Nearly there

 Here is where I sit now for all things textile. A clearer focus for you all and for me I think. Welcome if this is your first visit - you’ll find all the old stitchy posts here too.

So, this lovely jacket is nearly at the finishing line, if you’ll pardon the pun. It has been really interesting to knit, both for construction and for the lacy pattern on the skirt. Those 500+ stitches have been worth it.

The three in one rib has a lovely textural quality and the curlicues in the lace pattern an unexpected pleasure

The final shaping at the top of the sleeve is interesting too - a passage of standard decreases and then those purl 3tog, k 2tog rows to draw it all in at the top. I’m looking forward to seeing what that is like - it all feels rather Jane Austen 

Happy New Year

I hope you and yours have had an enjoyable, if quiet Christmas and New Year. Tomorrow we take down the tree with it's message of hope for the return of light in the darkness, and our little colour changing angels and snowflakes will be safely tucked back in their boxes to come out again next year. 

We aren't amongst those who have a themed Christmas and buy new decorations each year. Some of mine go back 30 years to when my daughter was a child, and upstairs I have a box with the last few remining ornaments that went onto our tree in Petersfield when I was a very little girl. And yes, Amanda Jane is tucked away in a box upstairs as well, along with all her clothes. She was given to me twice, the first time I was underwhelmed by her and she was "tossed to one side", so Mum packed her back up, put her away and brought her out again the following year when I was more appreciative!!

I have some new reading for the New Year. Thank you Rachel for the indirect recommendation - I was given two for the price of one! I am amused by the way that the same font has been used on both covers. Better finish "Early Mesopotamia, Society and Culture at the Dawn of History" first though. I think these will keep me busy for a good while, in between such delights as re reading PD James, for when I have an evening brain rather than morning one - you know how it goes.

I have been stitching as well, those little bits of blackwork all finished now, along with some Dorset buttons, which are rather fun to create, and may get a bit more embellishment. I will probably work a better version of the darkest square as well, it's lopsidedness is even more obvious here. They will be gathered together with others for a group project which must be finished in the next couple of months. I will post the results when it's done. I wonder what it might be?

I have enjoyed doing some simple stitching that hasn't required too much thinking. Sometimes that's all you need, a set of instructions, a needle, some thread, fabric and an embroidery hoop. Oh, and some good music to stitch by, in this case one of my favourite Christmas albums - Jethro Tull's Songs From the Wood with it's glorious ringing out of Solstice bells.

palimpsest

The residual marks left when existing text on vellum is scraped back for reuse. Christine Chester made a beautiful textile in 2015, relating it to her own ongoing theme of memories lost. You can read her thoughts behind her work here.

Here, just visible, the shadow of blackwork unpicked. I hadn't centered the pattern properly, didn't like the way it interacted with the edge, so out it came, leaving a trace of black fiber within the slightly larger holes. I am hoping the stitching will cover that little remnant.

I'm not happy with the way this one is centered either, so might have to find another square of fabric

This, on the other hand, has worked well - the difference in colour is down to the lighting

I'd forgotten what fun blackwork can be - the rhythm of the stitching so soothing, the patterns almost stitch themselves, and the back can look like cuneiform ...

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

stitch and stitch

Our next task for Poetry of Stitch has been to stitch our curve once more, again four iterations, but this time all in the same direction, and all with line stitches. I have been experimenting with chain stitch, cable stitch, and now some couching. I am varying the placing of the couching stitch to try and create a lighter and darker effect within the curve, and have varied the chain stitch density and width with the same intention.

Sometimes the back tells its own story

And sometimes it's just rather fun

Progress so far, the top left being the "control", with just a single thread laid across closely spaced, to mark a starting point for this tonal exercise.

then there is the homework ....... 

Magick

There are old magicks in this landscape

Hidden things

Buried secrets

Secret flows