My history map

A long time ago, in that other country, The Past, a small girl lived with her mummy and daddy in a compact sixties semi in a quiet close of similar modest homes. 

Their home was just one corner of a busy market town, tucked beside the Downs in Hampshire, with Butser Hill an ever present, but distant marker in the background of their lives. The house sat beside a plentiful thicket of brambles and wild ground, perfect for playing with The Gang and gathering blackberries. A very small stream ran along the bottom of all the back gardens, and the main road was far enough away to be no danger.

At the front of their collected houses was a wide green, bordered by two rows of "houses for elderly folk". Sometimes the little girl scavenged blackberries, or scrambled in the undergrowth with The Gang; playing hide and seek, surprising a slow worm, or trying to climb the scrubby trees growing on the land; sometimes she dressed as a fairy princess and floated about on the green outside, chaperoned by her trusted feline assistant, Kandy, watched by mummy from the window of her sun filled kitchen.

Sadly, the little girl's daddy and her grandad died within a year of each other, the year she became eight, and their life together there was over. She and her mummy had to travel all the way along the A272, she doing the map reading while Mummy drove, to live with her granny, known and loved as "Ganna". Mummy had to go back out to work full time, while Ganna, at the age of 70, became the mother of the house in all ways. 

with Ganna and Grandad in happier times

That little girl was, of course, me. I look back on that time, not as something remembered, but as part of the myth of the past by which, to some extent, we all live; those things we understand happened to us, but which evoke no sense of lived reality. As an adult, I think of my poor Mum, coping with the loss of so very much, relinquishing her parenthood and going back to being a daughter in the house. I think of eight year old me, trying to adjust to such a huge change of living. I was lucky, in that Ganna was the most wonderful second parent, and my life was enriched by her presence, but still it was a big disruption.

In Sussex Stitchers this year, we have a project where we are each encouraged to create an embroidery centered around a map of some sort. I have chosen this, my most momentous journey, as the story behind my map. Transferring various images onto printable organza, I layered them over another, printed onto silk: this layer is backed by white cotton sateen to give substance to stitch into. The imagery I have used includes some photos from above, but also clips from my mother's diary of the time; entries from February, when he died, and November when we left all we knew to move back to Ganna's house. I used MistyFuse to attach those organza layers, and have quietly stitched into the fabric with simple couching, running and seed stitch, using some metallics, silk and stranded cotton. I am toying, now, with bordering the piece with some vintage lace edging. This reflects that remembered sense of having stepped back into an earlier time, that of my grandmother's world, rather than the sixties in which, in theory, I grew up.

Behind all this past detail is a faded out version of an oil pastel sketch I created on a return visit to the area around 30 plus years ago. I was exploring the top of Butser Hill as evening approached; sketching a hawthorn tree, the layers of the downs and the curve of the A3 winding through them on its way to Portsmouth. As evening approached there were wonderful layers of clouds to catch the dying light, it was a magical experience. 

I am hoping these fleeting glimpses once finished, will create some sense of that lost life which sits, in its own little flickering, glowing space, inside my inner mind. There is more to do, but I am content with the outcome so far. I hope you like it.

Stitch experiments

I've just taken part in the TextileArtist.org Stitch Camp, led by Gwen Hedley. I have had her book Drawn to Stitch on my shelves for many years, all unexplored potential. When I saw that her workshop was being repeated I thought it might be an enjoyable introduction to her way of working, so signed up. 

We were advised to prepare with fabric, paints, mark making tools, plenty of newspaper for mopping up spills and, of course, threads in our colours of choice. Each of the five sessions comprised Joe and Sam introducing the activity with their usual bright eyed enthusiasm and Gwen demonstrating what she wanted us to do. The videos were pre recorded and no opportunity to interact with Gwen herself, but the support group on Facebook has been really helpful for feedback and inspiration. Gwen's instructions were clear and the examples shown very useful for understanding what was needed. I chose to use an old tea towel for its soft worn linen. With two colours, we were shown how to make marks - one side dense with little background material visible, the other side more loosely marked, open and fragmented. Here is what I had achieved after day one.

