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The Blog of Historic Deerfield
Featuring special acquisition highlights from the past five years in the areas of furniture, ceramics, metalwork, paintings, prints, textiles, and rare books, the exhibit includes four sections that explain why and how the museum’s staff added these items to the collection.
The exhibition highlights both published and unpublished material from the Alleys’ collection, showing how these objects reveal varied techniques and ornament as well as the characteristics of the environment in which they were made.
About twenty-five Deerfield women were paid to embroider vegetable-dyed linen yarns on hand-spun linen cloth. If their work was of sufficient quality, a flax wheel with a “D” was embroidered on the piece by one of the two founders as a “seal of approval.” This table scarf is an example of Pattern No. 7: Shepherd’s Thistle. This scarf is made of unbleached linen cloth with linen embroidery threads with traditional Blue and White Society stitches, in three shades of blue, plus white, detailing the large thistle at each end of the scarf.