Honoring the needlework of the past at the Village Tea

By Molly Roberts
Posted 6/7/22

The Kalona Historical Village hosted the Village Tea on Saturday, June 4, featuring a presentation from Doris Montag called “Honoring our Mothers and Grandmothers: Needlework from the Drawers …

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Honoring the needlework of the past at the Village Tea

Posted

The Kalona Historical Village hosted the Village Tea on Saturday, June 4, featuring a presentation from Doris Montag called “Honoring our Mothers and Grandmothers: Needlework from the Drawers of Daughters”.

“A lot of times, to me, if I were given a beautiful piece, I wouldn’t want to use it because I wouldn’t want to ruin it. So, I’d stuff it in a drawer,” Village Director Nancy Roth said. “Doris has made a way of finding a lot of these precious treasures of many different kinds, and that’s how she comes up with these great lectures and these great displays.

Montag has spent many years collecting hundreds of pieces of crochet and tatting, seeing value in the needlework that others have cast aside.

She told the attendees at the Village Tea that she started collecting needlework after retiring from her career as a healthcare administrator at the University of Iowa.

“I was at an auction in a farmhouse up near Cedar Rapids. The kitchen stuff was going last, of course, and I got to looking and there were some beautiful, beautiful places of crochet and I thought, ‘What are these doing out here for sale?’” Montag said. “I knew the family was working the auction, so I went and found the family to find out more about those pieces.”

Montag said she thought, “Somebody ought to do something about that,” when she realized the crochet pieces weren’t being valued.

“And I knew that person was going to be me,” she said.

“I called together all my siblings, I have three sisters, and my mom. We come with crochet and tatting in our family, so I made them dig out their stuff so I could look at it,” Montag said.

While both her grandmothers did crochet and her mother’s aunt, Annie, was a tatter, Montag does not do either form of threadwork herself.

Montag’s lecture, delivered while the attendees sipped tea from beautiful porcelain teacups, covered everything from the origins of thread to the difference between crochet and tatting, to showcasing different pieces she’s collected.

She talked about how in the 1700s, lace work, made with silk and linen thread, was done exclusively in convents for aristocrats, but in the 1840s, during the Irish famine, the nuns came out of the convents and taught the women and children how to crochet. By then, cotton thread had been invented, which made needlework affordable to the masses.

With the invention of the sewing machine in the 1850s, Patrick Clark, who had previously invented a four-cord cotton thread that was not strong enough to run through the early sewing machines, created a six-cord thread that could be sewn either with machines or by hand. He called it “Our New Thread.”

“Now think about all the spools for your whole life and what you’ve seen on them: ONT,” Montag said, so several gasps of realization from the ladies in the audience. “Why we still have that on spools in 2022 when it was created in the 1850s, I don’t know, but that’s what Our New Thread is.”

The attendees at the Village Tea were able to pass examples of crochet, tatting and the tools used to create them from table to table, getting a hands-on education about the important needlework done by the women of the past, giving them a chance to honor their mothers and grandmothers, just as Montag intended.