5 10 61 http://www.artisansinscotland.shca.ed.ac.uk/files/original/20c88e402542cd0d1d8d8abccc0b7cf0.jpg 2e375135098855cbb0afccf6c189e77b Exhibition Item Category Metal Wares Image copyright National Museums Scotland Item Location National Museum Scotland Description A photographic portrait of Robert Davidson (1845-1921), master blacksmith at Woodfoot, near Hawick, Roxburghshire with his second daughter, Mary, stood outside the lodge house and gate entrance to Stobs Castle, dated 1887 according to record, but, from the costume worn by the woman, probably a decade later. Robert Davidson is dressed in his working clothes of heavy stripped collarless cotton shirt and waistcoat, with flat peaked cap and leather blacksmith’s apron over trousers and sturdy but dusty boots. His shirt sleeves are rolled up to the elbows and he strikes a pose typically seen among men involved in the physically demanding metal and building trades, with brawny arms crossed high on his chest and a penetrating stare. The full beard and walrus-styled moustache, though fashionable at the time, add a patriarchal air. His daughter is stylishly dressed in a bell shaped walking skirt and matching jacket, with gigot sleeves, tight waist and a flared peplum. She has a white shirt with stand-up collar and tie. This ensemble along with the flat straw hat is characteristic of the style of dress adopted by the later nineteenth century ‘new woman’. Robert was descended from a long line of Roxburghshire blacksmiths. His grandfather, father and elder brother, all named Walter, were the blacksmiths who occupied the Newmill-on-Teviot smithy a few miles south of Hawick for most of the nineteenth century. A country blacksmith such as Robert Davidson would turn his hand to many different activities, such as shoeing horses, mending and making farm or local workshop equipment and fashioning tools for use by other craftsmen, such as hammers, knives, files and chisels. The Stobs Castle estate, from which he rented the cottage and workshop attached to the castle lodge would have generated much of his work. Though the name of the photographer is unrecorded, he was probably an amateur who enjoyed taking photographs of local people and scenes and was possibly connected to the gentry family who lived in Stobs Castle. Craft portraits of the period showing artisans in their places of work with well-dressed female family members included in the composition are common, but the men are normally also in their Sunday-best, with aprons over good trousers and smart shoes. What is unusual in this image is the contrast between the smart young woman, proud of her fashionable costume and her equally proud and dignified father in the ordinary working clothes of the master blacksmith. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Robert Davidson, Blacksmith and his Daughter, Roxburghshire ca. 1897 amateur blacksmiths dressmakers Hawick joiners photographers Roxburghshire http://www.artisansinscotland.shca.ed.ac.uk/files/original/05256bf4a27a7e08826cffcdaef21f56.jpg fc545bd80b7d531344c19733bc14bc65 Exhibition Item Category Wood Image copyright Orkney Islands Council Item Location Orkney Museum Description This is a photograph of Robert Foubister, a crofter, and his daughter making a straw backed Orkney Chair. They are pictured preparing oat straw into coils that are then stitched into the wooden frame. Foubister appears frequently in the D. M. Kirkness Orkney Chair order book for the 1890s alongside other chair backers including John Coupland of Kirkwall. A typical entry for 1891 was for two chairs, one mid sized and one small, both backed by Foubister, who was paid 5s and 3s6d respectively, as ordered by Miss Spead ‘while on a visit at Berstane House’, with the chairs and bills sent to Wm H. Longbottom, Cavendish Road, East the Park, Nottingham, who Miss Spead was about to marry. Miss Maud Balfour of Berstane House was one of the first to place an order with Kirkness. Foubister is a common name in Orkney. A fellow craftsman ca.1860 was Thomas Foubister, a taxidermist in Kirkwall, but most of that name were crofters and fishermen. Few trees grow on Orkney and the chair evolved for local home industry using drift wood and locally-grown straw. By the time this photograph was taken, the commercially made Orkney chair was made using imported wood, mostly shipped from Aberdeen. This portrait is the subject of a commercial postcard, which was published in the Kent’s Series and aimed at the tourist market. It is unusual for this genre of images that we know the names of the sitters, who are photographed in an artist’s studio, probably in Kirkwall, and not their usual place of work on a croft about six miles away. The photographer was Tom Kent, locally born in 1863 but trained in America. He contributed to magazines such as Country Life and sold postcard images of Orkney views and traditional life. