findings and the online life

Spring is just the perfect time to revive a blog that has been languishing for ages! Someone (who's smiling name starts with M 😉) pushed me to win my laziness and took me back to the "blog side"! (Muskaan is amazing and deserves a first prize as the best mentor and tatting friend!) 

So… here I am, blogging on my recent online and offline life. As a sneak peek on my offline life, my hand had the opportunity to touch a rare copy of the original Endrucks’ book (in March 2024). But I’ll tell you in next post…

Now to the online life.

The first important thing to write is that I've never stopped tatting for the Endrucks 1920 Project, trying to do my best to help Muskaan! She's incredibly creative and efficient, and the things to do are really so much that I often feel that I'm not doing enough to help her keep the Project going! 

E15 Ear of Maize Doodle by Muskaan - morphed into lavender by me - Pattern  https://drive.google.com/file/d/1GEms2X1Xmk1YHwrDz_3F7FiDLgIVpmz-/view

The Project has been recently updated with a document containing a compilation of sources - contemporary to Endrucks (1916 to 1935) - where we found the same (or similar) patterns of the Endrucks' 1920 book or even a couple of other Eleonore's designs not included in the book (they are very likely her subsequent patterns). Read our new doc "FINDINGS - contemporary/Endrucks-related patterns" -
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1CGDpofK-kym96sIPmeEdVJudLwNI5YWr/view?usp=drivesdk

Actually we found only two sources that contain patterns designed by Eleonore not included in the ‘Die Schiffchen-Spitszen’ book, because these designs were published after 1920. I show you in the next pic only one of these two patterns, from “The Studio Yearbook of Decorative Art”, issue 1925 (it was an annual review of contemporary architecture and applied art, issued from 1906 to 1925). A copy can be found in the site Heidelberg historic literature (www.ub.uni-heidelberg.de ). Very interestingly, these few designs show her evolution as a designer from 1920 on.

These “findings” are the result of both my online research and the offline help by a “detective on the field”. We should send a big thank you to a very kind lady, I only know her as ElisaT, who is a tatter, bilingual Italian German (and actually also English). She has decisively contributed to the Project, finding a lot about Eleonore's family (that will be shared soon) and about old German magazines. We wish her all the best and we hope that we can keep in touch and continue the great collaboration - life permitting.

And incredible as it may seem, from these old sources we learned that Eleonore was a self-taught tatter! And a generous teacher, a philanthropist, too. In fact, translating only some sentences found in two pages from the magazine “Daheim” (November 1925), this is what ElisaT wrote:

“Eleonore Endrucks writes in the article, of which she herself is the author, that she had gathered around her a group of ladies from the town where she had gone to live (Gilching) whom she had commissioned to carry out tatting work, according to the patterns that she had designed. Eleonore is keen to point out in the article that she did not keep any percentage: all the money went to the ladies who did the work.”

From the old books we also learn that Eleonore was soon recognised by her contemporaries as an innovator in the art of tatting, for the way patterns were written and diagrammed. We are still searching, but till now we think that she had never published a second book, even if she continued designing. 

We hope to find more in the future about her life and her tatting. I will continue to search online. Every one of you can help, if you think that you found something old new, or new old… oh well! Please contact Muskaan and/or me 😊

Ciao, Ninetta.