Eggs and more at Kittsee

The Web is great! Saturday morning Jerry was looking for something special going on to make an excursion of along with the wine tasting in Illmitz. What he found was an exhibit of Moravian Easter Eggs at the Ethnographic Museum at Kittsee.

The main collection at Kittsee is Folkart collected during the final decades of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to show the variety of customs of the Empire. The problem with the museum is that Kittsee lies off the beaten track, right at the eastern edge of Austria between the route to Bratislava and the route to Budapest. If you wait until you are passing by to visit the museum, you will only see it if you are deliberately tramping along the border. It's a small museum, probably not worth an extra trip from Vienna, but the drive itself is nice, taking you along the Danube, then through the old city gate at Hainburg. However as the whole area is only an hour from Vienna, it can easily be added to an excursion to the Roman site at Carnuntum Another possibility would be to connect it with a trip to the newly renovated palace at Schloss Hof a short way from the other end of the Hanburg bridge. Or use it as a cultural tag-on to a summer's day of swimming on the Eastern side of Lake Neusiedl.

But right now - and only until the 29th of April, they have a few hundred Easter eggs on loan from a Czech museum. Lovely eggs, new and old, modern and traditional, techniques ranging from painting with coloured wax, designs scratched out from a dyed egg, bits of cloth or lace glued on. Wire baskets formed around the eggs, Eggs done in 'plant batik' where a leaf has been laid down first, then the egg wrapped in onion skins and then boiled leaving a pale shadow of the leaves in a warm brown background. Wonderful eggs! If you like Easter eggs, even just these two rooms might be worth your while.

The main collection incudes all sorts of fascinating items: Stumps used as beehives carved with a picture of Samson tearing a lion's jaw apart - and the entrance for the bees in the lion's mouth, painted cemetary crosses from Romania, goat and horse costumes for processions, ceramics, decorated furniture, wood carvings, ...

And, of course textiles. One of the first was a few printing samplers- Strips of cloth with one design after another printed on them. Of the many embroidered items I particularly noticed a decorated kitchen towel - just a normal striped linen towel with rows of embroidery along one edge. There were many shirts of the several rectangles sewed together variety. I like these as they give so much scope for decorating each piece and also using decorative seams. Each is different, and even with similar ones I love looking at the individual touches of the needlewomen who made them. After the last few exhibits I have seen of ecclesiasical embroidery done either by professionals, or at that level of experitice and care, it was fun seeing things done with large stitches, with awkward stitches left in. The whole thing done either as showoff pieces or just for the love of colour and pattern. Remember - just the fact that someone had the time and materials to create a fancy embroidered shirt was show off of wealth. It said that the family didn't have to work hard from sunup to sundown just to survive.

My very favorite piece was a 'Sunday coat' for a woman. It was made of white leather with a sheepskin lining. I bet it was warm. But it was also beautiful. The outside was pieced, with major seams decorated by having folded lengths of other colours of leather worked in. The pieces themselves had fancy appliques of brown leather sewed on with tiny stitches. And between the appliques were various small motives in colourful satin stitch. And all of this on leather! The mind boggles. And here the stitches were small and regular. Wow!

At the moment I am working hard on my quilt and the sampler. Putting the quilt together requires a lot more careful sewing that I am usually good at, and for some reason I decided that I had to add the whitework bands from Linn Skinner's 'Beds of Roses' to the bottom of my sampler. Linn warned me that they are difficult. I'm not sure difficult is the word, but you can't afford a second of distraction. Not to mention that the satin stitch really does have to be properly laid. The fact that I am actually finding both restful, in the sense that I can keep my fingers well occupied without having to use most of my mind, says a lot about how hard the infection hit me. Although I am basically well again, My creative urge is only back to the extent of wanting to be doing, but not if I have to figure out what to do. It is lovely seeing the quilt top come together. It really is going to be beautiful. But I think it is a good idea to keep working hard at the finishing while I am enjoying it.