Learn Embroidery: Imperial Goldwork Course available now!

Back in 2020, when we were all cooped up inside, I taught an 8-part series on Zoom called the Imperial Goldwork Course. The series was based on the book “Lehrcurs der Goldstickerei” published in 1902 by Amelie von Saint-George. I have now uploaded the original PDFs and the recorded Zoom sessions of the live teaching. The course is available as part of a monthly or yearly subscription. Let’s have a look at what was taught at the Imperial School of Needlework in Vienna, Austria.

Miss Amelie was a tutor at the Imperial School of Needlework in Vienna at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th-century. The Imperial School of Needlework was established by Emilie Bach (1840-1890) in 1873. At the time, people were concerned that high-quality needlework would disappear due to the sharp decline in demand after the French Revolution (1789-1799). In the introduction of her book, Miss Amelie mourns the poor technical state and design of especially goldwork embroidery in the first decades of the 19th century. The Imperial School of Needlework raised the technical and design ability in needlework again by training professional embroideresses by the hundreds. The school was so successful that other schools were established within the Austrian Empire and the German Empire.

In order to make goldwork embroidery available to all needlework women, Miss Amelie published her ‘Lehrcurs der Goldstickerei’ in 1902. It is a rather charming book due to its antiquated tone and beautiful, high-quality drawings. In essence, the book is a step-by-step course teaching the type of goldwork embroidery popular in Central Europe at the end of the 19th-century. Quite a few techniques taught in the book have now become rare and are no longer taught, for instance, at the Royal School of Needlework. And although the reprint is widely available, its German text makes it rather inaccessible to most modern needleworkers. And, as you can conclude from the above, Miss Emilie and Miss Amelie did not believe in teaching embroidery to men … Luckily, times have changed, and I have no such reservations.

At the time, I adapted only the first part of the book for the online Imperial Goldwork Course. Teaching embroidery virtually was rather new at the time. Do let me know in the comments if this style of teaching, i.e. live Zoom classes and their recordings, is something you are interested in. And would you like to see an adaptation of the other parts of the book?

Literature
Saint-George, A. von (1902), Die Kunst der Goldstickerei nebst einer Anleitung zur Verwendung der Goldstickerei in Verbindung mit Applikation. Wien: Wiener Mode. Available from the Antique Pattern Library as a free PDF download.  If the link doesn’t work, go to www.antiquepatternlibrary.org, choose ‘embroidery’ from the categories at the top, and scroll down until you find the book.