If you have looked closely at some of the products here, you may have noticed the patterns were not made for a planner. They were not made for anything of the kind. They are cast brass, embroidered silk, printed cotton, a schoolgirl's sampler. Most are well over a century old, and every one was made by somebody, somewhere, for a reason.
I chose each one. Here is where they come from.
A gold weight, Akan artists, Ghana, 1700s to 1800s
Small enough to hold in your palm. Cast brass, made by the lost wax method, and used to weigh gold dust back when gold dust was the currency of the region.
They are called abrammuo. Some are figurative, shaped like animals and objects and tied to proverbs. Ours is one of the older geometric ones, and recent scholarship suggests those were the weights that did the weighing. The figurative ones may never have sat on a scale at all.
The meaning of most of the geometric patterns has been lost.
Why I chose it: because when I trace my family back, this is where my people were from before the slave trade. West Africa is not a decorative choice for me. And I love that of everything I could have picked from that part of the world, what I ended up drawn to was a working object. Not a ceremonial one. A tool somebody carried, used, and mostly kept hidden.
The Bible Quilt, Harriet Powers, Georgia, 1885 to 1886
Harriet Powers was born into slavery in Clarke County, Georgia in 1837. Her first quilt, she said, was four thousand and fifty diamonds. Not a pattern of diamonds, four thousand and fifty separate pieces of cloth, each one cut and sewn in by hand. She counted them, and she told people the number.
This one is seventy five inches by eighty nine, eleven panels, figures and animals and suns cut out and laid down on a ground. Adam and Eve. Jacob's dream. The Crucifixion. Judas and the thirty pieces of silver. She called it Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.
She showed it at the Northeast Georgia Fair in 1886. A white art teacher named Jennie Smith saw it there and went looking for the woman who made it. Powers would not sell. She sold later, when money got hard, and she attached a condition: Smith had to write down exactly what every single panel depicted. Her work was not going to be explained by somebody else.
One more thing, because the record has been wrong about her for a century. She could read and write. A letter she wrote about her own quilting in 1896 survives in a stranger's papers, found by the scholar Kyra E. Hicks.
At least five of her quilts existed. Two are left.
Why I chose it: the appliqué traces back to West African traditions, so this is the gold weight again, a few paragraphs up. That is the part I did not go looking for and found anyway.
She also gets called resourceful, which is true and is usually where the story stops. She was better than resourceful. She was good, she knew the work was good, and when she finally had to let it go she still set a condition on it.
The Smithsonian notes the ground was once bright pink with green borders, faded now by decades of light. So when I take color back into something of hers, it is closer to turning a light back on.
(The Smithsonian makes one more point and I will repeat it. She gets called the mother of African American quilting, and that can make her sound like a beginning. There is a long line of Black quilters before her and after her, and most of their names we do not have.)
A sampler, Mexico, December 1861
Look at the white poodle first.
It is in a lion clip, which is how poodles were groomed then, and she solved that the hard way. The curly parts, the head and chest and front legs and the pom left on the hip, are worked in a dense looped stitch. The shaved hindquarters are flat and smooth in pale cream. Two techniques on one small dog, so you can see where the coat was cut. I looked at it for a while before I understood what she had done, and I was wrong about it first. I thought she had run out of time.
Around it: a second dog, a brown and white hound. Birds. Devotional hearts, a basket of flowers, butterflies, a blue urn. Two feet square, linen and silk.
And along the piece, in embroidered script, Maria de Jesus Escarsega, á sus amados Padres, dedica. Diciembre 20 de 1861. Dedicated to her beloved parents. (The museum record names no maker. That is read off the piece itself, so I am telling you where it comes from.)
Why I chose it: she was very good and she knew it. The museum has no name for her. She put her own name on it, in thread, before anyone thought to check.
A rank badge, China, Qianlong reign, 1736 to 1795
Ten or twelve thousand men sat the provincial examinations. Fewer than three hundred passed.
Then, having survived that, you went and bought the badge yourself, from a commercial workshop, out of your own pocket.
A foot square, embroidered silk, worn on a surcoat over a court robe. Birds for civil officials, animals for military, nine ranks each. This bird is a crane, which is rank one. The sun disc it faces is the emperor.
Why I chose it: for the density. There is more happening per square inch here than almost anything else in the shop, and every bit of it is intentional. Maximalism is not a modern indulgence. People have been filling every inch beautifully for a very long time, and this one had to be perfect because everybody at court could read it.
Strawberry Thief, William Morris, 1883
The one you will recognize on sight.
