Indigo Russian Textiles at the Russian Museum

It may be the "white nights" of St. Petersburg (the sun doesn't really set and it is light all night. ) playing with my head or perhaps the size of the palaces or the length of Russian novels.....something is exciting me enough to write a 700 page blog entry on two days spent at the Russian museum. 

Not far from the Hermitage is The State Russian Museum.  It is the largest depository of Russian fine art in St Petersburg. The museum was established in 1895 when Tsar Nicholas was enthroned. Its original collection was composed of artworks taken from the Hermitage Museum, Alexander Palace, and the Imperial Academy of Arts. After the Russian Revolution of 1917 many private collections were nationalised and relocated to the Russian Museum. 


The main purpose in visiting was to see the icon collection and headed straight there from the entrance.
 The radar was on the lookout for Russian traditional design motifs in icon paintings that could possibly be reproduced with Russian traditional wood block printing on cloth or even stencilled with Japanese stencil techniques. The museum was not busy so you could quietly take iPhone pictures  without annoying anyone.  

Of course there were beautiful wall tapestries.  The colours the Russians got from their indigo (woad sourced) and rose madder was interesting to see. The themes of the tapestries were not interesting but thinking of the plant-dye logistics triggers imaginations.  The red madder dyed horse was a bit surreal.

This Bible cover was warmly crafted with a Russian Orthodox Patriarch embellished in folk-like detail.

The Museum is too big.  It is a good idea to leave after a few hours to respect and protect from overloading.

 The second day's goal was to look at the Russian Folk Craft section. It was a little like Christmas Eve...no sleep and up early walking to the museum and getting here before it opened. The Pushkin statue keeps the early arrivals company.

The museum rooms have been restored to perfection. (Mr Putin in putting some of that oil revenue to good cause. )  Hundreds of years of Russian treasures on display. There are long hallways dedicated with photographs to what had been lost in the Revolution, the Nazi Terror and the Soviet Era. Agony. 

The Russian Folk Art area is breathtaking. With economic sanctions on right now it is a good time to visit Russia as prices are low. (The people of the Crimea would welcome your contribution to the Russian economy.) If you can get there it is a fascinating destination. It is only a matter of time before  these museums are going to be over run with tour buses. 

The woodwork, ceramics, metalwork bone carving were all interesting. 

The collection of Upper Volga Distaffs was well displayed. You could sense the pride they makers of the distaff had and the importance the place in the household these objects held. 

As a noun, a distaff (/ˈdɪstɑːf/, also called a rock) is a tool used in spinning. It is designed to hold the unspun fibers, keeping them untangled and thus easing the spinning process. It is most commonly used to hold flax, and sometimes wool, but can be used for any type of fiber.

One room was full of Russian wood block indigo dyed textiles....BINGO!

So beautiful. Textiles have so much information in them. More to share.... in a few days. 

Textile Adventures in Russia.

As we read and heard, social connections seemed to have been paramount in Russian and Soviet society. Not 'what-you-know' but 'who-you-know'.

Anna's friend has the title, "Keeper of the Russian Textile Collection" at the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg.    

As a textile tourist in Russia one couldn't do much better than that.

The line-up to buy tickets stretched for blocks. We walked past all those sweating Russian tourists and serfs up to a very noble high iron and wood door with a cool breeze off the Neva and waited while Anna called her friend to let us in the back door.

 In the meanwhile a black immaculate Audi W12 pulled up and a few immaculately dressed men slipped out of the back seats and slipped seamlessly though the immaculately timed open door. It closed with a faint whiff of oak.

Tatiana appeared as the door opened again for us moments later. (It creaked a little...perhaps we weren't  cologned and Brioni Vanquished well enough for the oak breeze treatment.)

Hidden corridors occasionally interrupted by gilded doors. We had to pass through the the palace rooms that were tres public.

I started to get the idea of why the Bolshevik revolution started here in St Petersburg. What are the words..... terrifying .......opulence? 500 palaces side by side lining the canals and streets of St Petersburg. And this winter palace of the Tsar now the Hermintage Museum.....Brain Cracking.

We got the inside tour for a few hours. Visiting a Haute Couture exhibition being set up and not yet open to the public. The work of Vyacheslav Zaitsev, the Soviet Yves Saint Laurent. Hermitage link to the exhibition.

The impressive Issey Miyake exhibition recently seen and worshipped in Tokyo seemed a bit like a deflated balloon in a public park compared to this one. (Just kidding....The Issey Miyake exhibition was impossible to forget.)

