The Bayeux Tapestry

The challenge of the internet: you start looking for one thing and then find another.  I was browsing the course offerings at Coursera https://about.coursera.org/ which has 3 levels of offerings taught by instructors at different universities, and came across the Age of Cathedrals under general interest (not a degree program).  When I looked up the instructor, M. Howard Bloch, I decided to look for videos and found one on the Bayeux Tapestry.  I'm not particularly a craft person, but I do following quilting, crocheting, knitting groups on Facebook.  This is history in embroidery.

https://www.c-span.org/video/?197293-1/a-needle-hand-god

The Bayeux Tapestry is the world’s most famous textile–an exquisite 230-foot-long embroidered panorama depicting the events surrounding the Norman Conquest of 1066. It is also one of history’s most mysterious and compelling works of art. This haunting stitched account of the battle that redrew the map of medieval Europe has inspired dreams of theft, waves of nationalism, visions of limitless power, and esthetic rapture.

https://french.yale.edu/publications/needle-right-hand-god-norman-conquest-1066-and-making-and-meaning-bayeux-tapestry

Monday Memories--Mom's quilt plan for the grandchildren

I was looking for a small red ribbon to tie a little note my son had given me for Mother's Day (in a bottle), and the drawer in the sewing cabinet jammed.  When I finally got it open I found a plastic bag with floss and two hexagon cut embroidery pieces for a quilt on a very light weight white fabric--one for Ohio with cardinal and carnation, and the other North Carolina with cardinal and dogwood.  Each has the date they entered the union, Ohio in 1803, the 17th, and North Carolina which was 1789, the 12th of the original 13 colonies. It was a challenge to reconstruct this memory, but I finally remembered that my mother had brought them with her on a trip to Ohio because our daughter had been working on embroidery skills. I'm not sure, but I think it was Mom's plan to hand these out to the various grandchildren and then have them pieced into a quilt.  Great idea, but if the others didn't get any further than ours I don't think it ever came together.

This is her note for the correct colors for the pattern, sort of worse for the wear being 40 years in a plastic bag--but I would know that handwriting anywhere. Seeing her letters drop through the mail slot made my day for many years. These items hadn't been in the sewing cabinet 40 years, but a few months ago I had donated my "stash" to the Cancer resale store up the street, and probably decided to save these, and then immediately forgot them.

The pattern stamp had faded, so I couldn't scan them for this blog. I sorted through some google searches for "hexagon embroidery quilt patterns U.S. state birds", and actually did find one sample of a hexagon for Missouri, although the most common were squares.

Mom's note on the color strands