My unfinished needlework...
I think we probably all have at least one unfinished piece sitting around our house waiting for us.
But to find an unfinished piece from the past is actually quite rare (heirs and spouses often don’t keep our unfinished work).
This Monday I’ve got an amazing piece of partially finished work from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to show you. These are the pieces for an unfinished stumpwork cabinet. They raise more questions for me about the construction of said cabinet than they answer. The pieces are stitched on one piece of fabric, very close together. They are intended to be cut apart and applied to a wooden cabinet as so many stumpwork pieces are. But there isn’t any space to wrap them around… how were they applied? Glue? gimp and finishing nails?
The finished casket above can be seen in detail here. There are many closeups and different views of it.
In any case, it is a wonderful opportunity to see a work in progress. They have other caskets online that have been finished, so you can imagine what this would look like finished!
I love these. In particular, Gone Fishin’ reminds me of my own baby Rhys, gone now for a bit over a year. I miss that cat. He used to “fish” just like that on our dinner plates in college when we didn’t have a table to eat at. And if you called him on it, he would get this look like “What? Oh dear. How DID that paw get THERE?!” As if we didn’t know.
