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 ...

Glow

 An old gift joins a new gift to catch sunshine after the storm. Our days begin to grow longer again

I hope you and yours have had a kindly festive season. 

Perambulations

When I go for walks I have two options, to drive somewhere and walk, or to go out of my front door and see where the pavement takes me. I tend to do both in equal measures; sometimes I am treated to the wild rushing sea and views from our seafront, where the pavement is level and I can get a reasonable pace going; on other days I wander around the neighbourhood, peering at gardens, wondering about who lived here in past times, what this space looked like. Every so often something catches the eye and one thinks, hmmmm, where did that come from?

In this case, it is a rather lovely line of trees, Scots pine on one side, chestnut and other natives on the other. They are big trees, as you can see, much older than the surrounding houses and obviously planted, but by whom and what for?

They soar over one, and are home to a bevy of crows

They sit in a long green open space, called Ashcombe Park, between several modern developments. Folk walk along here with their dogs, conkers litter the ground in Autumn

So I did a little digging about and found a rather wonderful thing called "Bexhill Open Street Map" which has an amazing range of overlays on a standard map of the town. From this I can see that at one stage this space was open fields, belonging to Birchington Farm

then between 1899 and this 1909 map, Effingham House appears

and within a very short space of time, it becomes Effingham House School, run by Miss Ismay, who applied to the district council for a temporary gymnasium in April 1919, and shown here on a 1955 OS map. By 1911 the school had 37 boarders, aged 11 - 16 from as far afield as India, Holland and Argentina as well as the more predictable London, Yorkshire and Somerset. There were 5 academic staff, two matrons and 9 general staff.

Here you can see the line of trees in the aerial photo from 1967, angling across the middle of the image,

You can find pictures of both the school and their uniform in this Bexhill Museum publication from an exhibition they had about Bexhill's schools

And finally, to my delight, I found this 1954 advert for "Girl Golfers" at Effingham House School. You can see those lovely trees in the background.

Isn't it amazing how much history we can find, just by looking in different places

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

walking

We have been encouraged to take exercise throughout this pandemic, for the good of both physical and mental health. Since buying a fitness band when I was still in work, I have made a concerted effort to increase the number of steps I do each day, when not constrained by higher levels of pain or exhaustion than normal. My first target, back in around 2017, and still deskbound, was 2000 steps a day. It has built since then to the point where I regularly reach my 5000 a day target and occasionally go well beyond. That won't sound like much to anyone with any sensible level of fitness, but for me it is an achievement, and tells me that I can probably manage more as long as I keep pushing, remain patient and accept that sometimes I won't even mange half those 5000 steps in a day.

We are fortunate where we live to have the sea within walking distance, and also very benign suburban streets where one can be aware of birdsong, the wind shushing through a hedge, low raking sunlight illuminating the leaves, and all sorts of interesting gardens to peer at. 

sunny skies or windy, the sea is always good to watch

there are fairies and gnomes of you look closely, I wonder what it's like when the lights come on!

There are so many interesting things to see when you are looking.

With the good of my health in mind, and with the help of the fitness app, I can now set myself distance targets and have managed nearly two miles on two different days. A long walk for me, with the occasional stop for breath catching and general realignment of aching bones! 

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

accumulation

Things are building up, layer by layer

The wider view

Playing with a scrap of organza, 

A river perhaps

The present past

To all the world, bar me, this is an unremarkable piece of laundry marking; a soft blue embroidery thread used to stitch a name with very basic stitches into the edge of a pillowcase. To me, this speaks of a soft faced, elegantly spoken, refined elderly lady with round, pink, powdered cheeks, Mrs Tiggy-winkle eyes and the sweetest smile, eking out a life of genteel poverty during the early1970s in the deep recesses of St Leonards on Sea.

She was Norah Moore and had been one of two ladies who rented rooms in Ganna’s house. They took up the top floor of an Edwardian semi, where they shared the kitchen and bathroom, but retired to their own individual rooms; paying guests. Mum and I took over those rooms when we moved to live with Ganna in 1968 after Daddy died. Later, Mum would take me to visit Norah, in her two room bedsit in yet another St Leonard’s Edwardian: this a stone's throw from Nanya's first abode with her three girls. I'm sure I was given sweets, butterscotch bricks wrapped in gold paper with a crispy crunch to them; Callard and Bowser as I recall.

Mrs Moore had been married, and had a little girl of her own, but some tragedy, possibly wartime, stripped her of husband, child and meaning in her life. I remember the sadness in me, that this kindly soul had gone through such tragedy.

I may be the only person in the world who remembers her

sampling

Although no stitching was done while away, since coming home I have spent some time with my Mesopotamia layered piece, this time a proper sample. Christine's advice was to pin the layers together, rather than tacking, as with every stitch you make, the organza and the layer(s) below make a little adjustment with each other. Pins can be moved to accommodate this. It was very fine advice.

So here: the base of hand dyed fabric, with its layer of marks; a layer of poly organza coloured with walnut and India ink if I remember; a snippet of the paper laminated piece with more floor plan imagery and a layer of seed stitch suggesting another building.

The next layer of seeding, at larger scale, with a thread which matches the colours on the fabric, both responds to what is below, and secures the coloured organza

Here using Emily Jo Gibbs' technique of stitching around the edge of the layer below 

finding shadows of floor plans, hidden beneath, or impromptu patterns from the combined layers.

Here stitching moves away from the absolute randomness of seeding, responding to what lies beneath, just as archaeology does, searching for treasure 

Sampling really does allow for experiment and experiencing the way the layers interact, how stitching can bring to the surface what lies below. 

My larger piece has more detail, though the seeding needs to extend further around the remains; I like the way they flicker in and out, depending on the colour in the hand dyed fabric below.

Once the sampling is done, I can think more clearly about how to develop this further. For now it is good to just consider

Retreat

We are home again after our annual trip to the Lakes, which Covid was kind enough to allow. We are expecting to be confined to a greater degree in the near future if the rise in infection continues, and are so grateful to have been able to be there this year. As ever the place was magical, despite not "going anywhere"; we walked and swam and I knitted and crocheted and read far too many books, the best of which was The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle.

Neither of  us can walk very far, due to age and general debility, but I managed a couple of, for me, longish walks, (just over 1 1/2 miles in old money), and as ever looked longingly at the Pikes, wishing I were fitter. This is taken from a point on the road above Elterwater. The sense of space is quite different from a walk on the south coast, with the sea's horizon at one's side. Here is such stillness, space contained by immenseness, water trickling, sheep foraging, light glancing off the landscape, a here and a there.

We stay just on the edge of Elterwater, and were lucky enough to see a red squirrel for the first time

and on one of my walks, this shy creature just over the wall

As ever there was rain, but that just adds to the beauty and richness of the colours

And ever in the background, water and reflection

Then one night, when sleep was eluding me, moonlight and shadow