It is rather unfortunate that the second hand bookshop in our town is right next door to the bank, so that when I go to pay in, I often find myself paying in to not quite the right place! But this week's find is something I have no trouble justifying. Just look at the typeface on the cover. I saw that on the spine and it drew me without my realising why.
Then look at where the authoresses taught, and put that together with the date (1913) (I had hoped to take a better picture) Arts and crafts and Macintosh and all those wonderful influences.
Then there is the wonderful frontispiece, of a design by Margaret Swanson.The book is a handbook for teachers of girls from five to six, up to age fourteen and is crammed with designs and examples of work to give the children to do. The nicest thing about it is the philosophy of education embedded in the courses - basically: help the children choose their materials and colours, and let it be enjoyable - at all costs avoid drilling them in long boring seams that have to be perfect before they can go on to do something pleasing to the senses. Firstly they say the children are not capable of doing the fine boring work when they are little (quite so) and secondly there is no surer way of turning them off. They will find a way to do the boring work, when it becomes necessary to achieve a finished article they really want to make.
The last thing that I want to show from the book is the only mention of knitting and is that interesting method of darning knitting so that it looks like a knitted fabric. I do know that my daughter Vivienne has got an earlier book with a reference to it, but here is another one to put into the timeline.
1 comment:
Ann MacBeth's method of teaching embroidery was adopted in Scottish schools and one of my aunts subsequently used it to teach me. It involved sheets of card with long and short stitches drawn on them so that you made rapid progress, and brightly coloured stitches. But at school in the 1950s I was taught by duller methods. My aunt did beautiful work, which was remarkable for her use of colour, but it didn't rub off on me so some of it must have been her own talent. Sadly, none of her work seems to have survived. I asked her to do me a tablecloth once, but by then her final illness had set in and the cloth was very ordinary.
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