This week Nicky Dillerstone sent me back some old “photos”, from a community project that she did at 20-21 in Scunthorpe some years ago. We took along old family photos which Nicky printed on calico, we stitched into them and Nicky made them up into quilts to be part of an exhibition. The quilts have been dismantled, and the pieces returned to the stitchers.
The one above is of my mum and nanna, when I guess mum was about 7 or 8. Unfortunately there isn’t anybody left who can give me more details about any of the photos.
This one is mum again, aged 2 or 3, and it’s a professional, staged photo. I’m not sure if we all had to use red stitching to bring all the pieces together, but I think so.
This is a professional one of my dad aged about 4.
And this is my mum, I believe, with her paternal great grandmother and her baby cousin, or it could be the baby’s mum, mum’s auntie.
They reminded me that I have more photos printed on calico from another workshop that we did with Nicky shortly afterwards. These are not finished…… no deadline for them!
This bride is my great Auntie Vi with husband Uncle Tom, and on the right, my nanna as bridesmaid. Auntie Vi was 15 years younger than my great grandma. Somewhere, tucked away in an old exercise book, I have notes about the family history from Auntie Vi after reading “Roots” in the late 70’s; so that’s a rainy day project sometime.
My intention had been to embroider the roses and Uncle Tom’s buttonhole.
This again is Auntie Vi, looking very glamorous, which is not at all how I remember her. We usually saw her in her work clothes, gardening, in the huge garden that she managed on her own for many years after Uncle Tom died when I was quite tiny. There is one needle full of thread, but whether I can match it up with more I don’t know.
And this is a later one of her. As the vicar said of her at her funeral, that although she was no church goer she was a great character and everybody in the road knew her. Hers was the first funeral I went to that was more a celebration of her long life rather than doom and gloom. I vividly remember laughing at some tale the vicar told with tears rolling down my cheeks. Just looking at the photos of her makes me smile and brings back many happy memories.
It was a busy time at the Grasby Embroiderers Exhibition last weekend. The first visitors arrived before we were officially open, but it worked well as we were all ready anyway and good to have keen viewers.
There were several bodies of work on display, some of which had not been seen before, including the bras, a fund raiser for Breast Cancer. We had all started with a white bra, the same size (36FF), so plenty of space to stitch. The brief was a famous woman, real or fictitious. We all had completely different ideas which ended in very different looking bras; from the top left: Grace Darling, Claire / Grayson Perry, Snow Queen (mine), Shirley Bassey (Gold Finger), bottom left: Flower Power, and Gertrude Jekyll.
I used white and siver threads to stitch simple snowflakes in various sizes, Angelina fibres to sparkle and catch the light, fluffy yarn to look like snow-drifts, and strings of beads to represent icicles. The bras were stuffed and stitched on to a painted canvas
We each started one body of work (“New Beginnings”) with a pack of black and white threads, fabrics, papers, etc., a different stitch to play and experiment with, a page of quotes for self reflection and the starting point of one of two sayings: “Time and tide wait for no man” or “Castles in the air”. Also we had a white Ikea frame for a piece “Where we started”.
Two thoughts immediately jumped into my head: the song “Both sides now” by Joni Mitchell and the German fairytale castle Neuschwanstein, which we had visited years ago with our German friends.
My stitch was Half Rhodes stitch, a canvas work stitch. This was where my preliminary ideas started, but in my pack had been a piece of wallpaper with half a butterfly on, which I played around with in PhotoShop, mirror-imaging it, horizontally and vertically. This led to the swan pieces below of white on black and black on white in tiny reverse chain stitches. In the other white frame are Lorna’s sand ripples in sorbello stitch (white on white), and in the foreground her “Time and tide” piece.
The red and white box, with silhouette of a castle round the four sides, has a tiny bead and wire red swan on a little mirror hidden in the bottom of the box. The starting points evolve and develop as the work progresses. Most of the rest of the group ended up using colour in their pieces, but it was good to go back to basics and look at line / shape / form and texture, and work in sketchbooks
The flowers and angels were new bodies of work for our exhibition at The Old Rectory in Epworth, but looked different in a different setting and differently staged. My tulip on the left had lost its shape and form a little at Epworth, the humidity had made it wilt. It may need a couple of tiny stitches to anchor it, but so far it seems OK where I have hung it at home. The black cloth makes the other flowers sing, but drains the pale green of my canvas and makes it appear white, at least in the photograph.
I love the bright colours and abstraction of Mary’s angel, a complete contrast to my cream angel with very fine gold thread and simplistic stitching. Her wonderful flower, behind on the right, is so free, and the use of colour is stunning; if I were to try something like that it would look overdone and a mess, because not knowing when to stop would be my downfall.
The lockdown challenges are a riot of colour when all displayed together, just what we needed to keep our spirits up, a surprise through the post each month, giving an ideal opportuntity to experiment and play with some new and different techniques.
The red dado rail behind my “I am little” work was a happy accident, but unfortunately I took the photo before the radiator had been covered with another black cloth. This was part of the “Revisted” project, and most of the others developed earlier work from old sketchbooks and bodies of work from before I joined the group. I took the title of “Portrait” that had been used some time ago. It started at just the right time when we were emptying my dad’s house, and came across my infant school books and old black and white photos of when I was four and five. The title comes from a page in my first school book, with the tiny drawing reproduced on the left and on my name plate.
There was a sales table (fabric, inspiration packs, our postcards) and a tombola, both of which all but sold out. The money from these was split equally between Grasby Church and Breast Cancer.
Tea and coffee, and homemade cakes and biscuits (donations to Grasby Church) with well spaced tables, the weather was bright and sunny, so it was easy to have the doors open for good ventilation. It all felt safe and welcoming, with a steady stream of visitors, but never so many together that it felt crowded.
It seemed that most of the visitors on Saturday and Sunday morning were fellow stitchers, and mainly locals on both afternoons. No rhyme or reason for this, but it was a very friendly atmosphere and lots of the visitors knew one or more of us. It was good to see people that we’d not had any contact with since March 2020 at least, so lots of chatting and catching up, and compliments about the work.
debbidipity 