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Robert Foubister and his daughter Lizzie, Orkney ca. 1920 chair Kirkness Kirkwall Orkney photographers postcard straw tourist industry wood http://www.artisansinscotland.shca.ed.ac.uk/files/original/7a6392de91e13df9aa5a285a13831f3d.jpg 0d4374f27c26c2212b58bcb60ed46928 Exhibition Item Category Glass and Ceramics Image copyright National Museums Scotland Item Location Cumnock Description Redware salt container topped with a hen and chicks in a nest, made by the Cumnock Pottery in East Ayrshire and dated 1871. This russet brown, black and cream glazed kitchen ceramic is of an ovoid or egg-shaped form with applied feathered decoration on the sides and a moulded brown-speckled hen and four chicks sat in a straw nest on the top. There is a round hand-sized aperture towards one side embellished with chick motifs, below which is a white plaque decorated with the words ‘from Cumnock Pottery 1871’ rendered in a simple free-style hand. Redware, also known as terracotta, is a type of hard, red stoneware, though the term is also used to describe any common clay pottery that is red in colour. Salt containers such as this, for standing alongside a cooking stove, have a covered top to keep the salt dry and free from kitchen debris. They are variously known as salt crocks, vases or pigs, the latter an old Scots word for a jar or pot made of earthenware. The nesting hen was a popular whimsical motif in eighteenth and nineteenth century pottery design, seen frequently in early Staffordshire-made egg baskets or tureens and adopted in Scotland from the mid-nineteenth century. The Cumnock Pottery made many styles of salt containers, usually embellished with ‘couthy’ sayings, but they are mostly plain in form. The decorative hen feature seen here suggests a more expensive object than the usual output. The Cumnock Pottery was founded in 1792 on the Dumfries House estate of Lord Bute by the inspector of mines there, the Leadhill-born engineer James Taylor, who also made celebrated contributions to the development of stream engineering. The first potters were brought in from Glasgow but it was many years before the enterprise, which never employed more than a dozen craftsmen, was deemed economically viable and much of the early output comprised basic tiles or simple pots. The fortunes of the business were transformed in the 1850s when the coming of the railway widened the market and acted as a spur to leisure travel. The new owner, James McGavin Nicol, with family links into the grocery trade, expanded the output into more decorative domestic wares, colourful flowerpots, holiday souvenirs and commemorative wares to mark family occasions such as marriages and birthdays. Cumnock ware also featured regularly in late nineteenth century Church bazaars and charity sales, alongside the more refined and expensive, Dunmore and Wemyss ware. The striking feature of Cumnock ware is the decoration with mottoes, whose wit and rustic frankness in broad Scots, which were often quotes from the poetry of Burns, appealed to sophisticated urban customers who saw in these homely inscriptions an echo of earlier times. But motto ware was not unique to Scotland and was made in several English potteries at much the same time. The Watcombe Terracotta Clay Company of Torquay, founded in 1869, was particularly noteworthy and like the Cumnock pottery focussed on souvenirs manufacture for sale to holiday makers. In an area best known for coal mining, textiles or fancy box making, contemporary accounts make light of Cumnock ceramic production, partly because the workforce was small and the output naïve in character. A History of Old Cumnock of 1899, by the Rev. John Warrick, gives it only a brief and passing mention. ‘Our local pottery maintains its reputation through the special brown ware, which it sends out under the name of Cumnock pottery, and also through its glazed flowerpots.’ (p. 356-7). The Cumnock pottery was at its height in the late nineteenth century and pre-war years, but closed in 1920 as fashions changed and the local clay was exhausted. But as with so many areas of distinctive Scottish craft production, as the industry came to an end the appeal to collectors began to grow – delighting the ‘connoisseur in Scottish domestic utensils’ and evoking a ‘glad smile from the Scot in exile.’ (Aberdeen Press and Journal, 20 July, 1925) One of the best collections is housed in the Baird Institute in Cumnock where the oldest pot is inscribed ‘William McCroan, Weaver at Chapel, 1801.’ Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Saut [Salt] Bucket, ‘From Cumnock Pottery, 1871’ Ayrshire bazaars Burns Bute collectors pottery Staffordshire terracotta tourist industry http://www.artisansinscotland.shca.ed.ac.uk/files/original/422d579e5821359d52960e2143168d70.jpg 6b0e430ebefc1534a1d63314555678fc Exhibition Item Title Silver Teapot, Robert Gray and Son Category Buildings Description This round silver Rococo styled teapot has a domed top and is set on a base with a gadrooned band. A cast plaque has been applied to the side showing two greyhounds hunting a hare and the lettering ‘Ardrossan Coursing Club MCCCCXXVll’. It was made by Glasgow silversmiths, Robert Gray and Son. The teapot’s fashionable design with additional applied and engraved detail identifies it as a sporting trophy. The top, handle and spout are decorated with a swirling foliate and floral rococo-styled pattern. The NMS owns another silver hare-coursing trophy made by the same firm in 1823, this time in the form of a circular footed basked with handle decorated with a cast band of vine leaves and grapes on the inner edge, bearing the same cast motif of two greyhounds and hare and engraved detail of the prize winner. These wares, the teapot and the basket, were presumably also made without the additional decoration for domestic customers. Silverware production was transformed ca1820 with increases in the supply of silver from the Americas and Australia, reducing costs and allowing expansion into the growing middle class market. Design influences were conservative and mostly backward referencing, with the Neoclassical and Rococo style predominating. The gadroon motif on the base and upper rim of this teapot was commonly found on the edges of furniture as well as silver ware of the period and is of neoclassical inspiration, though the piece as a whole is of a hybrid design. A base like this could be used for other items in the product range. Robert Gray (c. 1755-1829) is regarded as one of Scotland’s finest silver makers, with a firm in Glasgow’s Trongate from c. 1776 and a broad output that included flatware, candlesticks, presentation cups and plates and the ubiquitous silver tea service. At the time the teapot was made, the firm was managed by William Gray (1781-1850), son of the founder, who was his father’s apprentice from 1794-1802. Robert Gray and Son trained a generation of fine silversmiths, many emigrating overseas, including Robert Hendery of Montreal, who completed his apprenticeship in Glasgow in 1837 and was in business in Canada by 1841. The Ardrossan Coursing Club, for which this teapot was made, ran its hounds over Lord Eglinton’s lands in the vicinity of the Ayrshire town of Ardrossan. Hare coursing was a popular blood sport amongst rural elites and presentation cups or other silver items, including silver dog collars, were awarded as prizes. Andrew Brown Esq of Thornhill near Stewarton in Ayrshire, whose name as winner is engraved on the teapot along with the name of his dog ‘Loo’, was a gentleman farmer. Robert Gray and Son made many prizes and presentations pieces and also decorated silverwares made by other firms. The silverware trade involved complex relationships between firms with highly skilled provincial makers sourcing some of the components for their standard wares from big London firms. Image copyright National Museums Scotland Item Location National Museums Scotland Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Silver Teapot, Robert Gray and Son, Glasgow, 1827 aristocratic patronage Ayrshire Glasgow London neoclassical rococo silver silversmith http://www.artisansinscotland.shca.ed.ac.uk/files/original/89df88dcdc5aa058e17343f89e0ae737.jpg 3199707dbf7759f6a3bee6bc48f0f2d7 Exhibition Item Category Glass Image copyright CSG CIC Glasgow Museums and Libraries Collections Item Location Maryhill Burgh Hall, Glasgow Description This stained glass panel is one of twenty depicting different trades created by Stephen Adam (1848-1910) for the Burgh Halls in Maryhill a western suburb of Glasgow. Adam was one of Scotland’s most prolific and renowned nineteenth-century stained glass designers. His Maryhill panels celebrate the artisan labour that defined the industries of Glasgow and Maryhill’s local trades. This panel depicts a typical joiner’s workshop. One man wears a traditional Scotch bonnet and carries a basket of tools that include a handsaw and piece of rope, while the other planes a piece of timber on a workbench. The tools and equipment seen here would have been familiar to most woodworker’s workshops in the 1870s. The Maryhill Burgh panels have been noted for their contemporary realism in contrast to Renaissance-style depictions of figures that were favoured for most late nineteenth-century ecclesiastical stained glass. Other Glasgow trades featured in Adam’s panels include zinc spelters, iron moulders and chemical