of daily work, housemaids‘.

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Tender Buttons [A Long Dress], by Gertrude Stein

What is the current that makes machinery, that makes it crackle, what is the current that presents a long line and a necessary waist. What is this current.

What is the wind, what is it.

Where is the serene length, it is there and a dark place is not a dark place, only a white and red are black, only a yellow and green are blue, a pink is scarlet, a bow is every color. A line distinguishes it. A line just distinguishes it.

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From the index of Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management

Pig, Guinea .. .. .. ..     How roast pig was discovered     ,, to silence a.. .. ..     Novel way of recovering a stolen    Suckling, to carve a .. ..     ,, roast .. .. ..     ,, to scald.. .. ..     The learned .. .. .. Pig's cheeks, to dry .. .. ..     Face, collared .. .. ..     Fry, to dress .. .. ..     Liver .. .. .. ..     Pettitoes .. .. .. .. Pigs, Austrian mode of herding ..     English mode of hunting and       Indian sticking .. ..     How pastured and fed formerly 

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Seamstress and Narrative: Text, Sewing, and Narrative, by Olga Matich

The seamstress performs her work in time as she puts together parts that are patently spatial. If we assign the seamstress and her modern tool – the sewing machine – a symbolic role in the story in which she appears, together they can be said to produce the whirring motor of the plot, or a silent motor in the case of the seamstress sewing by hand. 

[...] One way to think about the seamstress is to consider her the agent of narrative: her work is directly related to making whole disconnected parts. She stitches together pieces of fabric with the purpose of creating a meaningful whole, whether a beautiful new garment or fixing an old one. Although everyday culture and nineteenth century literature portray her work as menial, the language of stitching, weaving, and sewing informs many of the metaphors that we use to describe narrative: 'narrative thread', for example, is a common image in both Russian and English, with thread having become a web term as well. 'Text', which is etymologically linked to 'textile' (from the Latin 'to weave') reveals a connection between writing and weaving. In English, we speak of seamless narrative montage or stories that present a seamless narrative experience.

Vladislav Khodasevich and Marina Tsvetaeva use the double meaning of thread (nit'), seam (shov), and stitch (stezhok) – literal and metaphoric – in their poetry that links sewing and writing.

Ты показала мне без слов, Как вышел хорошо и чисто Тобою проведенный шов По краю белого батиста.

А я подумал: жизнь моя, Как нить, за Божьими перстами  По легкой ткани бытия  Бежит такими же стежками.

Khodasevich, "Bez slov" (Without Words, 1918)

(You showed me without words, How well and pure The seam you placed Lies on the edge of white batiste. And I thought: my life Like a thread in God's fingers Runs with the same stitches Over the woven fabric of being.)

Some Russian terms for writing poetry have stitching as a subtext. The noun "stroka," meaning line of verse, is etymologically related to the verb "strochit'" ('to stitch'), but it also means line of stitches. Tsvetaeva uses the double meaning of "stroka," calling herself a day seamstress of lines ("Strok podennaia shveia") in "Crawling Slugs of Days" (Dnei spolzaiushchie slizni).

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From the Mapping Petersburg project headed by Olga Matich.

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Soviet soldiers brought Singers en mass from Germany during World War II. These sewing machines were so popular as trophies that today most Eastern Europeans, including myself, still hold on to the conviction that Singer is a German company. My mother’s uncle got our family’s Singer from emptied German quarters in Minsk at the end of the war.

—Valzhyna Mort, on her poem "Singer"

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Singer, by Valzhyna Mort

A yoke of honey in a glass of cooling milk. Bats playful like butterflies on power lines. In all your stories blood hangs like braids   of drying onions. Our village is so small, it doesn’t have its own graveyard. Our souls, are sapped in sour water of the bogs.   Men die in wars, their bodies their graves. And women burn in fire. When midsummer brings thunderstorms, we cannot sleep   because our house is a wooden sieve, and crescent lightning cut off our hair. The bogs ablaze, we sit all night in fear.   I always thought that your old trophy Singer would hurry us away on its arched back. I thought we’d hold on to its mane of threads   from loosened spools along Arabic spine, same threads that were sown into my skirts, my underthings, first bras. What smell   came from those threads you had so long, sown in, pulled out, sown back into the clothes that held together men who’d fall apart   undressed. Same threads between my legs! I lash them, and the Singer gallops!    And sky hangs only the lightning’s thread. Like in that poem: on Berlin’s Jaegerstrasse Arian whores are wearing shirts ripped off sliced chests of our girls. My Singer-Horsey,   why everything has to be like that poem?

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[S]ome objects do seem to retain the pulse of their making. This pulse intrigues me. There is a breath of hesitancy before touching or not touching, a strange moment. If I choose to pick up this small white cup with its single chip near the handle, will it figure in my life? A simple object, this cup that is more ivory than white, too small for morning coffee, not quite balanced, could become part of my life of handled things. It could fall away into the territory of personal story-telling; the sensuous, sinuous intertwining of things with memories. A favoured, favourite thing. Or I could put it away. Or I could pass it on. How objects are handed on is all about story-telling. I am giving you this because I love you. Or because it was given to me. Because I bought it somewhere special. Because you will care for it. Because it will complicate your life. Because it will make someone else envious? There is no easy story in legacy. What is remembered and what is forgotten? There can be a chain of forgetting, the rubbing away of previous ownership as much as the slow accretion of stories.

Edmund de Waal, The Hare With Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance