Patterns: Waste Paper, Pouncing & Heat Transfer

Woman holding some kind of needlework pattern, probably

transfer paper, and fabric with the pattern transferred

This post is about patterns for needlework and how seamstresses transferred their purchased patterns in the past---stamping, pouncing, hot iron transfers, waste paper and tracing the design onto fabric.

"If one is near a first-class art embroidery shop she can of course have this stamping done for her...."

explained Home Needlework magazine in 1906. So we know the services a first class needlework shop would offer.

However, the home needleworker or the home pattern designer had many options to reproduce designs.

 The ad above ran in the Brooklyn Eagle for weeks in 1858.

"Quilting Patterns---Something New---A very useful and time saving article for forming patterns on bed quilts and ladies' skirts, price 25 cents at J. Bunce's, 94 Fulton, corner Henry Street."

John and Richard Bunce ran a hardware and furnishing store on Fulton Street in Brooklyn. They may have been selling some kind of transfer or stamping kit.

Tracing the Pattern onto Paper

1829 needlework advice: 

"Patterns...may be purchased at most of the fancy-shops...A pattern may be copied, by placing a thin piece of paper over the original, and tracing it through, against a window."

 (I still use this method when I'm too lazy to find the light box.)

One might trace onto a suitable translucent sheet of paper but if you had none you could make tracing paper by soaking the paper in lard or kerosene, according to a set of directions in Blakelee's Industrial Encyclopedia in 1889. (Do not try either of these methods at home, especially by candlelight.)

Blakelee's had you glue the tracing paper to a piece of cardboard and then cut the cardboard for patchwork templates. A time-honored tradition.

François-Hubert Drouais, Madame Pompadour, 1760s

Collection of the National Gallery in London

She may be hooking in a tambour frame, using a hook to chain stitch

Waste Paper

An 1884 patent case from William Briggs discussed pattern for needlework. The plaintiffs contrasted their new method with the customary techniques. In old and new methods a commercial design is first printed with ink onto paper using block printing.

International Quilt Study Center & Museum

 has archived Mountain Mist's steel plates for printing 

patterns on paper for batting wrappers. 

"In domestic embroidery it is customary to use paper upon which the pattern to be embroidered is printed from surface blocks or otherwise. This paper is stitched upon the fabric to be embroidered, and when the embroidery is complete the paper upon which the pattern had been printed is torn out."

Nancy Zieman showing how to tear away a pattern printed on stabilizer

This transfer method is sometimes called waste paper. I have used it many times for hand embroidering words. You write words on high quality paper and baste it to the fabric; embroider through both the paper and the fabric and when finished tear away the paper. It works quite well if the paper doesn't shred too much.

Heat Transfer

Heat transferring ink was invented in the 1850s or '60s.

The Briggs patent lawsuit discussed their new method of pattern copying, patented in England in . 1874, which involved printing designs in a novel ink---"a bituminous substance or varnish and transferring the said pattern to the fabric when required, by the application of heat to the back of the paper....A beautiful clear pattern of any colour is marked on the fabrics."

Transferable patterns were sold in this 1886 book

from Briggs in Manchester, England, who may have held

most of the early patents.

The patterns were bound into the book. It's a wonder any of the books are left but here's a digital version:

https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=caia.ark:/13960/t6xw5jf80;view=1up;seq=22

Pouncing or Stamping Through Perforations

A fourth method of transferring pattern is by punching holes through the paper pattern, securing it to the fabric and sifting a powder through the holes. The powder is called pounce powder or stamping powder.

An old pounce shaker

One can make a tool for applying powder by stitching a small coarse cotton bag, filling it with powder and banging or pouncing the bag against the pattern lines. Powder sifts into the holes.

You can still buy pounce powder

Cardboard pattern with pounce powder sticking to the holes

Many patterns sold by professional designer were pre-punched with holes. A clever mechanic could perforate several sheets of paper at once with her designs. Or the customer could punch holes herself in a printed pattern with a sharp needle or a special tool, a pounce wheel.

Vintage tracing wheel

A perforating wheel looked like this but probably sharper and with spikes spaced further apart.

We used to use this type of tracing wheel with dressmaker's 

carbon paper (yet another way to transfer designs).

Before heat transfers, perforated commercial patterns must have been the norm. You may recall Emma Keytes Wilcockson (1829-1871) who operated a Fancy Repository shop in London in the 1850s & '60s. In 1856 she boasted: " I have issued from my establishment upwards of 60,000 square yards of traced and perforated muslin for embroidery.”