workers. Adam’s own workshops at St Vincent Street, Glasgow, feature in an 1891 published account titled Glasgow and its Environs. The description gives a sense of the hierarchy of tasks and division of labour involved in making architectural stained glass, describing workshops for lead working, drawing and designing cartoons, for glass painting and staining, plus kilns for firing and supplementary departments for packing and for housing stocks of materials. At the height of his success in the 1890s Adam employed several assistants and apprentices. Stephen Adam was born in Edinburgh and received his training at the Trustee’s Academy in Edinburgh. He was apprenticed in 1861 to Edinburgh glass painter James Ballantine who authored A Treatise on Painted Glass in 1845. The Maryhill Burgh Halls panels were commissioned while Adam was in partnership with David Small, a former house-painter who retained his business as an ‘embosser and fancy decorator’ after his partnership with Adam ended in 1885. Adam’s other commissions include memorial windows for Paisley Abbey and contracts for public institutions, hotels, restaurants and banks. A report on his address to the Edinburgh Architectural Society in 1896 described his public work as ‘for the comfort and education of the masses in church and home, palace and hall’ (The Scotsman, December 3,1896). Stained glass was an art form traditionally associated with ecclesiastical buildings but a resurgence of interest in the second half of the nineteenth century led to commissions for decorative glass for public and domestic architecture. Increasing demand supported a number of workshops and designers. Adam was a key figure in Glasgow glass, as were other influential figures such as Oscar Paterson and John and William Guthrie. John Guthrie was a founder member of The Scottish Society of Art Workers, and the Guthries were an example of an established general glaziers and interior decorators that branched out into the lucrative fashion for painted and stained glass in the 1880s. They employed freelance designers from the Glasgow School of Art and produced glass for Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s interiors. Stephen Adam’s work was exhibited at Arts and Crafts exhibitions in London and Scotland, and he also published two books on his craft: Stained Glass its History and Development (1877), and The Truth in Decorative Art: Stained Glass, Medieval and Modern (ca.1896). Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Stained glass panel, 'The Joiners', Stephen Adam, 1878 Adam apprentices Arts and Crafts carpenters designers exhibitions Glasgow glass glass stainers tools http://www.artisansinscotland.shca.ed.ac.uk/files/original/e4e6665368524276f9e1e496a15395b7.jpg e85b5aea4c80b5eb559af55b8c1ac5fa Exhibition Item Category Textiles Image copyright © Shetland Museum and Archives Item Location Shetland Museum and Archives Description This photograph shows the eye-catching Shetland Stand from the Women’s Industries section at the Edinburgh International Exhibition of Industry, Science and Art in 1886. It represents a group of women knitters as a community of craft workers, though three of the girls were from Mainland Shetland and three from nearby Fair Isle. The standing figure is Barbara Muir, sister of Margaret Currie who ran Currie & Co a truck-free shop buying and selling Shetland knitting from premises at Freefield Docks in Lerwick. The women attended the exhibition to raise awareness of the skills of Shetland’s knitters and to sell hand-knitted goods made on the islands. The unusual shape of the stand reflects its construction from whale jawbones, prize remnants from another important Shetland industry. Shetland flags are displayed on either side of the Shetland coat of arms with its distinctive longboat motif and a horizontal banner reads ‘Zetland and Fair Isle Knitters’. The display includes a spinning wheel, a woven kishie (basket) perhaps to hold skeins of wool, and tables on each side of the stand that are draped with fine lace knitted squares. A large lace shawl is one of the many items pinned and draped above the knitter’s heads in this photograph. Fishing and crofting were key industries on Fair Isle and Mainland Shetland but knitting was also economically important to the islands’ communities of women who supplemented their family income and sometimes fed their families on the proceeds of their handiwork. Girls were taught to knit as soon as they were old enough to hold needles, creating items of clothing - shawls, vests and socks – that could be sold to visitors or brokered through merchants. Cash payments for knitting were known but knitted items were more frequently exchanged for essential goods and provisions through Shetland’s cashless truck system. This