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Layette Pincushion This layette pincushion is made of light-blue fabric, faded from the sun and mottled in places. A message pricked out in pins reading “God Bless Thee my baby” appears in cursive in the centre of the cushion. The first three words are capitalized and separated by pinheads. A curved frame of pinheads surrounds the message, and there are decorative details at the top, bottom, centre, and corners of the frame. The top decoration resembles a crown, and the bottom decoration either a teardrop or a leaf. The corners of the frame are marked with triangular shapes. To the left and right of the pinhead frame, there are curved floral designs of ribbon rosettes in pink, blue, yellow, and white, and leaves in soft green. White lace trims all four sides of the cushion, which measures five inches wide, three and three-quarters inches deep, and two inches high. The pincushion’s provenance is unknown, but it most likely formed part of a baby’s layette and seems to have been made by its mother, as suggested by the possessive “my” in the message.
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The Brontë Family's Broken Hair Bracelet This simple but sophisticated nineteenth-century hairwork bracelet is composed of six thin plaits of light brown hair, joined together at each end by metal clasps. The photographs above show the bracelet, housed at the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth, in its current state. Uniformly muted in colour but slightly iridescent, the golden tinge of the hair complements the glinting metal in the flat links of the clasp. A partially obscured safety chain connects the two clasps at the ends of the bracelet, hidden underneath the body of the piece. The bracelet features two kinds of braid, alternating between the two styles to achieve an illusion of complexity and intricacy when viewed from afar. There is, however, one broken plait that has detached from the rest; having become partially unraveled, these hairs splay out loosely in all directions. The hair at the end of the broken plait still holds an imprint of its previous braided configuration, a subtle imprint that persists despite the passage of time.
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William Moon's "Reading for the Blind" Primer To a sighted person, this object might appear to be a guide to a foreign but oddly familiar language. It is, instead, an introduction for both blind and sighted users to a tactile script for blind readers created by William Moon. A single sheet of card whose content is shared in both inked and inkless text, the primer has collected creases and weathered brown marks that preserve the touch of those who used it to learn to read. Underneath the bold, black-inked title “Reading for the Blind, by W. Moon, LL.D.” are instructions in small inked print for a sighted assistant, outlining how to teach a blind person to read Moon’s tactile alphabet. Below, an inked version of the roman alphabet is paired with its tactile, raised-print equivalent in Moon’s script. Moving down, we find a reiteration of the pairing of inked and raised-print letters, this version a “Classified Alphabet” that groups letters according to their shape. To the right of this grouping, tactile numerals are grouped as even or odd. Reaching the halfway point of the page, we encounter the Lord’s Prayer presented in Moon’s script. Only the first three of the eleven lines of the prayer are given in both inked and tactile text; the remainder are solely tactile. The lines of the prayer are printed or embossed in two different directions, with lines that read left to right alternating with lines that read right to left.