See a post on Emma here:

http://womensworkquilts.blogspot.com/2018/02/selling-patchwork-patterns-fancy.html

The blogger at Q is for Quilter found a catalog advertising "Perforated Stamping Patterns" 

from the 1880s

http://qisforquilter.com/

This 1915 ad in a needlework magazine for a battery-operated perforator tells you that it's a "money maker." "Greatest help in [a] Fancy Work Shop. Perforates as a pencil writes. Several patterns at once." 

Well, I wouldn't invest 6 of your 1915 dollars in this item but it does give us a little insight into making money by making patterns.

Contemporary pattern to be perforated

And the machine to do it with

I think this punch would be more reliable than the "Midget Perforator." See a recent Threads post on perforating design.

https://www.threadsmagazine.com/2016/03/02/how-to-embroider-garments-like-penn-fletcher

J.B. Marchais, Girl in a Blue Skirt Sewing

Collection of the Bowes Museum

She has Berlin work in her lap

With all the trials and troubles detailed above you can see why counted or charted needlework has

always been so popular. No tracing, just counting.

Here's a post on a New York fancy store:

http://womensworkquilts.blogspot.com/2018/03/a-fancy-store-in-new-york-city.html

Read more about pattern transferring in Molly Proctor's Art Needlework & Embroidery Transfers:

https://books.google.com/books?id=LDpKAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA6&dq=heat+transfer+pattern+invented+embroidery&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjfyLj7oc_cAhVr54MKHUdcCBcQ6AEIRjAF#v=onepage&q=heat%20transfer%20pattern%20invented%20embroidery&f=false

New York City's Crawford Shops

Women working in the Crawford Shops sewing workroom in the early 20th century,

stitching dolls for the toy store, located at 28 West 51st Street.

Plain sewing on clothing. 

Jessie Tarbox Beals took many of these photographs

for the Association's newspaper Baghdad on the Subway

Offering sewing rooms where women could find work, comfortable conditions and companionship was a common mission of charitable organizations. The New York Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor, founded in 1843, opened the Crawford Work Shops in 1915. 

"For several years the work of the Association's Sewing Bureau was limited to the giving out of sewing to be done by women in their own homes, this for the purpose of giving to such women an opportunity of adding a dollar or two each week to the family income....

Working at home had advantages but a 

central workshop offered a refuge from small city apartments.

"It was decided to change the method of work by having rooms to which the women could come to do the sewing under instruction....through the kindness of Mr. and Mrs. Wm. Emerson who gave us the use of two rooms in the Emerson Apartment House at 555 West 53rd Street, near Eleventh Avenue. The classes, beginning with five women in attendance, had increased to 30 in July, making it necessary to transfer them to larger quarters at 408 West 20th Street. Here again they have steadily increased to an average attendance of between 40 and 50 women at both morning and afternoon classes."

The clients are often described as old and infirm, but obviously

there is a range of ages. 

Why so many references to the elderly? Perhaps the article of faith that younger women should be at home taking care of children might prejudice the public against the enterprise.

In 1917:  Ninety women were employed "paid at the minimum rate of 15 cents an hour and are allowed to work any or all of the day...women who must prepare children for school [may] come late and go home as early as they wish." This change in descriptions may reflect changes brought by World War I when working women gained some temporary patriotic approval.

One ambitious project was the Crawford Rug Shop begun in the 1930s in which professional artists designed rugs to be hooked by shop workers. In 1937 eleven of the rugs were shown at the Museum of Modern Art, which owns one of them, Marguerite Zorach's Jungle. Artist Florence Decker managed the Rug Shop in those years.

I haven't found any references to patchwork or quilts in the Crawford Shop records, but this is the kind of charitable sewing organization that was a common source of needlework plain and fancy.

See a post about charity sewing rooms and women's exchanges here:

http://womensworkquilts.blogspot.com/2018/06/womens-exchanges-depositories.html

The tradition continues:
The Waverly Tennessee United Methodist Church has scheduled its Annual White Oak Women's Exchange Quilt Show & Boutique for November 2 & 3rd this year.
https://www.facebook.com/events/192935418112908/

Read more about the Crawford Shops at Columbia University Libraries archive here:

https://css.cul.columbia.edu/catalog?f%5Bsubject_names%5D%5B%5D=Crawford%20Work%20Shops%20(New%20York,%20N.Y.)