came under scrutiny in 1872 when a Parliamentary Report revealed the economic realities of Shetland knitting. At a time when four-fifths of all the island’s women were thought to be involved in the hosiery industry - whether as spinners, hand-knitters or in subsidiary tasks such as carding wool of garment finishing - claims were made that when paid in goods rather than money the true value of knitting valued at nine shillings was often as low as four shillings (Report to the Board of Agriculture for Scotland, 1914). The Shetland Stand at the Edinburgh Exhibition was organised by G.H. M. Thoms, Sheriff of Orkney and Shetland, Currie & Co and Mr Laurence of Fair Isle as an educational spectacle where visitors could see the processes of the industry – carding, spinning, dyeing and knitting - ‘practically shown’ by the deft fingers of six young women dressed in national costume. (Official Exhibition Catalogue p. 280). The Scotsman newspaper highlighted the display as one especially ‘worthy of notice and proving of great interest to visitors’. It offered an opportunity to bring makers and purchasers together, though prices had to be clearly tagged and items could not be removed by purchasers until the end of exhibition. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The 'Jaw Bone' Stand at the Edinburgh International Exhibition, 1886 aristocratic patronage Edinburgh exhibitions Glasgow home industries knitters shawls Shetland women’s industries http://www.artisansinscotland.shca.ed.ac.uk/files/original/f8e3ce966627732db6c4b46794251fc7.jpg 347475614f4ef0279978189e7791b7bf Exhibition Item Category Textiles Description Scottish royal burghs were centres of craft manufacture and trade, governed by their merchants and artisans through the town council or ‘executive’. The privileges and responsibilities of craft workers were vested in incorporated bodies, known as trades houses, that regulated craft entry through apprenticeships, set wages and prices, supported the widows and orphans of its members and also had rights to sit on the town council. The city of Dundee had nine incorporated trades – the baxters or bakers; cordiners or shoemakers; skinners or glovers; tailors; bonnetmakers; fleshers; hammermen; weavers; and dyers. The character of these crafts, with their strong sense of community, reflected a local emphasis on textile processing and clothing manufacture. By the mid eighteenth century, with new technologies of production and expanding markets, the controls that were exercised by traditional craft elites through their trade houses were waning. This is a famous print, reproduced in a number of versions, whose satirical intent is clear from the less than flattering representation of the individuals depicted. It was painted by a local artist, Henry Harwood and engraved in Edinburgh against a background of frequent accusations of town council corruption in Dundee and major disputes over control of the harbour. The men who make up the ‘executive’ are stood in the High Street in front of the Trades Hall. To the right is the Merchant’s Hotel, on the corner of Castle Street. Just below the hotel is the shop occupied by George Rough, a glover, who is depicted sixth from the right. The shop on the left, selling crockery and cutlery, had belonged until recently to Alexander Riddoch, merchant, who had dominated the council of Dundee for almost forty years. There are members of the weaving trade represented, along with a tailor, bonnetmaker, baker and shoemaker. The Deacon of the Dyers, James Cathro, son of a shoemaker, is the squat figure wearing an apron stood third from the left. Though often having a family background in the skilled trades, most of these men were long separated from the daily necessity of making a living from their craft. The Deacon of the Weaver Trade, Robert Mudie, was the son of a weaver and practiced the trade in youth, but through self-education became a schoolteacher at Dundee Academy and was later a writer and journalist. Burgh reforms in the early 1830s gave power to new economic elites and skilled artisans shifted their institutional allegiances and collective identities towards trade unions. The old trade houses, including the nine incorporated trades of Dundee, maintained their ceremonial and philanthropic roles in Scottish burgh life throughout the nineteenth century and beyond, though many of the trades they represented had all but disappeared. Image copyright Museum Services, University of Dundee Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The ‘Executive’ of Dundee, by Henry Harwood, 1821 Dundee Edinburgh shoemakers tailors Trades house weavers http://www.artisansinscotland.shca.ed.ac.uk/files/original/af30322f9140413cd01f89cc36e0fd00.jpg 66ef9c40a95c97e975a515f5d37c819a Exhibition