Millie gets a move on

During Victorian times, woman - and not just mill working woman - took to wearing a long slender shawl called the Sontag, named after the German singer called Henrietta Sontag who brought it to the attention at that time. It wrapped around the shoulders and the back of the neck, crossed over at the front and was either tied or tucked into a belt at the back. The earliest written pattern found for the Sontag was in the 1860s.

It felt fitting that Millie should have one as it would allow me to incorporate elements of Himself's work in textiles. The hessian itself originated from India, transported to Forfar in Scotland and then down to the textile mills in the northern England. The wools are 100% British wools from mills in Huddersfield in West Yorkshire. So a rough and hardworking Sontag was made for Millie, to keep from being cold in the linen mills during chilly early starts.

Her skirt was given a patch - using a snip of linen left from cutting out the pattern, it felt right to use every last scrap, then simple boro mending was applied - to allow it to be both functional and decorative.

The original fabric doll had printed hair ribbons holding her plaits back. However, once the body was sewn and stuffed, these once prominent ribbons seemed to flatten out - so strips of red fabric were retrieved from the snippety-bits-basket and attached. Ribbons were very expensive and so would have been precious and worn with pride and love.

The working mill woman would have had a simple working style of chatelaine belt, not decorative but a purely functional version where all the tools of the trade were hung and in this case a whistle which would have been used to be able to be heard above the clatter of the weaving machines. Most mills were several stories high and the noise would have been almost unbearable. Millies learnt to lip read so they could communicate during the long working day which usually started at 6am, finishing at 6pm with an hour for lunch. 

Aprons were not just the domain of the working class, nearly everyone had some form of pinafore or apron to protect their clothing. With needing to protect the few items of clothing they had not just from wear and tear but from general dirt, a protective pinny or apron was worn by both women and men, rich and poor alike.

Time marches on, Millie has a date to keep and I have to make sure she keeps it ... 💙
 

What Millie did next

Having painted what I could, Millie lay out on my work-desk overnight to allow the paint to fully dry.

As I mentioned yesterday, with reference to the lack of poor or working class clothes in museums, it made me think on my favourite form of slow-sew stitching -  Japanese Boro ( ぼろ) mending. It is derived from the word boroboro meaning tattered or repaired. The mended cloth then, over years, develops a wonderful beauty and history - each one having a unique story with patches being added and reinforced by simple stitches.

I have been using boro mending on work jeans for Himself and decorate my clothing as well as fabric journal covers. So, I decided to gently include boro into Millie's skirt. Linking mending with embellishment to create an object of 'impermanence and imperfection' yet functional and beautiful leads to another traditional Japanese aesthetic - Wabi sabi' - which is used to describe the appreciation the beauty of the imperfect and incomplete.

One of the many hazards (and there were many) of working in a textile mill before present day health and safety legislation, was the exposure of mill workers to cotton dust which to respiratory disorders with some progressing on to some fatal lung diseases.

Himself is a modern day textile worker and despite wearing a mask with filters is still is affected by cotton dust although thankfully no way near the extent of the unprotected woman who laboured at the linen weaving machines.

So - stitching this doll is also my way of not just acknowledging the hardship and and hard working Millies, but also present day textile workers here and around the world.