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This purse was among the contents of an embroidered casket used by a young girl, Martha Edlin, to store her small personal possessions. She would have embroidered it herself. It would not have served a practical purpose, and was probably an exercise to show her skill.
People Martha Edlin (1660-1725) worked a series of embroideries during her childhood, including this purse, which were cherished by her descendants and passed down through the female line in her family for over three hundred years. We know little about her life, except that she married a man called Richard Richmond and appears to have been a prosperous widow, with daughters and grandchildren, living in Pinner in Greater London at the time she drew up her will.
Materials & Making Following the usual development of needlework skills in a young educated girl in the mid-17th century, Martha Edlin embroidered a multi-coloured sampler at the age of eight, and a more complicated piece in whitework and cutwork at nine. By 1671, her eleventh year, she had embroidered the panels of an elaborate casket, and two years later a beadwork jewellery case. The needlework skills she demonstrated in these pieces would be important attributes in her adulthood, in the management of her household and in the making, mending and decoration of her own and her family's clothes. (en) |