Morris kept a kitchen garden at Kelmscott Manor, and thrushes kept robbing his strawberries. His daughter May remembered him watching "the rascally thrushes at work" and telling the gardener that not one bird was to be touched. Then he put them in the pattern. A man so annoyed by birds that he immortalized them.
It was hard to make. The technique dyes the whole cloth blue first and then bleaches the design back out of it, and Morris first tried it in 1875 and could not get it right until 1881. In 1883 he wrote about anxiously supervising the first printing. It carries more colors than any other textile he designed, it was expensive to produce and expensive to buy, and people bought it anyway.
Why I chose it: partly because it is so well known by now that it has gone soft and comforting, and I have it in several places in my own home. But mostly for what is happening in it. A man stopped and watched something that had nothing to do with him. Birds doing bird things, having whole complicated negotiations with each other and with the ground, which we file under noise. He watched long enough to decide it was worth keeping. I think about that more than I expected to.
Maurice Pillard Verneuil, France, 1869 to 1942
I have chosen more of his work than anyone else's here, so he gets more room.
He studied under Eugène Grasset, who thought enough of him to write the introduction to his first book and to bring him in to illustrate Art et Décoration. Between 1897 and 1903 he produced L'Animal dans la Décoration, L'Ornementation par le Pochoir, and Étude de la Plante, and that last one's subtitle just lists who it was for: wallpaper, fabrics, ceramics, marquetry, carpets, ironwork, bookbinding, lace, embroidery, stained glass, mosaic, jewelry, bronze, silversmithing.
These were never gallery pictures. They are reference books, made so other people could copy them onto manufactured goods, and he says so outright in the preface.
The plates were made by pochoir. Stencils cut by hand from waxed paper or thin metal with a penknife, one stencil per color, each cut with little bridges to hold it together. The hard part is registration, getting every layer to land exactly on the last one. He did some plates in one stencil and some in six.
In 1903 he wrote: "the eternal repetition, the servile imitation of old styles, prevents any original conception, a return to nature is imperative." He did not mean copy a leaf. He meant interprétation, nature put through a person's temperament and then made to fit whatever factory was going to produce it.
Why I chose him: he put that much care into work whose whole destiny was to end up on somebody's wallpaper. No rope in front of it, no wall label, no one clapping. Just a very good drawing, sent off to be used. The first book devoted to him did not appear until 2000, about a century after he drew them.
I am not comparing myself to him, but I cannot think about him for long without wanting to work harder.
Palampore and chintz, India, 1700s
Hand-painted, mordant-dyed cotton hangings. The process runs like this. The cloth is stiffened in astringents and buffalo milk, because the fat in the milk stops the dye from bleeding, then sun-dried. Areas are outlined with mordant and dyed red. Then the whole thing is waxed everywhere except where blue is wanted, dyed in indigo, the wax scraped away, and the yellows and greens painted on by hand. The drawing was done with a bamboo pen, a kalam, which is where the word kalamkari comes from.
Europe could not reproduce it and could not stop wanting it. France banned Indian painted cotton outright in 1686, the import, the manufacture, and the wearing of it, and kept the ban for over seventy years. By 1726 you could be sent to the galleys for trafficking it. England restricted it too, in 1700 and again in 1721.
When somebody tried to reconstruct the technique in our own century, they found parts of it were gone. Nobody remembered.
Why I chose it: because the flowering cotton people now call English chintz is Indian, and it traveled the other direction, and it was good enough that governments legislated against it. I did not want to make one more product that pretends otherwise.
About the books these came out of
A lot of the nineteenth century European books that collected the world's ornament were assembled from museum cases in London and Paris rather than from the places the work came from. Some of the writing around those plates is exactly as bad as you would expect, and some of it is more admiring than you would expect. Both things are true and I am not going to tidy that up.
What I have done about it is go to the original object wherever I can, name the people and the place first and the museum second, and not repeat a meaning that is not in the record. Where the meaning has been lost, I say it has been lost.
What I did to them
More than you might think, and I will not pretend otherwise.
Every plate gets cleaned up and rebuilt so it can scale without falling apart. Then I recolor it, and sometimes substantially. Strawberry Thief in the shop is not Morris's colorway at all. I pulled the jewel tones out of it deliberately, because a planner page you look at every day should not shout at you, and I changed the ground color completely. I will keep doing that, differently, with everything I pull.
None of these patterns are mine. I am borrowing them, and I would rather say that out loud than let a recolor imply otherwise.
Your next step
Next time you are looking at one of the patterned products, look past the layout for a second. There is a person on the other end of it, and sometimes we even know her name.
The restored plates are available on their own in the Print Shop, and the patterned styles run through the Home Decor collection. If you want the version you write in every day, they are in the Life Planner line.