Presenting an unusual wallpaper border that reflects both the current wall fashion and the use of new technology. This paper border is embossed and die-cut, with many open or pierced areas within the design. The border consists of large bunches of purple grapes hanging on the vine with green-colored foliage. The vine is suspended from...
This charming frieze doubles as an overview of women’s fashion from the period 1700-1900. It features nine women grouped into trios separated by a curvilinear motif of a flowering vine. On the far left, a woman in simple colonial dress stands next to a woman in mid-eighteenth-century and a woman in late-eighteenth-century garb. The next...
I have long admired the wide children’s borders, also called friezes, designed and produced in the early twentieth century, prior to the Great Depression in 1929. Cooper Hewitt has a fair collection of these with the most popular being Winnie the Pooh, produced ca. 1926, coinciding with the release of the book by A.A. Milne...
Elizabeth Ann Harpin Andrew was born on September 26, 1749, and stitched this sampler at the age of six. She ornamented her work with highly stylized floral motifs, framed with four-leaf clovers in a chain-link border. Elizabeth recorded the sampler’s completion date as October 17, 1755, and carefully calculated her age on that date as...
Author: Cecilia Gunzburger September is New York Textile Month! In celebration, members of the Textile Society of America will author Object of the Day for the month. A non-profit professional organization of scholars, educators, and artists in the field of textiles, TSA provides an international forum for the exchange and dissemination of information about textiles...
Peepers is a wallpaper border designed with children in mind. It is less infantile in design than other children’s papers so will not be so quickly outgrown and can be and can be paired with another wallpaper or used alone on a painted wall to create an inexpensive decoration. The amorphous figures get smaller as...
This frieze by the New York-based Robert Graves Co. is an excellent example of the use of Native American motifs in American design at the turn of the century. Though this was an age that saw an unprecedented suppression of native culture, Native American art itself saw an unprecedented wave of appreciation and praise, particularly...
I have always been fond of landscape friezes and I sometimes wish I lived in a nice bungalow where I could actually use some of these different wall treatments to best effect. I’ve probably mentioned before that wide landscape friezes were popularized by Walter Crane when he introduced his May Tree frieze in 1896, and...
Excerpt from Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman’s essay “Where is the Public Today? Design for a New Civic Imagination” from By the People: Designing a Better America exhibition publication. Border Crossing Design by the people begins with re-energizing a public culture and building the capacity of divided communities for mutual recognition and coexistence. The San...
