ANNE WANNER'S Textiles in History / symposiums

   
  Meeting in Plauen, Germany 23 April to 24 April 2010
  Verein Vogtländische Textilgeschichte Plauen e.V.
Sitz Schaustickerei Plauener Spitze, Obstgartenweg 1, D-08523 Plauen
Tel. ++ 03741/443 187

schaustickerei@web.de - www.schaustickerei-plauen.de
 

     
      The city of Plauen    
     
           
     
   

 
  Vogtlandmuseum Plauen, Nobelstr. 9-13,
D-08523 Plauen
       
 
 
12 pm opening of the study days by
Lordmayor of the city of Plauen, Ralf Oberdorfer
 
2.10 pm papers on Plauen Lace, in the festival room;
by Dipl. Paed. Beate Schad, and Katrin Färber
           
 

Exhibition at Vogtlandmuseum Plauen. Here hand embroidery is on show.
 

Whitework hand embroidery from 1851,
exhibited at the London World Exhibition 1851
 
House built between 1797-99 by the cotton merchant Johann Christian Kanz. In this room the emperor Napoleon Ist spent a night in May 1812 on his journey to Russia
  In earlier times wollen cloth was produced in Plauen. Since the 16th c. the production of cotton fabrics is documented and since 1770 tambour or chainstitch embroidery was known. It is said that Karoline Wilhelmine Krause (married since 1802 to the cotton merchant Karl Gottlieb Krause) learnt how to embroider the satin stitch at the court of Weimar and introduced it around 1808/10 in Plauen





Lit: Beate Schad, Plauener Spitze, filigrane Gebilde des Industriezeitalters, Plauen 2009

.
 

Hand embroidered presentation of the merchant Rudolf Schmidt, who lived from 1839 to 1889 at Nobelstrasse 13. He wrote memories of his youth which are presserved.
 
           
  The Plauen Lace Museum
Unterer Graben 1, D-08523 Plauen
       
     
 
   

 

           
  Fedor Schnorr (1817-1896) of Plauen discovered the embroidery machine at the world exhibition in Paris 1855. But as he did not succeed to buy this machine he sent the student Albert Voigt (1829-1895) of Chemnitz to Switzerland with the order to buy 2 machines there.   Voigt bought 2 machines in the machine factory Burkhard at St. Fiden (St.Gallen). With the technician Johann Conrad Dietrich some cases with the parts of the machines were smuggled over the lake of Constance and they arrived on 27 October 1857 in Plauen.   The machines were set up in the factory of Fedor Schnorr and in January 1858 the production of machine embroideries started.
Albert Voigt since 1860 developped the production and improvement of the embroidery machines.
           
     

  Men's coat made from assebled parts   Procedure of assembling table cloth    
  The name chemical lace derived from the use of chlorine or caustic soda to remove the backing.
The design is embroidered with the machine and when it is finished, the background is singed away. In this way 'shaped pieces' and 'allovers' can be made.
  The embroidery machine produces equal parts of embroidery which have to be assebled in another working stage.
On the machine parts for 28 table cloths were produced in 4794 minutes.
  The joining of the parts took 8305 minutes. This work was done on a sewing machine.
The total working time for 28 cloths was 20752 minutes which is 12 hours and 35 minutes per one table cloth.
  The Cornely is a hand-operated sewing machine and it fixed a thick thread around the outlines in patterned machine laces.
The Bonnaz was a chain-stitch machine used to embroider patterns on net in imitation of tambour work. The shapes were attached by chain stitch instead of a couched cord.
(Text from: A Dictionnary of Lace by Pat Earnshaw, 1982, p.106)



Curtain, 1913,
embroidered with the chainstitch machine on tull.
 
 

           
  Showing and demonstration of machine embroidery, Obstgartenweg 1, D-08529 Plauen        
     
           
  The dwelling house was built in 1889 by Max Vollstädt. In 1902 the one-storied factory building was added. In 1904 the owner became Albert Schiller, merchant of machinelace. The building was used as a factory until 1997. It was built for 10 big embroidery machines. The measurements of the house corresponded to the size of the machines. Rooflight and big windows gave the required daylight.

There were several changes of ownership. In December 2001 the factory became a museum to demonstrate machine embroidery.
 
 
           
 


The genuine historic embroidery machines are completed by some machines of other Vogtland factories of the time
 
Chain Stitch machine
 
Working with the pantograph
 


Pantograph

           
     
  The design was originally controlled by a pantograph: as the course of the threads was traced stitch by stitch on a master design. The net itself was moved and the hundreds of needles embroidered simultaneously along the whole width of the machine.   The Schiffli is an enormous machine, often 20 yards (18m) or more long, with the ability to reprocuce the same desing many times over at once. It can be used to imitate the patterns, though not the technique.
 


(Text from: A Dictionnary of Lace by Pat Earnshaw, 1982, p.106)

               
 
Multi-head  machines
  Threading machine
 
Copy machine
 



Magnification machine:
The design has to be scaled up 6 times in order to be used for machine embroidery.

   
 

home content Last revised May 10, 2010