Item Category Glass and Ceramics Image copyright ©Falkirk Community Trust: Ref: P14070 Item Location Callendar House, Falkirk Description Production processes in Britain’s potteries were largely divided by gender until the twentieth-century. This is a portrait of a group of female workers at the Bridgeness Pottery in Bo’Ness near Falkirk. On the board in front of the group is chalked the words 'Bridgeness Pottery Spongers', showing them to be the young women responsible for hand decorating domestic ware in the pottery’s sponging department. The Bridgeness Pottery was founded by C.W.McNay in 1888 and operated in the Bo’Ness area until 1958. Spongeware is the term used to describe pottery decorated by applying colour using a piece of natural sponge. It is widely considered to be a Scottish technique that was first used in the 1830s and then put into commercial production a decade later by Staffordshire potter William Adams. Sponging was an economic means of producing simple, two-dimensional patterns in one or two colours on inexpensive pots. The women in the photograph would have used carved pieces of natural sponge to apply repeat patterns to the unglazed pottery (biscuit-ware) before firing. Popular spongeware patterns included flowers, animals, ornamental lozenges and borders. Female workers were nearly always employed at the finishing end of production where they decorated wares using a variety of techniques. Hand-painting and gilding demanded specialist training at an art-school, whereas applying transfer designs and sponging were techniques learned on the job. Nevertheless sponging required a coordination of hand and eye and a sense of design as described by Margaret Finlay who worked in the sponging department at the Bridgeness Pottery from 1916 to the 1927. She described the process of sponging as part of a working day that started and 6 o’clock in the morning and finished at 6 o’clock at night: “I was in the Sponging and you had a wheel… you worked it with this hand and you did your sponging with this one and you had an arm rest and you could do your colourings with the plates for the different colour stuffs you had. You had a bit of sponge in every one of these things…Every time you worked it you turned the wheel round with your fingers underneath and you turned it round and got the pattern on. If you were going to put lines round plates or anything, you had a wee brush, long to a point… and when you turned the wheel round this was going all the time and your hand was making a line round it.” (http://bonesspottery.co.uk/fim.html) Bridgeness was just one of a number of potteries operating in Bo’Ness in the nineteenth century with six different works operating out of the district between 1766 and 1958. The McNay family were also partners in the Bo’Ness Pottery (est.1784), which went into liquidation in 1898 transferring its trade in transfer-printed goods for Empire markets along with machinery and copper-plates to the Bridgeness works. Nevertheless, emphasis at the Bridgeness Pottery remained on serviceable goods in the form of functional sponge-decorated household pottery rather than luxury productions. In a dinner to mark the opening of the pottery, the founder C.W.McNay described its activities as not ‘attempting to do what the great potteries in England did, who could get large sums for making a single pot’ but instead competing ‘with the best of them in producing the more common article… broken day after day to the grief of all housewives’ (Falkirk Herald, April 21,1888). Perhaps for this reason very few examples of Bridgeness Pottery spongeware have survived. But the technique was used widely in Scottish potteries and surviving examples have been accredited to potteries in Kirkcaldy, Glasgow and Prestonpans Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Bridgeness Pottery Spongers, ca.1910 Bo-ness ceramics decorators design design schools Falkirk pottery women craftworkers women’s industries http://www.artisansinscotland.shca.ed.ac.uk/files/original/23221bfc0ecbe0bf9badbb122df40c8b.jpg df532e784121a2dd114455ef9a052907 Exhibition Item Category Textiles Image copyright Shetland Museum and Archives Item Location Shetland Museum and Archives Description This is a photograph of the Petrie family dressing lace shawls on Shetland in the early years of the century. Shawls were hand-knitted by women of the island then shipped by merchants or middlemen to be sold on the mainland. ‘Dressing’, sometimes known as ‘blocking’, was usually the last stage of Shetland shawl production. It refers to the process of dampening the finished shawl before pinning it with gentle tension to a prepared frame and then leaving it to dry in the stretched position. This process opens the lace construction of the knitting, creating