#craftspeople

Catherine Elizabeth Cooke 

(May 5, 1924 – August 13, 2024)

Miss Cooke was an American designer principally known for her jewelry. She has been called "an icon within the tradition of modernist jewelry" and "a seminal figure in American Modernist studio jewelry".

Her pieces have been shown nationally and internationally and are included in a number of museum collections, including the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York.

She is regarded as an important role model for other artists and craftspeople.

Archaeologists excavating a necropolis north of Lima have unearthed a 1,300-year-old ornate tomb from the Wari era of Peru. The tomb contains the remains of a high-status man dubbed the "Lord of Huarmey."

The remains of six other people were found in the same tomb, some of which were likely reinterred after first being buried elsewhere. The remains include four adults — possibly two males and two females — and three people who may be adolescents, according to the University of Warsaw's Faculty of Archaeology.

Today’s #WorkerWednesday post features employees of the Joseph Bancroft & Sons Company’s Print Works Division at Eddystone, Pennsylvania. The photograph above shows a pantagraph operator at work at one of the textile manufacturer’s twenty-five machines, seen below. She is transferring a pattern for transfer onto fabric.

In this system, the operator engraves a pattern onto a zinc plate surface.The machine’s stylus is guided to follow the cut line on the zinc plate, and this motion is transferred through diminution bars and carriages to the diamond carriers that rescale the image for transfer onto varnished copper cylinders, seen at the bottom of the above photograph and mounted at the top of most of the machines, with one cylinder for each color component of the pattern.

This photograph, meanwhile, shows a sketchmaker at work designing patterns to be reduced in size and transferred by a pantagraph operator at a later date.

開化堂 | 職人展（2018）