Category: Lily Yeats

"But Bless Our Hands That Ebb Away"

2/16/2016

In our previous blog post we talked about Lily Yeats and her role in the Arts and Crafts movement in Ireland. Today we will be discussing the various methods used to conserve and frame this historic embroidery, which will be on display at the McMullen Museum at Boston College from February 5 to June 6, 2016, as a part of the exhibit “The Arts and Crafts Movement: Making it Irish.”

When Museum Textile Services received the embroidery it was mounted onto an acidic board behind a gold paper mat inside an oak frame. The ground silk was wrapped around to the back side of the board and strung with orange linen thread. The mounted object was quite a bit smaller than its frame.

Embroidery by Lily Yeats and Brigid O'Brien, John J. Burns Library, Boston College.

In order to center the mounted embroidery into the frame, someone had taped it to the back of the gold window mat. MTS conservator Cara Jordan was able to be remove most of the tape mechanically with limited loss of silk. Small areas of tape that were more difficult to remove were humidified, allowing Cara eventually to lift the tape from the silk.

Tape on the reverse of the embroidery.

One edge being humidified,

The edge after tape was removed.

In order to remount the embroidery, the orange lacing had to be removed. The thread was cut in a few key spots, after which it was easily unlaced from the silk ground. The orange thread was too weak to reuse, so it was returned to the client. To our surprise, the back corners and an area of deterioration on the front had been glued to the board. Cara successfully released these adhered areas with acetone.

Cara remounted the embroidery onto a board of the same size as the original because the deep folds in the ground silk retained a memory of that shape. She lightly tensioned the embroidery around a new archival 8-ply board to which she had attached cotton poplin. While the embroidery was face up, it was hand stitched to the outer edge of the board using DMC cotton thread. It was then flipped over onto a padded surface and the folds of fabric were arranged on the back of the board before being hand stitched in place. The embroidery was then flipped face up again and Cara placed a network of hand stitching around the figures. Once the embroidery was properly mounted, the areas of damage were couched to the fabric-covered board with Gütermann Skala polyester thread.

Since the newly mounted embroidery was smaller than the frame, Cara needed to make a spacer system to properly position the embroidery. She cut a ring of corrugated polypropylene and covered the interior edge with archival frame tape. A new gold mat was cut for the piece to hide the sharp line between the faded front and the still-green sides. The mat was adhered to the polypropylene spacer with archival double-stick tape. The embroidery was then framed behind UV-filtering glass in its oak frame.

Mounted embroidery with the polypropylene spacer around it.

The unfaded bright green edge of the mounted embroidery.

The mounted embroidery with its mat adhered to the spacer.

We hope that you are as excited to see this embroidery at the McMullen as we are!

Morgan Carbone has a BA in Art History from Grinnell College. She recently finished her Master of Arts degree in Fashion and Textile Studies at the Fashion Institute of Technology.

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"The Proud and Careless Notes Live On"

2/1/2016

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In December, 2015, Museum Textile Services textile conservators Camille Myers Breeze and Morgan Carbone traveled to Boston College to condition report, vacuum and install a tapestry now on display at the Burns Library. While there, we looked at an embroidery done by Lily Yeats and Brigid O'Brien in 1915, which needed some conservation TLC. The newly-purchase embroidery will be on display in “The Arts and Crafts Movement: Making it Irish,” opening at the McMullen Museum at Boston College on February 6, 2016. The exhibit contains over one hundred artifacts from the Irish Arts and Crafts movement.

Embroidery by Lily Yeats and Brigid O'Brien, John J. Burns Library, Boston College.

The signatures “BO’BRIEN” and “Lily YEATS” are stitched at the bottom corners of the embroidery. Brigid O'Brien is credited as the designer and Lily Yeats was the maker. Yeats had been involved in the Arts and Crafts movement for many years by the time she made this embroidery. She studied embroidery under May Morris, daughter of William Morris, starting in 1888. In 1902 Lily, along with her sister Elizabeth and friend Evelyn Gleeson, founded the Dun Emer guild in Dublin. Dun Emer focused primarily on tapestry and carpet making. In 1908, the group separated and Lily and her sister founded Cuala Industries which ran a printing press and an embroidery workshop. The embroidery that MTS conserved was created in the Cuala embroidery workshop around 1915.

Framing the central figures in the embroidery are two banners reading, "The Proud and Careless Notes Live On But Bless Our Hands That Ebb Away." The text is from the W. B. Yeats poem The Players ask for a Blessing on the Psalteries and themselves from his collection of lyrical poems called In the Seven Woods. The poem was also Elizabeth Yeats' first hand-printed publication at Dun Emer, in 1903. W. B. Yeats was the brother of Lily and Elizabeth Yeats. Their other brother, Jack Butler Yeats, designed textiles for both Cuala Industries and the Dun Emer guild.

The Boston College embroidery has several condition issues, including fading due to light exposure, an area of unidirectional loss to the right of the figures, and gummy adhesive tape holding the back of the mounted textile to an acidic paper mat. Stay tuned for our follow-up blog on the textile conservation treatment by Cara Jordan.

Morgan Carbone has a BA in Art History from Grinnell College. She recently finished her Master of Arts degree in Fashion and Textile Studies at the Fashion Institute of Technology.

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"But Bless Our Hands That Ebb Away"

"The Proud and Careless Notes Live On"

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