Mary Card Centre/mat
I have for sale a White hand made centre/mat that could be a design by Mary Card?? It was a time she was working for Weildens in London and was not given credit for it? (an Australian lady who became world famous for her creative crochet designs - (see more information about her below) The pattern is a Weeping Wisteria/Laburnum, the gorgeous hand crochet edge is attached to a centre mat of slub linen, hand embroidered with Spring flowers to each end - these stunning intricate hand crochet pieces are highly collectible and getting very hard to find :) just gorgeous:)
- see photos
- Size = overall size 57cm x 73cm or 22.5" x 28 3/4" with lace border 11.5cm/4.5" deep on sides and 12.5cm/5" on corners. Centre slub linen 35.5cm x 48.5 or 14" x 19"
- see more photos below (business card is a reference to size)
Card, Mary (1861–1940)
Mary Card (1861-1940), crochet pattern designer, was born on 24 September 1861 at Castlemaine, Victoria Australia. In 1880 Mary was a student at the National Gallery School of Design. 1903 she had become increasing deaf, faced with the need to find an occupation in which her disability was not a handicap, she decided to combine her writing, drawing and needle-work abilities to become a 'professional designer and teacher of needlework through the press'. Choosing Irish crochet as her medium, she joined a Ladies' Work Association which undertook repairs of valuable crochet pieces and taught herself to mend old lace. When she discovered that she could make new and effective designs to be worked from a chart method of her own invention rather than the usual printed directions.
Her first designs were published in the Ladies' Home Journal in the United States of America. In 1909 she decided to offer her designs and a monthly article to the New Idea (later Everylady's Journal), Melbourne. Her patterns became so popular that the editor reprinted many. She then developed 'giant charts' for more ambitious designs and to cater for workers with failing eyesight, drawn on the scale of ten squares to the inch with a guiding line at every inch.
With five books published, Mary went to the U.S.A. late in 1917 to launch some of her newer designs. In New York, The Mary Card Co. was set up to reprint her crochet books. Later she settled in England in a studio-cottage at Barkham, Berkshire. She continued to produce designs for more than twenty years
Mary Card revisited Australia occasionally. Early in 1940, in poor health, she returned to Victoria to live at Olinda, where she shared a cottage with her sister Harriet. She died there on 13 October 1940 and was cremated.
Reference ~24/08/2014; Citation detail; Sally O'Neill, 'Card, Mary (1861–1940)', Australian Dictionary of Biography published in hardcopy 1979