Crown

The theme for this month’s travelling book pages for S.E.A.T.A. (Scunthorpe Embroidery and Textiles Association) is the Queen’s 70th Jubilee, and could be from any event during her reign illustrated in stitch.

The first thing that jumped into my head was the carving of the crown that topped the State Carriage, by O.H. Boyd (Howard). I was going to his pencil-drawing class at the time, and sure that we were privés to seeing the work in progress. I don’t recall seeing the finished crown before it went to Australia, no doubt as it was probably pretty close to the deadline. I have a memory of it being on the front of the North Linconshire Magazine (April 2007), which was called “Direct” at the time, also of him writing a couple of articles for a wood-carving magazine which I thought a friend would probably still have.

Janet went to his wood-carving classes as well as the drawing ones, and she found and loaned me the magazine, and another article about it. The image wasn’t quite what I had in mind, because it showed work in progress rather than the finished crown.

An internet search brought up the finished State Coach (which is now known as the Diamond Jubilee State Coach) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond_Jubilee_State_Coach, but not the articles in the wood-carving magazine. The Coach was made to commemorate the Queen’s 80th birthday.

I made a rough drawing which I decided to stitch through using a gold coloured silk thread, after trying blue water soluble pen on the gold lamé very unsuccessfully. You can see lots of needle pricks where I’ve come up in the wrong place. It’s backed with a piece of cotton curtain lining, with a layer of wadding to give a quilted effect.

Once I’d stitched all round, I started adding some beads.

More beads were added, rather too many for the curved sections, but I didn’t want to use bigger beads as it would have been too bulky for the travelling book. There were also some curved stitches – straight stitches couched down in the middle near the bottom to try and replicate the texture of the carving.

The finished stitching in daylight.

I then used a needle over the stitching lines to break through the paper and make it easier to remove. In fact, I liked the effect of the paper once I’d taken off the excess round the edge, and was tempted to leave it on.

But I decided to take it all off, and stretch it over mount-board.

I did this in two layers, initially mitred across the diagonals of the corners of the curtain lining, then lacing across the verticals and horizontals. The wadding was cut back to the size of the mount-board. The gold lamé had one selvedge edge which I left on: it frays so badly, and I thought three fraying edges were enough to deal with. Again I mitred the corners, then turned the raw edge under and stitched it gently through the curtain lining.

If I was using it again, I would zigzag round the edges and tack it to a bigger piece of backing fabric. But I do think that lacing the backing fabric, and then stitching through the fragile fabric to attach it, would work for fine silks, organzas and things you don’t want so much tension on. I just need to do my inspiration page, and it’ll all be ready for the swap.

Done !

Scrappy nine patch workshop

The workshop we had last Saturday at S.E.A.T.A. (Scunthorpe Embroidery and Textile Association) with Alex Hall flew by. Alex’s intention was for us to use different ways to attach found objects (like plastic rings) to fabric using a variety of stitched techniques.

I had already decided before I arrived that I was going off piste. I had some limpet shells that were almost rings that I wanted as my starting-point. This also influenced my choice of background fabric and my scraps, with a lovely piece of indigo batik / tie-dye that was just about the right size for a front and back. While looking for more limpet shells I found a plastic box full of seasidey bits and pieces gathered for a workshop with Nicky Dillerstone years ago: tea-dyed towelling and calico, blue velvet, a scrap of print in blue and cream spirals, textured synthetic (heat gun?), a strip of painted calico (sea and beach?).

With a little ripping and cutting, moving things around and assessing balance, I was ready to start anchoring down. The left hand side looks like sea and the right more beachy.

Looking through a jar of beads I found a little fish, which I thought was a bit twee, but then found several more. They are really tiny, kept in a spice jar lid. One has got away already.And there were exactly nine mixed in with beads and sequins etc.

Then I found this bit of net, and thought they could be caught in the net, with one or two escapees.

The shells below are ones I started painting at my painting class earlier in the week. Alex had informed me that the wonderful textures on the largest shell and the left foreground one, are “Pomatoceros” (what a lovely word!) – a tube-building annelid worm.

The central limpet shell was quite smooth, so I decided to add some “Pomatoceros” texture with bullion knots in the “Bella Donna” viscose thread that I’d vowed not to use again a few weeks ago!

At the moment they are wriggling all over the place and need anchoring to the shell with some matching sylko, but are giving the effect I’m aiming for. Even for bullion knots it’s horrible to work with, but it does slide on itself quite well.

Not much has been stitched down yet, and it will no doubt evolve from here as other things jump out at me, like using a limpet shell over the printed fabric to see the mollusc inside! One of the new members very kindly gave me the two silvery spirals, from a recycled piece of jewellery she’d found in a charity shop. Much to my shame, I can’t remember her name (sorry!), but I think she got my travelling book piece from last week.

I’m looking forward to getting back to it, once I’m up to date with the other things that have deadlines.