Once dry the fabric was chopped up with greater or lesser pre thought depending on the inclinations of participants. It was such fun watching the images appear on Facebook, so many varieties of colour, marks and decisions. I chose the "turn it over and don't think" method, knowing that otherwise I would never pick up the scissors, being dreadful at decision making. Reassembly involved selecting pieces that had some kind of correlation and matching marks across these. I have chosen to stitch all my selections down on Harem cloth (as used by Jude). Many folk chose to stitch their pieces together in sequence to make strips, but I felt this wasn't for me, so have reassembled twelve pieces in a more or less patchwork. I hope the flow of marks is as apparent to you as it is to me, 

I have just begun the stitching, having several other things on the go as well. I will do my best to "finish" this, though many folk have completed theirs already. For me the interest lies in understanding how to use stitch in an abstract way, responding to what lies beneath. I am a bit ambivalent about acrylic and textile, but the paint was very dilute so the hand of the fabric hasn't changed too drastically.

a plastic fork created good parallel lines, the little flicks of colour above the lines were from the same tool, while a holder for Covid testing makes a decorative repeated square.

Random plastic packaging, harvested from the street, creates a sort of snowflake, or perhaps seed head with more fly stitch seeds tumbling down

more "snowflakes, parallel swirls and Covid test holders

I find a lot of the marks too stark, so will look at how to soften these with both stitch and the colours I use. As it moves forward I will post updates, but I suspect this will be around for a while! It has encouraged me to delve more deeply into Gwen's book as well, which I am finding really rewarding

How is your stitching going?

growth and green

I have been adding some green growth to my layers test piece. The river brings growth, and we harnessed that growth for our own purposes back in those Mesopotamian days to extraordinary effect. In the distance, space marked out for a fragment of royal inscription. I was amused, when picking up my test cuneiform stitching to judge the size of that space, to find myself turning it the right way up - which tells me the stitching has, at least, taught me a bit about how to view cuneiform :-)

Then there is this, one of many reels of, for the most part unusable thread, having aged to fragility, that I have inherited from mother, grandmother, aunt and probably great grandmother. This was probably produced in wartime, a delightfully informative website tells me.

isn't the green delicious

I'm using it in a piece we did with Cas Holmes, a delightful teacher and artist, whose work I have admired for many years. The workshop, run over two sessions, focused on how we could blend momigami, "very squashed" paper, and textile scraps, in a piece with both hand and machine stitch. It was so enjoyable, in particular because she was teaching us via Zoom sessions, which bring their own challenges. The first was in part about preparation of the papers we had selected, by crumpling and kneading them in our hands until they loss their stiffness and became more fabric like - this is the momigami element. She encouraged us to layer these with scraps of fabric, pinning them to a calico backing, then stitching them loosely down using expressive stitches that worked with the underlying strata. In the second session she showed us how she uses machine stitch over the initial stitch layer, painting into the fabric with thread, creating texture and highlights, turning the piece over to stitch from the back to add elements of less purposeful stitch. Throughout both sessions she also talked to us about the design process, using her own work to show us examples of how the layers come together. Here she is talking about her piece "In Great Grandmothers' Shadow".

So far, I have got to here, a sort of landscape, with sort of buildings, and a ground layer to divide the space. 

As you'll see I've not reached the machining stage yet, and the paper element of this is so fragile that I suspect it will disintegrate once I start. For Cas that is a good thing; something she uses in her work and I can see its potential. But for this bit of stitching, I'm not so sure - which probably means I really should, and learn from moving beyond my inhibitions. For now I have just done hand stitching, and am happy with the result, though I feel it needs a bit more. I enjoyed the tactile nature of the paper, the difference in sound both as the needle and thread pass through, and the sound and feel as you handle it, skin rubbing against different fibres. I may well explore more, another way of layering.

