Honouring work done

It's been a while since I've mentioned this wonderful treasure that came my way earlier in the year. Since you last saw it I have been working away at "consolidating". Getting all the unfinished edges finished, sewing lots of little while hexagons to add to the edges to get to a clean starting point, taking our endless paper hexagons so I have templates to paper piece around, sewing lots of colourful flowers so I have a stock to begin adding in my own contributions. You can see them making rainbow in the box below

So, having got the point where there is a boundary of white around what has been done so far, I was advised that it is usual to have some way of marking where one maker ceased and another began. This struck me as an excellent idea; the piecing that has been done so far is so fine and I am trying to achieve the same quality, but my aesthetic with colour is bound to differ from hers. So, without doing something too obvious that would intrude on the rhythm of the overall design (assuming I do actually finish it), I have decided to run a single line of stem stitch around the white edges to show where her flowers end and mine begin. You can see it below, skirting round the purple and blue and green, marking the transition that spans 13 years and a whole generation; the originator of this was my Mum's generation. It makes me think of edges and boundaries and maps, I don't quite know why.

I am still stitching every day, amongst all the other projects on the go. A quiet task that can be inventive, when choosing, cutting and stitching the fabrics for the flowers, or quietly undemanding, when stitching white on white; hexagons around paper, hexagons to other hexagons, or rhythmic stem stich to mark the place one stopped and another started. Honouring her work as I move forward with my own.

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

Cooking cloth

In complete contrast to the previous post,

a little pot of gnarly bits,

a little tub of things from the garden

an old aluminium saucepan and some copper pipe, wrapped in cloth

Yes I'm having another try with eco printing/dyeing. There were so many lovely pieces at FOQ this year, and I wanted to experiment, to see what happens, which is always a fun way to learn.

The gnarly bits are Oak Gall -  a good source of tannin for dyeing or as a mordant; collected on one of my local "constitutionals". Two galls ground then simmered to extract the tannins. The leaves and flowers from my garden, collected on the day they were bundled, with the exception of a couple of eucalyptus leaves from Yorkshire. Fabric (ancient sheeting) soaked in the tannin mixture, bundled and then simmered rather than steaming. Now I will wait a few days to unwrap and see what happened.

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

Festival time

Darling daughter and I had a wonderful couple of days at Festival of Quilts in Birmingham last weekend. There was just so much to see and be inspired by, from exquisitely executed "traditional" quilts to the marvellous art textiles in the various galleries. Here are just a few of them

My favourite, and the first gallery we visited, was this beautiful, fragile emotive piece by the lovely Christine Chester. She entered it for the Vlieseline Fine Art Textile Award and was so thrilled when it was accepted (why on earth wouldn't they?). As with much of her work, it centres around the theme of memory and loss. She shows how a condition like dementia takes so much away both from the sufferer and those around them. How the person they love slowly fades away, and then even their own memories of that person become fragile and thinned by time, once they have gone. She created all the fabrics herself, then used the very traditional English Paper Piecing technique, with incredibly fine stitching, to evoke this delicate image of her father mending his fishing nets, cap pulled down, concentration absolute. It is a picture she has used in previous works about him, each one expressing her loss and his in a different way. She wanted it to hang so it could be viewed from both sides, bringing that sense of transparency and fading memories to life. We, her students, were lucky enough to watch it evolve and when I first saw it complete, I was moved to tears. It touched deeply on my own sense of loss, bringing to mind my Dad, who I haven't seen for more than 51 years, but who sits in my heart every day.

The next gallery I wanted to visit was that of India Flint. We weren't there on Saturday to hear her talk, but it was marvellous to be able to get close to her eco printed works, to see the way the different textures of wool, cotton and silk affected the prints that she makes with her "botanical alchemy". Very special, too, to see her sitting quietly there, stitching, barefoot, like an alternative Whistler's Mother; the same pose, the same gentle muted colours, but a whirled away from 1870s America. It was good to be able to thank her for her inspiration.

That satisfied my immediate priorities. Then it was a matter of wandering through the textile forest, pausing where inspiration struck, and doing our best to manage both my and Jen's frailties by stopping regularly for food and drink, or just to rest our aching and exhausting bones for a while.

Here's some more things we enjoyed

Leah Higgins' marvellous breakdown printing inspired by the cotton mills of Manchester and Salford.