a flat, evenly-tensioned surface that shows the full beauty of the shawl and its patterning. Shawl pattern names often reflected the landscape of the Islands, for example, ‘old shale’ and ‘print o’ waves’ were frequently-used Shetland lace patterns. P.E. Petrie was listed in the Mansons’ Shetland Almanac Directory as a ‘cleaner and dresser of Shetland hosiery’ at Albany Street, Lerwick, though, as this photograph shows, several female members of the family were involved in the process of preparing shawls for selling. Historian Lyn Abrams has noted that dressers worked for either the knitter or the selling merchant, and that a hand-knitter could do business with a merchant or sell her goods directly to island visitors or travelling salesmen. When selling to merchants, shawls were often paid for in essential provisions rather than money with merchants providing the wool to island women who knitted shawls and hosiery in between their other crofting duties. Miss Algy Peterson grew up in a two-bedroom cottage in Shetland, and when interviewed in 1902 about her family life and childhood recalled that her mother knitted shawls in between other tasks of working on the croft or gutting herrings. When Queen Victoria was gifted some examples of fine knitting from Shetland in 1837 a fashion for Shetland shawl knitting followed and patterns were published in women’s magazines and sewing manuals. In 1846 W.S Orr & Co of London published Mrs J.B Gore’s pattern for ‘The Royal Shetland Shawl’, which illustrates the skill, intricacy and patience involved in Shetland-style knitting. The instructions for the shawl border alone were to cast on 600 stitches, repeat four rows of pattern to the length of half a yard, then finish with a 21 rows of edging. This photograph was taken by John David (Jack)Rattar, a Shetland-based photographer who documented the island’s landscapes, wildlife and craft traditions. Rattar’s photographs appeared in The Manchester Guardian and the Society magazine Country Life, but he also ran a thriving business in Lerwick selling framed copies of his photographs and postcards as keepsakes for tourists visiting the island. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Petrie Family, dressing shawls, Shetland, ca.1910 aristocratic patronage fashionable consumption knitters photographers shawls Shetland women’s industries http://www.artisansinscotland.shca.ed.ac.uk/files/original/f0869f9f96dd95024736319b55a16bd0.jpg 0425402cbc37d0eccf4b12ae5054d41b Exhibition Item Category Metal Wares Image copyright East Lothian Council Archives Item Location John Gray Centre, Haddington Description This photograph of Thomas M. Ross (1860-1937) was taken in the studio of a professional photographer. It survives with a handwritten note that describes Ross's participation in several international exhibitions. Ross's note connects him to the London firm of John Smeaton, Plumbers and Sanitary Engineers of Baker Street and Castle Street, Strand, London, which exhibited Stand no.938 at the International Health Exhibition in South Kensington in London in 1884. In addition to Ross’s arrangement of decorative twists and knots, Smeaton’s stand showcased an 'Imperial Spray, Shower, Douche, Rose, and Wave Bath Complete’, a ‘Tip-up Lavatory Apparatus’, and a Bachelor’s Bath and Lavatory combined with wardrobe’. Such elaborate sanitary fittings are indicative of the novelty associated with indoor bathrooms that were the new innovation that signified middle-class status in housing in the 1880s. Ross’s note says that his work was also seen at the Industrial Exhibition in Edinburgh in 1886 where it was awarded an Honourable Mention, and that it won a Silver Medal at an un-named exhibition a year later. Industrial exhibitions offered skilled craftsmen like Ross an important way of finding new clients and attracting commissions. They were regular fixtures in nineteenth century trade centres and Ross’s eye-catching work must have attracted attention in their visually competitive environments. Considerable skill and sensitive manipulation of materials were needed to maintain a uniform hollow within a contorted pipe. According to Ross’s note, the knot in the centre of this display was made up of a 12 feet length of 2 inch lead waste pipe and the others were twisted from 1 ½ inch and 1 ¼ inch lead pipe respectively. By the end of the century, machinery that used centrifugal force was used to uniformly, and perhaps more practically, shape the forms of domestic lead pipes. Tommy Ross was a well-known plumber and key figure in Haddington society. He became Lord Provost of the town in 1918. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Tommy Ross, Plumber, Haddington, ca. 1885 exhibitions Haddington metal new industries photographers plumbers