I hope your stitching week has been good?

stitching cuneiform

Seems to lend itself to fly stitch. I find myself wanting to make the stitching as decorative as possible, along with representing the cuneiform; enjoying the patterns made by the cuneiform shapes. I allow myself to turn my fabric through 90 degrees, as the scribes might have turned their tablets, pressing stylus into clay.

I wonder about those Babylonian ladies, stitching mottos into their loved ones' garments: spells of protection, charms to ward off evil. Is this the stitch they might have used?

And because Rachel enjoyed my seaside, yesterday's walk gave me this

Helpmeets for stitching

Because my good friend and fellow Embroiderers' Guild member Steph and I are running some supported stitch sessions locally, I have been thinking more about how we use aids to stitching and why; I thought I'd share them with you here. 

First and foremost is comfort. Most of us have aches and pains of some sort or another, having reached the age where we have the privilege of doing our own thing, following our star to some extent, rather than being subsumed by the rest of the family's needs. Then of course there is light and the ability to see.

By preference my favourite spot is here, in my grandmother's chair ("that's the Bergere Chair Kath" I was always told, though I suspect it isn't!). I have cushions and a quilt for comfort, south facing natural light, a warm radiator nearby and Cecil's tables to my right and left. I have the magnifier with it's ring of light, and my "giraffe" - the floor stand which holds my embroidery frame, I love this, though it can be a bit picky about whether it stays put in terms of its neck and knees! When you look at the frame, you can see it is one of those with clip over half tubes of plastic on a tubular plastic frame.

On the fabric held within the frame I have a needle park, held on by a magnet on the back of the cloth,  and a thread card (excuse the unintentional advert), recycled biscuit packaging. On the back the number and brand of thread is noted on each hole. This way the skeins can stay at home, or in the basket - less likely to become a tangle then.

If you were looking over my shoulder this is what you'd see, Mesopotamia under magnification, though not quite at satellite image detail. You can see here the way the frame can be used to hold fabric that is wider than the capacity of the frame. Not RSN tight by any means, but I'm not working to RSN standards.

And close up we have Sippar, the twin cities each with it's own temple, tucked in by the Euphrates to the left, downriver from Khafajah and Tell Asmar (Eshnunna). The Tigris is there too, coming in from the right. We are coming down from the rain fed alluvial plains of Upper Mesopotamia, where to a large extent there was enough rain each year to support agriculture. Now we are nearing the southern plains where no agriculture was possible without extensive canal systems for irrigation,

I love the way the thread yet to be couched drifts across the landscape, as though the water was looking for a way; flow not yet determined. And the cities, yet unstitched, lurking to the south, awaiting my attention.

A real treat

For four days last weekend, I had the pleasure of attending a workshop led by Eszter Bornmisza, hosted by Studio 11 as part of Christine's programme of "re-treats". She always has inspiring textile artists, and I have been on several over the years. This one was called "Captured in Nets" and was a marvellous introduction to the techniques Eszter uses to craft her beautiful artworks. If you've not seen them, pop over to her website to have a look. If you have seen them in person you will understand how evocative they are; ethereal, yet firmly grounded in the townscapes that are her primary theme. Eszter was a generous, patient and supportive tutor and we learnt a great deal. In addition to nurturing and broadening my textile skills, the four days gave me an even deeper appreciation of her art, and of the time, skill and meticulous planning involved in each creation.

Our first day was an introduction to net making with soluble fabric, machine stitching into it to create a web that, once the fabric has been dissolved, will hold itself together. This is harder than it sounds as you have to make sure that wherever your stitching goes, it is tied in with what has been before, otherwise bits will fall apart. I found the first day challenging. In part this was because my Janome was misbehaving. Once I'd  popped home and returned with the Bernina; my preferred machine for embroidery (but heavy to move about), the rest of my time was undisturbed by machine failure. Having not done much machine embroidery for a long while; my shoulders and upper back were tense and intensely painful, my stitching unruly. However, I managed a couple of samples, and began to understand more about its creative potential.

