This beautifully illustrated book showcases over 300 elegantly designed paisley shawls woven in the Victorian era from 1830 through the early twentieth century. Shown in rich full color are the distinctive scrolled leaf designs on shawls of various sizes and fabric types from India, Scotland, France, Ireland, England, Italy, and Holland. The book is divided into two main sections: the first devoted to very long shawls and the second devoted to square and various size shawls. All feature intricate patterns and fine workmanship; many are rare, museum quality shawls. Includes an overview of shawl types and tips for selecting, cleaning, and storing shawls. This book is an invaluable tool for identifying the origins, dates, and values of paisley shawls. A must for vintage textile buyers, sellers, and collectors.

This collection of 44 original plates of royalty-free designs range from small individual cones, barely an inch high, to full-page motifs. Intricately beautiful.

Inspired by nature's elements, paisley patterns derive from a centuries-old art tradition. Colorists will enjoy hours of creative pleasure with this all-original gallery of paisley designs! 30 full-page illustrations swirl with organic themes.

Throughout history, precious stones have inspired passions and poetry, quests and curses, sacred writings and unsacred actions. In this scintillating book, journalist Victoria Finlay embarks on her own globe-circling search for the real stories behind some of the gems we prize most. Blending adventure travel, geology, exciting new research, and her own irresistible charm, Finlay has fashioned a treasure hunt for some of the most valuable, glamorous, and mysterious substances on earth. With the same intense curiosity and narrative flair she displayed in her widely-praised book Color, Finlay journeys from the underground opal churches of outback Australia to the once pearl-rich rivers of Scotland; from the peridot mines on an Apache reservation in Arizona to the remote ruby mines in the mountains of northern Burma. She risks confronting scorpions to crawl through Cleopatra’s long-deserted emerald mines, tries her hand at gem cutting in the dusty Sri Lankan city where Marco Polo bartered for sapphires, and investigates a rumor that fifty years ago most of the world’s amber was mined by prisoners in a Soviet gulag. Jewels is a unique and often exhilarating voyage through history, across cultures, deep into the earth’s mantle, and up to the glittering heights of fame, power, and wealth. From the fabled curse of the Hope Diamond, to the disturbing truths about how pearls are cultured, to the peasants who were once executed for carrying amber to the centuries-old quest by magicians and scientists to make a perfect diamond, Jewels tells dazzling stories with a wonderment and brilliance truly worthy of its subjects.

Bonnets, capes, caps, shawls, bodices, and crinolines as people actually wore them from 1840 to 1914. More than 200 photos depict aristocrats and members of the middle class as well as celebrities.

We know that way we dress says a lot about us. It’s drilled into us by our parents as children, as adults throughout our working lives, and eternally from the culture surrounding us. Our dress tells the outside world of the culture and era we come from to our social status within that culture. Our dress can be telling of our political views, religious beliefs, sexuality and countless other identifying traits that we can keep hidden or show to the world by our choice of what to wear when heading venturing out. This was absolutely true, famously so, in the Victorian Era in which men and women alike wore their status on their often lavish, embellished sleeves. In her new book, Dr. Madeleine Seyes explores Victorian culture through the lens of fashion in her new book, Double Threads: Fashion and Victorian Popular Literature, which sits at the intersection of the fields of Victorian literary studies, dress and material cultural studies, feminist literary criticism, and gender and sexuality studies.

A magnificent work of original research that unravels history through textiles and cloth—how we make it, use it, and what it means to us. How is a handmade fabric helping save an ancient forest? Why is a famous fabric pattern from India best known by the name of a Scottish town? How is a Chinese dragon robe a diagram of the whole universe? What is the difference between how the Greek Fates and the Viking Norns used threads to tell our destiny? In Fabric, bestselling author Victoria Finlay spins us round the globe, weaving stories of our relationship with cloth and asking how and why people through the ages have made it, worn it, invented it, and made symbols out of it. And sometimes why they have fought for it. She beats the inner bark of trees into cloth in Papua New Guinea, fails to handspin cotton in Guatemala, visits tweed weavers at their homes in Harris, and has lessons in patchwork-making in Gee's Bend, Alabama - where in the 1930s, deprived of almost everything they owned, a community of women turned quilting into an art form. She began her research just after the deaths of both her parents —and entwined in the threads she found her personal story too. Fabric is not just a material history of our world, but Finlay's own journey through grief and recovery.

The city of Norwich, a major textile centre in the 18th century, led the way in the manufacture of shawls based on traditional Indian styles and designs. This text includes background information on the Norwich shawl, placing the garment in the context of contemporary fashion design and the history of the textile industry. For the first time, the collection of Norwich shawls housed at Strangers Hall Museum has been made available for public viewing at Style and Splendour, The Norwich Shawl Industry 1785-1885 exhibition at the Norwich Castle Museum, 16 September - 26 November 1995.