Red hair in Paintings: Red haired women with handwork

Louis Rittman
1889-1963

                              My grandmother Ellen a tailor. The love for sewing I got from her.
                             Every year I make carnival costumes for my 3 sons. I recently discovered
                                       that my grandmother also was fond of making Costumes
                                         Here she is in her own creation, I guess around 1915.

Ellen in her Pierrot costume.

When my grandmother was very young when she learned to saw

Her grandmother had been a seamstress .

Emile Munier

Munier was a french painter
You will find nice information about this painter on
http://www.emilemunier.org/

He liked the sweetness of this idea so much he had to use it once more

Emile Munier

F.Giugliano

What is going on? Pretending to have painted this all by himself?
Was the striped dress too hard to make?
If You make a copy You have to write it on the painting!
And not cheat people pretending you got the idea all by yourself!!

Between 1963 and 1975 in Denmark when I went to school ,we had handwork
and also lessons in keeping a household.The teacher taught us how

to knit, to crotch, to sew, to stitch, to weave and how to make patters and cut after them

I remember being 12 and knitting a Bikini !My first real bikini!
With a real bra and nice panties, that covered the navel .
The model was rather big though, here were perhaps 2 cm open skin between the bra and panties.
I still can recall the enormous excitement when first time wearing it in the sea,
but the thing grew to size 56 when it got wet ,
so everything did slide of my thin ironing board of a body!

But this lessons in handwork was not close to what my grandmother had learned.

Back then when she was young , Embroidery was part of a proper
woman's talents. An inherited deed from the times of Dowry. In the generations
before my grandmother the young unmarried woman would prepare for her
married life by sewing and knitting all she would need in her new home , bed sheets, pillows, towels,aprons nightgowns, handkerchiefs, tablecloths, underwear skirts etc.

As a teenager I would roam flee marked to find this treasures of old linen and white cotton clothes,

with their fantastic hole stitches and embroideries, made in the most intricate patterns.
Each piece was a work of Art and many women signed their names in fine stitches.

I still have a big collection of the first underwear and bras, they were called

Skovbukser (Bloomers) and Livstykker in Danish. The panties would be open down so the woman

could just spread her legs and stand when she needed to let her waters. The bras

were short blouses in much finer fabric like very thin cotton batiste ,silk or muslin ,
really soft and pleasant to wear.

Much more pleasant than today's bras which

cut into the skin and are much to warm because of the synthetic materials they are made of.

Some of the old laces in my collection , my grandmother made.

She had learned how to make the many different types of embroideries and how to tie Orkis.

How to embroider with a ribbon and how to do hemstitches.

Her bed pillows and linen would carry her initials and her nightgown which was made from solid unbreakable hard linen to last a lifetime, would have fine almost invisible stitches in white.
I imagine how difficult it must have been to embroider in this hard material.
It looks so easy on the paintings, but don't be mistaken.... it was not!