The Bread & Roses Banner

Bread & Roses Banner by Elaine Luther, as installed at Art Reach of MidMichigan, August 2025.

This piece was a long time coming, as I worked through the bread and roses theme in various ways. First, I bought this doily (see below), in a sealed, mixed bag of doilies at a rummage sale. Going through the contents of the bag at home, there was one that said BREAD. I’d never seen one with a word before!  I was so excited!  And how perfect, here is an object that is handmade, and is infused with ideas of handcrafting not only with textiles, but with food.  Double the care, at least double the symbolism.

This Bread & Roses quilt has a print of the BREAD doily, in a print made with cyanotype.  The large roses are from a vintage table cloth.

Bread and Roses Quilt by Elaine Luther, 2025. Includes cyanotype print of the BREAD doily.

Before I made that quilt, I started collecting rose fabrics and I made this miniature version of the quilt:

Miniature Bread and Roses quilt by Elaine Luther, 2024

I now have rose fabrics in so many colors and varieties! I learned that a fabric with a large element is called a “hero” fabric, so I have some fabrics with hero roses. I also came across the piece in the top photo, the table runner with the cross stitching. I can’t quite remember where I bought it, but it might have been eBay.

What’s with all the Bread & Roses?

Bread & Roses is the name of a labor movement song from 1911. You know the Mill Girls in Lowell, Massachusetts? They were the young women who left the family farms and go work in textile factories. By 1911, it was time to protest for better hours and pay.

And, as folks used to do, they wrote a march song. It’s a lovely song that continued to be sung for decades. Regrettably, there’s a super racist line in there (because, sigh, of course there is). Because of this, I haven’t quoted the whole song, but I did want to share the feelings in the excerpts that I have quoted and printed.

Of course, the challenge with just making a piece like the quilts above that include a print of the BREAD doily and rose fabrics, is that the song, Bread & Roses, is just not commonly known anymore.  I used to be in choirs and I guess I know a lot of songs, I thought everyone knew this song, but as I showed the quilts to people, many of them did not get the reference.  By using the quotes from the song lyrics, that gives viewers more to go on.

Version One

Here’s the first version of the prints of the song lyrics that I printed on vintage napkins:

Cyanotype print on vintage napkin, with song lyric and dried, pressed plant, Elaine Luther, 2025.

Cyanotype print on vintage napkin with song lyric, Elaine Luther, 2025.

I had hoped to leave the stitching on the edges visible, undyed, but that didn’t work out (I would have had to thicken the cyanotype or SolarFast for that to really work), so I touched up the edges and exposed the prints again, which ended up turning them blotchy.  (While I usually do SolarFast dye when I’m working on fabric, for these I used cyanotype; I don’t remember why.)

I wasn’t happy with those, so I reprinted them, this time on vintage napkins with scalloped edges. This one is on the other side of the banner at the top of this post.  The laces in the print below are probably machine made, but I’m not an expert.

Cyanotype print on vintage napkin, with song lyric and vintage laces, Elaine Luther, 2025

Here’s a close up of the lovely stitching on that table runner. (I did not do the stitching.)

Preparing to stitch down a cyanotype on vintage napkin to a found textile with cross stitch roses. Elaine Luther 2025.

Hand stitching a cyanotype on a napkin to a larger textile. Elaine Luther, July 2025.

I love the scalloped edges on these!  I sometimes feel a tiny bit weird about layering my work on top of another, unknown woman’s work and calling it my own.  That’s why I call works like this a textile collage, that’s what they are.  And I’m always completely clear about which aspects of a piece I made and which ones are “found.”  Calling them found objects feels a bit disingenuous, since I found the embroidered table runner by actively searching on eBay for textiles with roses on them.

Betsy Zacsek, who I’ve mentioned in previous posts, designed the layout for this show and suggested that we hang this over the grand piano that’s in the gallery, to make the piano part of the show, instead of just a big thing that’s in the way.  And, since this piece has two sides, that’s perfect, you get to see both sides!  The show I’m referencing is my solo show, up now at Art Reach of Mid Michigan, in Mt. Pleasant, MI.  The show is called Clocking in for Unpaid Labor.

Since we’re here talking about the BREAD doily, here’s one more artwork that includes a print of that.

Textile collage mounted on canvas, with digitally printed photos, fabric and cyanotype. Upper left image is of Inez Milholland.  Lower image is the Silent Sentinels  at the White House, the same ladies who were arrested, imprisoned and force fed through the nose.  Copyright Elaine Luther 2024

This pieces was one of two of mine that were in the show at the CAMP Gallery, We Got the Power, their 2024 show in the series, Women Pulling on the Thread of Social Discourse. CAMP stands for Contemporary Art Modern Project and it’s in Miami, Florida.

This piece covers the suffrage movement and references the labor movement, while the other piece covers the 1970s.

And lastly, the two Bread & Roses quilts are not the only time I’ve made the same artwork at two different scales.  You can see more of those in this blog post.

P.S. I’ve since found one more doily with words in it! It says “TAKE A” and then has an image of a chair! It’s a little hard to read and very hard to photograph, which is why I’m not showing it here.