Old Hand-sewn Piecework Leather and Oil Cloth Brown Ball carved folk art people Pennsylvania 50 years ago and

Pennsylvania 50 years ago and has had her in her personal collection since

there is something so right about this elusive portrait

published in 1880 by Ivison

which is just the right amount of strange

It is hard to capture in photos

Old Hand-sewn Piecework Leather and Oil Cloth Brown Ball carved folk art people Pennsylvania 50 years ago andI'm drawn like a magnet to antique hand sewn toy balls like this; there's something about the piecework required to yield a (nearly) round ball that feels like quite a feat of construction to me, with the result like a three dimensional quilt. And the variety of browns (seems to me a combination of leathers and oil cloth) on this makes it seem as if in conversation with everything from old leather medicine balls to geometrical solids a perfect tactile