Category: Research & Scholarship

PDF version: Author and artist Mary B. Kelly shares her love of textiles in Goddess Women Cloth: A Worldwide Tradition of Making and Using Ritual Textiles. Across the world, textiles often display strong, colorful symbols and images of female deities. Made primarily made by women, they were intended for protection and to encourage fertility in …

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PDF version: Goddesses of the Northlands is authored by artist and professor, Mary B. Kelly. Professor Kelly spent more than 20 years researching goddess figures on Eastern European textiles. This final volume in the Goddess Embroideries trilogy presents the story of change and migration in the countries bordering the Arctic Circle. Folk beliefs and the symbols …

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PDF version: Linked by the Black and Aegean seas, the lands of Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria and Greece are also united by their strong ritual embroidery traditions. In a similar format to her earlier book, Goddess Embroideries of Eastern Europe, the author recounts Bulgarian women’s folk rituals and links them to goddess motifs on their textiles. She …

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PDF: A handbook of patterns and commentary on their history and usage, this booklet contains charts planned primarily for needleworkers. Its focus is the figure of the Mother Goddess, whose image appears from ancient times on ritual cloths and costumes of many lands. This book introduces the little known high-seat ceremonial hangings of Telmark, Norway. …

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PDF version: Remnants of ancient goddess beliefs were very much a part of nineteenth century Eastern European folk culture. Even up until the twentieth century, Eastern European women supervised rituals in honor of the goddess (see cover for a recreation of one such ritual), and carefully embroidered her image on their ritual cloths and clothing. …

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PDF version: For more than 25 years artist and professor of art Mary B. Kelly has researched both Christian and pre-Christian motifs on the embroidered and woven ritual cloths of Eastern Europe. Kelly is a weaver and spinner as well as a fine artist. In this book, you will learn to create important textiles: banners, …

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