Eszter Bornemisza's complex stitched and layered works that speak of maps and cities and time 

Caroline Nixon's oh so delicate Underground Overground, eco printed and then stitched

Niki Chandler's Le Ciel Electrique.“And all in a flash night turned to day. Capturing the haunting experience of camping in a pine forest during a violent electric storm.” 

Crafted in transparents and shimmering organza, a photo can't catch the sparkling luminosity of this piece.

Alice Fox's allotment year, Plot 105 : 52 weeks. 

seasonal plants, eco printed and gathered together in fragile handmade books, part of the Natural Selection gallery of plant based artworks

The vibrant colours of Liz Jones' Moving On, made with her own hand spun and hand woven merino wool

the quiet reflectiveness of Ann Beare's The Sentinels: Silent Witness, inspired by The Purton Hulks

and finally Beatrice Bueche's shining Tree in the Moonlight

Of course we saw and enjoyed more than these, but I would run out of words, and you would run out of patience if I showed you everything.

If you want more, you'll just have to go yourself - next year 

Starting and finishing

Moaning Mona, as she is becoming known, is nearly finished. She should have been handed in at our meeting last Saturday, but she's nearly there.

This meeting involved several very enjoyable little workshops being run by members of Sussex Stitchers, embracing the sharing skills and knowledge side of belonging to the Embroiderers' Guild. We have also been running a monthly stitching group (called Fly Stitchers) for some newer members to give them more confidence in their (already very good) stitching. One of the questions we are often asked is about starting and finishing threads.

There are a couple of schools of thought on this. One of the most common methods is the "away knot", where the end of the thread is knotted and brought down into the fabric far enough away from your starting point that you can take it through to the back of the work and weave in when you have finished. This is a really good method if you are working on small motifs and designs, or using a stitch which isn't intended to cover the fabric.

In the case of Mona, however, the area of her hair is densely stitched with a mixture of stem and outline stitch (of which more in a bit). This being the case, I've used the method recommended by RSN teachers, which is to run the thread down on the line you will be covering with stitching, then bring it back up and take a small backstitch to anchor it before starting the stitching proper. When you get to the end of the thread, you do a similar thing in reverse.

So here you can see various "freckles" in the unstitched area of her hair, where I have got to the end of a thread and "parked" by making a small securing stitch, bringing the end of the thread to the surface again and snipping it close to the linen. It will stay there until it is covered by subsequent stitching. (The bottom edge is much squarer than it appears here!)

You can also park thread temporarily, as below, where in the foreground and further up you can see threads ready to be used for the next bit of stitching. I have started stitching upwards from the area of organza where her hair meets her face, rather than working from the top down and risking a bulge in the layers of organza.

Here, below, you can see where I have started a strand of darker brown, the loose end is middle right, and if you look closely you can see the tiny anchoring stitch just before the needle goes down into the fabric, having come up where I am starting this colour. On the left are two more needles with different blends of brown as I am mixing colour both in the needle and as I move across the hair from left to right.

The other thing I am doing is mixing stem and outline stitch so that there is more texture in the hair, rather than having the twist of the stitches all one way. If you're not sure of the difference, the source of all good stitchy information Mary Corbet will tell you here.

Now for the other bit of finishing - i.e. finishing Moaning Mona

Having seen lots of our other stitchers' contributions, I think she's going to look rather wonderful when she's done. I'll be sure to take a pic to show you.

Dye and stitch and sometimes both

So a little free time focus and some fun with the dyepot. These below a set of fabrics variously manipulated in shibori fashion, stitched, pleated, folded, bound, crumpled.

Dyed with synthetic indigo, flushed through with a wash of petrol green towards the end - I enjoy playing with the parameters of what and when. The colours not quite right here, but you get the idea.

Then in a plastic tray, this scrumptious srcumpledness. Again, shibori stitched, dyed bright yellow a few days ago, then extra colour flooded in as a second process

And here it is unwrapped and blended together with three other bits of cloth from those long ago sheets. Some of my experiments in my first year or two with Christine top and third, second and fourth dyed very recently to complement. I intend spreading them out a bit onto a backcloth so each can have its own voice, but still be part of a whole

And the cities begin to grow in Mesopotamia - 

Assur, capital of the Assyrian Empire the latest to manifest as we flow down the Tigris, Dur Sharrukin, Nineveh and Nimrud nestled in the confluence of the Greater Zab and the Tigris