COL.24 | RSN Collection & Archive

Tea cosy

Late 19th century-early 20th century

United Kingdom

Late 19th-century or 20th-century padded and embroidered tea cosy featuring on one side a bird and on the other butterflies.

Late 19th-century or early 20th-century padded tea cosy embroidered with silk threads on turquoise silk. One side of the cosy features a bird in flight with two stems of flowering and fruiting cherries. The head and the chest of the bird are worked in long and short stitches, resulting in skilful silk shading. The wings and tail feathers are wrought in satin and fishbone stitches. The stems, flowers, and cherries are outlined and infilled with different stitches including buttonhole, French knots, long and short, split, chain, Burden, and running.

The other side of the cosy features five butterflies, three in flight and two at rest on a flowering and fruiting plum stem. The wings of the butterflies in flight are outlined in split stitches and infilled with long and short and split stitches. The wings of the butterflies at rest are also outlined and infilled with a myriad of colours in a variety of stitches including long short, trellis, couching, Romanian couching, satin, brick, four legged star eyelet, and split. The flowers are executed in long and short and fishbone stitches with French knots at their centre and the plums are worked in polychrome split stitches. Some of the leaves are outlined in a couched thread infilled with satin stitch, while others have stepped outlines in one dark shade of thread and the centre is satin stitch in a lighter shade. The stems are outlined in split stitches and infilled with a chevron pattern in satin stitch.

A piece of green silk thread is couched down at the bottom of the design about five centimetres from the edge of the cosy on both sides. Silk twisted cord incorporating the colour shades from the embroidery is couched round the outside of the cosy. The sides of the cosy are ruched, green silk.

The inside of the cosy is made from lime green silk, hand quilted with running stitches in a diamond pattern.

width: 38cm
height: 27cm
depth: 7cm

silk
silk thread

Satin stitch