De Borduurschool: Marcella van Oost

With tender care, Marcella van Oost places a heavy textile roll on her dining table. It is about thirty centimetres wide and tied up with ribbons. Marcella unties the ribbons and unfolds the roll bit by bit. What emerges is a series of meticulous needlework samples: embroidered ribbons and letters, whitework and cutwork, lace ribbons and miniature garments, attached to fabric and sewn together to form an almost ten-metre-long scroll. “This is a sampler roll,” Marcella says. “Girls used to make these at school to demonstrate their needlework skills. It is kind of a needlework CV, really.”

The sampler roll lying on the table is not the work of a school pupil, but of Marcella herself. It is the result of years of research into historical techniques used in needlework education and in the regional costumes of the Dutch peninsula of Marken, Marcella’s areas of expertise. For generations of Dutch people, these stitches and motifs evoke powerful memories. The sampler roll is also a way of preserving these and passing them on.

One of your areas of expertise is regional costume embroidery from Marken. You are not from this area, are you?  

“No, I’m from Rotterdam. I’ve always lived in that area. In Capelle aan den IJssel, in Westland… I ended up researching regional costumes from Marken when I started embroidering. That was almost twenty years ago.”

When did you first encounter needlework?

“I started playing around with fabrics and threads very early on: I think I was about five years old. I made clothes for my Barbie with fabrics and buttons I got from my grandmother. I also had needlework classes at school. I remember a knitting room that smelled strongly of geraniums. We had to knit socks, and mittens. I have always liked needle crafts: I like to make something myself, something that lasts.”

“At eighteen, I bought a sewing machine and took a course in pattern drawing, but tailoring was not my trade. I became a professional musician. For years, I only turned to needlework occasionally. I started again when my children were older and I had more time on my hands. I started quilting, but I work at a brisk pace, so the costs became pretty high due to the large amounts of materials needed. Moreover, at some point I had thirty quilts in my house that I couldn’t store. I turned to embroidery.”

“In 2005, I started working on a first sampler roll, with samples of traditional techniques historically taught to girls in boarding schools. They would first learn the useful techniques, such as mending and making buttonholes. Then they learned techniques for decorating fabric, the so-called ‘fine’ techniques, such as delicate embroidery patterns. These are included in the scroll, which eventually became twelve metres long.”

“A sampler roll was sometimes called a souvenir de ma jeunesse, ‘keepsake of my youth’ in French. I wasn’t young anymore when I made mine, so I named it souvenir de ma vie: keepsake of my life.”

How did you arrive at regional costume techniques?

“I wanted to learn more and went to a number of workshops, including several with Margreet Beemsterboer, who introduced me to the regional costumes and embroidery of Marken. The regional costume of Marken has an incredibly extensive language. You can tell from clothing and embroidery whether a child is a boy or a girl, whether someone is in mourning, or married, or not. Clothing is a way of displaying who you are.”

“Margreet’s specialisation is whitework, embroidery of white threads on white fabric. In 2013, I helped her to create an e-course on whitework techniques. It was a great success. We made a second course on Marken embroidery together. This time we paid more attention to colour. On a second sampler roll, I made small exercise samples of regional costume embroidery and the household crafts that are so richly present on Marken.”

“At that time, we occasionally visited residents of Marken to see their embroidery. After a while, I tentatively started showing my own work at the Marker Museum. Visitors from Marken were astonished – they recognised so much of what they saw.”

“Something similar happened with a quilt I had made from pieces of fabric from old regional costumes. The quilt was exhibited in Hoorn. At the exhibition opening, a group of ladies in Spakenburg costume stood before the quilt, pointing at it and whispering. They knew exactly where each fabric came from and who had worn it. I had also included a coarse piece of cloth with a bit of an unseemly print.  It came from the Second World War, one of the ladies told me. In those days there were hardly any new fabrics available, so to make clothes they cut up their printed curtains!”

“All kinds of stories emerge from regional costumes, which I like to pass on. I do that with my sampler roll: I often take it with me.”

Why is it important to pass on those stories?

“That is how they are kept alive, and it is a way of getting to know people and gaining new knowledge. People on Marken are pleased with it: they cherish their heritage very much. They are increasingly aware of what they have. When people used to pass away on Marken, their belongings were often sold to anyone who wanted them, including foreign tourists. Much of it was lost. Nowadays, those objects are more likely to go to a museum.”

“I was recently in a museum depot myself, together with a group of embroidery experts, to look at some embroidery objects. We were studying them closely, pointing out the different stitches. It was an interesting experience for the depot staff, who are used to seeing those pieces as objects with a name and a number. Suddenly those objects consisted of embroidery stitches. They got a completely different view on them. Some of the staff were keen to learn more about embroidery after that.”

“I am a real stitch freak. I want to know a stitch so well that I can also recognise it in a different context. I recognise stitches from Marken in Danish embroidery, for example. There is often a history behind such cases. A large group of farmers from Marken went to Denmark centuries ago at the invitation of the Danish king to set up an agricultural policy. The women took their needlework and their clothing with them. Their patterns were adopted by the Danes. This is how the similarities with Marken embroidery came about.”

What motivates you to keep embroidering?

“Those stories, and the technique itself. I like very fine embroidery, I’m fastidious. I always think: I still have a lot to learn. So do others, for that matter.”

Needlework is no longer an obligatory subject in regular education. Why?

“The need disappeared at one point, I think. After the Second World War, a culture of disposability emerged. In such a society, it’s no use making things by hand. Craft classes lost their raison d’être in education. It’s only now that we notice the damage that has done.”

What kind of damage?

“Many people are no longer able to repair clothes that are broken, so those clothes are more likely to be thrown away. There is a shortage of people who can work with their hands. At the same time, I think that damage can be repaired. There are people using repair techniques again these days, or people who decorate their clothes with embroidery.”

“I don’t think needlework classes should become compulsory in schools again, mind you – schoolchildren have enough on their plate as it is. What I do find important: that people know where to go if they do want to learn something about it. And that we can pass on our knowledge.”