Tatiana had worked on restoring and remaking the textiles in one of the Tzar's throne rooms. The one he used to commemorate Peter the Great, founder of St.Petersburg.

The massive room had been damaged during the war and the Soviet government was not priorotizing the refurbishing of the Tzar's throne room.

When removing the embroideried insignia from the walls and throne of the room for restoration Tatiana realized that the room was originally not royal cherry red but actually a deeper darker red.  The naturally dyed madder red had faded with time or with something in the cleaning water or actual air itself. 

The decorating had been well documented in the early 1800's. With the Nazi blockade and the Bolshevik Revolution and then the Soviet Era it is hard to imagine these documents survived.

They did.

 Tatiana was able to locate the French company that had produced the silk velvet and brocade for the wall panels, curtains, and the throne itself. They were still in business. They still had the sample books and the thread counts and brocade patterns in their old library. The materials were reproduced and the room re-reddened and ready for the millions of tourists who diminutively and awestruck slide through the palace rooms in plastic bagged protective shoes.

I need some more time in St Petersburg. Tatiana has invited me back in the off-season to spend more time in the back rooms. I received a formal invitation to a conference of textile restorers in December 2017. I can't wait.

Thank you Tatiana and Anna....I could never have imagined what an amazing day it was going to be.

Finnish Folk Craft Museum:

Henri and Ilkka were such generous hosts. We spent a few hours  visiting the Finnish Folk Craft Museum in Jyvaskyla. A small museum. Just the the right size.Downstairs is the permanent exhibition that focuses on Finnish textiles. It was my third day in Finland and the third loom set with a rag weave. This grandma's grandma of a loom had some charming features. Wheels built onto the the frame itself for the shafts.

The crank for the back roll locked interestingly on some carved wooden hooks on the side of the loom.

There was this patched and worn sweater hanging in the display. There had been a young couple who fell in love. She knit him a sweater before he went off to war. She married someone else in his absence. He never married and lived a sort of hermits existence. He died with very few possessions. He did have the precious sweater repaired by himself over and over during his life.

There were mannequins behind glass wearing tradition clothing. Some of the clothing original and some painful reproductions.  The clothes were red and blue and white. Madder and indigo were available in Finland in the closing years of the 19th century.




We all got very excited to find a display with actual madder roots and a brief history of how it was used. It grew well in the short Finnish summers and thrived in the soil there. Henri was excited as his grandparents have a lot of extra land on their farm to start cultivating it.

We had plenty of laughs naming the future madder- product-design-studio with plays on English and Japanese and Finnish words.  We had plenty more laughs choosing the ideal red Finnish building as we drove along through the scenic lakeside birch forests.

Back to the museum...

The temporary exhibition upstairs was informative and we each fell into our own thoughts as we walked through.

The exhibition was simple enough. It centered around a 'make-it-by-hand' craft magazine called, 'Omin Kasin' which printed it's first issue in 1938 and it's last issue in 1971. 

Those dates alone started the wheels turning. Russia , their big next door country had been their enemy and the Finns took sides with the Germans. Paying war reparations for helping with the blockade of St Petersburg put stress on the country's coffers in the post war years.

 This magazines contents could not but reflect this reality.

" With Our Hands exhibition brings back memories from the past centuries. It presents parts of the development of Finnish handcraft, the craft industry, and design between the 1940s and the 1970's. The name of the exhibition refers to a magazine, which lived side by side with the Finns in the post war period. With it's  handcraft instructions and tips the magazine marked a way to a happy and practical everyday life in an era with major social transitions.

The models, instructions and patterns in the magazine were designed to be useful for everyone. They were suited to a traditional farm household as well as to a modern urban home. Besides crafts, hints were given to fashionable dressing and interior decoration. 

During World Was II clothes and supplies for the soldiers were made according to the instructions in the Omin kasin magazine.  After the war there was a  shortage of raw materials, but it was no reason to give up making handcraft. Instead new ways to fix, reuse and recycle the materials were invented. However, beauty was not forgotten: the companionship of practicality and beauty were highlighted in the magazine. "

I am interested to hear my readers thoughts and recollections on these kinds of magazines.

Some weaving from the late 19th century that indicated there was a source of rose madder  and indigo in Finland.

And some lovey hand knit mittens wth traditional patterns.

Here is picture of Henri's original weaving. There is a man out there with great taste and weaving skills!

 Here are some pictures of a wonderful wooden Finnish Church. The texture of the wood and the solemnness of the structure were impressive.