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Description
This wool blanket has embroidered “compass rose" or “sunburst” designs in each corner. The blanket is a plain weave white wool, napped on both sides, with a narrow gray-brown stripe in the weft near both ends. The circular designs are embroidered using buttonhole and herringbone stitches with gray, green, red, and yellow wool. Adding decorative stitching to household textiles was an inexpensive way to beautify one’s space – the embroidery on this blanket indicates it was most likely used as the top layer on a bed. This object is one of a large group transferred to Winterthur from the American Textile History Museum when it closed in 2017.