Victoria Hall, Saltaire

I love Saltaire!  The fabulous Salt's Mill with its art and bookshops, Hockney pictures and sensational cafe.  Each year the UNESCO World Heritage site hosts an Art Trail in which art from new and established artists is displayed around the village, in houses, churches and other venues.

This year there was an open call for people to create postcards for display in the United Reformed Church.  The postcards will be sold for £5 each for the benefit of the Cellar Trust, a local charity which specialises in helping people recover from mental health illness.

I so enjoyed making my architecture pictures that I decided to recreate Saltaire's Victoria Hall in the same style.  Why not pop along and see if you can spot it?  The exhibition and Arts Trail is on from 27-29th May 2017.

Hidden Lives (part II)

Another month, another book - this time the subject is lace.  Five years ago, I researched the lives of Victorian social reformers, Josephine Butler, Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon and Octavia Hill for an exhibition inspired by lace from the Gawthorpe Textiles collection.  This is a reproduction of the same piece.

It is a lady's cuff: machine embroidered net decorated with hand-made paper couronnes.  Hand cuffs to bind Victorian women, financially to their husbands, intellectually to the expectations of society and physically by a well-defined sense of duty.  With limited means of expression, I imagined a Victorian woman stitching I dream of escape and set me free, unobtrusively working the words into the decoration.  The key motif is reminiscent of a chaterlaine worn by a house-keeper (the only suitable job for a woman).  The paper couronnes are fashioned from old books, alluding to the power of the written word to change the status quo.

Just one stitch

I've been teaching my Haworth workshop class about the joy of using just one stitch.  This Japanese style cherry tree has been completed using Sorbello Stitch, an unusual knotted stitch in the shape of a square.  By varying the weight and nature of the yarn, you can create beautiful textures.  Most of the stitching was done using a viscose pearle yarn.  It was horrible to work with (twisting mercilessly into huge gnarls) but the resulting stitches look so like cherry blossom I had to keep going.

Renaissance - a pocket full of memories

Here is the next installment in the Skipton Embroiderers' Guild Travelling Book project.  The theme for this project was Renaissance and in particular the cloth of Italian Renaissance courtiers.

At around the same time that I was researching this theme, my daughter introduced me to a book:  Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (Jones & Stallybrass 2001).  The book describes how clothes were passed from master to servant, friend to friend and lover to lover.  In this way, argue the authors, the memories associated with the material are transmitted.  I loved this idea of 'ghosts of owners past' and wanted to incorporate it in my piece.

Thinking about what kind of things might be passed on, and mindful that I could only reproduce a small item or fragment for the book, I remembered that pockets were detatchable items before the 17th Century.  Italian saccoccias (pockets) were beautifully decorated items.  I made my scale model saccoccia out of devore printed velvet and discharge printed silk because the two processes leave a kind of ghostly image - a memory of a previous owner.  The fabric was designed, dyed and printed by my daughter for her A-level art course which gave it particular significance to me.  I hand-stitched a motif from a 16th Century fragment of Italian silk velvet using gold coloured thread, another memory if you will.

Finally I wondered what one might keep in a pocket.  My inspiration came from the phrase 'born with a silver spoon in her mouth'.  Prior to the introduction of place settings, people carried their own spoon with them to table.  For land-owing classes this was often a silver spoon.  In Medieval times, such people were craftsmen or farmers who frequently had dirty hands.  Not wanting to be mistaken for a serf, the silver spoon became a mark of wealth and used as a passport or credit card might be used today.

I made a silver spoon using machine embroidery on disolvable fabric.  Once the plastic film had dissolved, I gently shaped the work into a curved bowl and rounded handle.

By way of explaining my work in the Travelling Book, used a paper-chain of ladies to illustrate the transmission of memories with the saccoccia.

Straight Stitch Architecture

After a few weeks of meticulous stitching I decided to give my Haworth Stitch Group a slightly different challenge; to create a picture sewn in straight lines.

I was inspired by a project from HoopLa magazine which showed a London cityscape, drawn with long single stitches and punctuated with small spots of coloured fabric.   Some of the group chose favourite cities and some chose this charming illustration of Dutch houses.  The pictures are postcard size and the pieces of fabric are teeny-tiny.  The 'drawing' was worked in thick top-stitch or button thread using elongated back-stitch.

I quiet like the discipline of straight black lines and can see other projects that might include this technique.

Spring Tweets

My Thursday sewing group has been busy working on some lovely garden birds using simple stitches and blending colours, but the project is quite intense and I've had a few latecomers that would like to do something similar but in half the time.

So here is my quick version:  I've used patches of fabric to provide the basic colour and then stitched over the top to add detail and texture.  The bird is worked on calico over a background of printed fabric.  Once the final outline has been worked in backstitch, the calico is cut away to reveal the main fabric.  All that's left to do is stitch some feet!

The Domestic

Oh I'm so enjoying the Travelling Book project!  This month I have been given my friend Marjorie's book to work on.  She chose The Domestic - or Home as her theme and in her introduction she explores the construct of the perfect home.  Images of Milly Molly Mandy and Little Grey Rabbit are interspersed with poetry and prose about the home.  She says she has come to the realisation that for her, home is where she is surrounded by books, music and sewing paraphernalia.

My response to her theme is to create a sample piece called 'Blueprint'.  The Victorian architect Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin (1812-52) was my inspiration.  His design for his own perfect house with family at the centre has been stitched onto cotton organdie.  Quilted onto a piece of blanket using a template from wallpaper, also designed by Pugin.  A comfort blanket.  Trapped between the layers are talismen for protection - found objects: a curtain rinng and brass robin from my mother's stash; a button from Auntie Jean's sewing box; a broken earring - a sparkly object; a safety pin - always useful; a baking bean from my kitchen; a book fragment - Marjorie's refuge.

By way of explanation, I have created my own construct for the house.  The floor plan is pasted to the page but an illustration of the house and it's shadow cut from an old book make a 3D house with the wallpaper design offering another wall. 

'In pure architecture the smallest detail should have a meaning or serve a purpose'  AWN Pugin