Here, my various samples at the end of the sessions in the studio

And the thought processes that brought it all about - with retrospective notes

A preparatory drawing inspired by Eridu, exploring the pattern of temple spaces and how continuous line might all hold together

stitch and imagery,

lace and thread, boundaries and mounds

The second day also had its difficulties; I stitched my forefinger - breaking the machine needle as I snatched it away. A loud bang, a sharp pain and a few minutes of feeling rather peculiar followed, but the studio had plasters and there was more stitching to be done. I still felt I wasn't sure what I was supposed to be doing but, following instructions, managed to produce a couple more samples and felt happier by the end of the day.

Inspired by Nirvana; a different sort of layer, that of family myth, nestled at the edge of the Rother, home to childhood dreams

and what to do with the spaces removed?

Then Babylon, drawing on an ancient map; imagery printed out several days before the workshop and pondered on

the reverse of the embroidery makes a more powerful statement - lesson learnt

By day three things were looking up, the accumulation of techniques was beginning to make sense, and I was starting to see where they might apply to the projects I am working on at my regular Studio 11 sessions. More samples were made, more stitching was done, more bobbins were cleared of thread and at end of play, a very enjoyable meal out, organised for us by Christine at a local hostelry. We began with making voids, mending them, bridging gaps. Organza carved out with a soldering iron, mended with Islamic pierced window grilles in mind, same region, later culture, more layers of history. The cutout pieces were also captured in a net with additions

Here, working with painted clingfilm and very pink organza. As I stitched I was thinking about the growth enabled by Abzu, the life giving water; marshlands, foliage, ripples, grasses waving

Flowers and leaves strewn across gaps in the fabric, supported by a web of stitching. The flowers were hand stitched into a piece of soluble fabric with chain stitch, then pinned to the base fabric, the leaves simple knots in a piece of thread.

Finally there was the "bring it all together and make a larger piece" day. So we put all we had learnt into practice on our chosen design. In my case this was based around a satellite view of Nineveh - drawn from my Mesopotamia ruminations. Here a portion of Nineveh, the hill of Kuyunjik nestled in a bend of the Khosr River, on the outskirts of Mosul

Not anywhere near finished yet, there is still much stitching of nets to be done, suggestions of cultivated land at the top, soluble fabric to be washed away, but an encouraging start. I managed to do enough to know how to complete it, and will make time to do this, which will be a huge pleasure.

So, a marvellous and inspiring few days amongst friends old and new exploring thread, stitch, time and ideas to create something fresh. I feel I have learnt  techniques that chime with my thoughts about Mesopotamia; history, layers of time and layers of man made artefacts/marks on the earth. Techniques I can hopefully exploit in my own way to move forward with my explorations of what creating textile art is all about.

Thank you Eszter and Christine for a very inspiring retreat. Definitely a real treat.

Confluence

Follow me now down the Diyala river, past Tell Asmar, those twelve little souls, hidden away in the dark for millennia, their eyes gazing beseechingly in the house of their God

Past the fields where grows the grain to feed those gods

To the point where the Diyala melds with the Tigris, and it and the Euphrates come their closest on their way to the alluvial plains where civilisation found wings

Rivers flowing

Mesopotamia is flowing slowly along

Down the Euphrates, splitting and rejoining as the land allows

At the confluence of the Tigris and the Greater Zab, where Dur Sharrukin, Nineveh, Nimrud and Assur sit

the  Lesser Zab river, flowing in below Assur

and still further down, the Tigris and Euphrates joining and flowing past Isin, Uruk, Larsa, Ur and Eridu, magical names

All the land fed by water, cultivated by man,

And, from many years ago a different kind of river, flowing through a quiet Sussex wood, over the edge and into the past.

Forewood waterfall - found at the back of the shed, still stretched onto the drawing board. Acrylic paint must be tasty to someone