Gaze No More in the Bitter Glass

   Last year I had to leave my home and studio of twenty five years and it was not easy. It was my little paradise and the grief process was long. Whenever I closed my eyes I was back there, walking around and looking in the corners. It was a tiny place, a studio cottage of one big open room with a bathroom.

 

 To find a way to preserve the memory and still move on I decided to embroider the maps of my heart, both the placement of the furniture and the way that I moved around it, after 25 years the routes were engraved in my soul.

Handkys are symbols of grief and loss and as I unpacked and put things into storage I found a pile of my great aunts handkerchiefs. Fine lawn cotton and linen, they were too beautiful to pack away and forget so I embroidered them instead.

 

A fine linen one was used for the floor plan and four delicately embroidered lawn ones for the movement maps. The idea was that these could be overlaid onto the floor plan and the ghost of my home would reveal itself.

Coming in from the Shops

Getting Dressed and Making Breakfast

Going To Bed

Watching a Film and Making Tea

Floorplan on linen

 

Stem stitch, Bayeux stitch, Chain stitch and Bullion stitch 

Angel Of Love

 

   So, in 2017 I began a small wasps nest in raised needlelace. It was a bit of a challenge with the circular chambers and the angled formation of the nest. How I made the base was crucial to the overall stability of the piece but there was no way of doing a practice piece I just had to do it.

When a piece of work really tests you it can be like a banana skin in your mind, it just keeps slipping away when you think of it! So the following year I did some more but by this time I was fully involved in my medical residency and the making of the surgical models. I was filmed making the piece but actual progress was slow. It was still unformed in my mind and therefore hard for me to come back to with much certainty of whether it would actually work out properly. There is no small amount of anxiety when you invest so much time in a piece.

   

Then, after much upheaval in my life I came back to the piece in 2024. I picked up where I had left off with the top nest section and quickly realised that it was all okay! I had been so close to resolving in my head and hadn't realised it. The branch followed and then early this year I made the smaller section and there it was.

What drew me to doing this was a photograph of a solitary wasps nest and a long term fascination with the paper that wasps make themselves. To reproduce the making process of another being was key to the whole work.

I found that I had to think like a wasp, think how I would construct pod shapes from the inside and how they would link together. Each construction section be it the base, the pods, the lids or how I moved (stitched) from one area to another was only solved by doing it and being it.

It is the second piece in a series called Angels of Heaven based on a text in the gospel of the Essenes; the quote I worked from here is  ''Loving words are as honeycomb''. The first piece is featured on this blog and is called "Angel of Eternal Life" under the search term 'angels'.

 

  Post Hoc Exilium (after this exile). A line from a very early Christian hymn, Robert MacFarlane talks, in his book 'The Wild Places', of monks who chose to live on remote Scottish Islands building tiny cells and living in harsh conditions in order to be closer to God. They felt that they were in exile from heaven.

  

In a remote Cornish bay in the idyll of my childhood I would stand in the clear water and try to touch the ferny seaweeds that floated there. Their texture was beautiful but I could not touch it, I was of the earth and air, they of the water. I could only try and touch them with my mind.

 In 2016 I began a residency with the vascular surgery unit at St.Mary's hospital in Paddington London (see the Thread Management blog in the side menu). Whilst working there with Professor Colin Bicknell I could not touch I could only look but I saw him train a young surgeon by allowing her to put her hand on his as he felt his way through to where he needed to be. 

 

Between the seaside holiday and now I have learned many techniques with textiles, the most obvious involve touch, the less obvious are about sight and visual texture.

The piece that you see here represents all that I know of my craft mapped onto what I know of the surgeons. 

The vascular system of the hand is made using the needlelace cordonnet technique, the glove has seams which mirror those arteries. Both pieces have cuffs, one in a sturdy reticella style lace with branching arterial pattern, the other is a freestyle needlelace.

I took particular care to retain the 3D quality of the arteries where the deep palmer arch seperates from the superficial palmer arch.

 Though there is the obvious parallel between our knowledge what it also speaks of is the extension of touch that I already understood and the extension of empathy that I had to make to understand the world of surgery.  

New in the shop

 

 Well, after moving home and studio, it has taken a while to unpack and find everything! Here now are a few new items in my shop...

The first is 'The Attached Spool', above. An antique spool of hand spun linen which has become mysteriously attached to a long couronne chain.

 These chains are found in the Italian technique called Casalguidi stitch, a branch of stumpwork techniques, and are made using a couronne stick. The beauty of them is that the rings are properly linked together which inspired me to try attaching them to existing objects.

Next are two hand stitched ring brooches. They are both early 20thC. pieces in brass or silver coloured metal, one has couronne style embroidery and the other a little needlelace edge. 

All can be found on my shop HERE

Trace

 In his book 'Underland' Robert Macfarlane says

'sometimes, in fact, all that is left behind by loss is trace - and sometimes empty volume can be easier to hold in the heart than presence itself'

This piece from Evidence consists of a ribbon winder card, the tattered remains of lace shelf edging, two old snail shells and a web of single stitch needlelace.

   I have collected a lot of antique and vintage haberdashery over the past thirty five years. A lot was not really valued by the world until recently. I saw not just the quality of the material in the trimmings but also in the simple packaging; the winders and reels that ribbons were wound onto, the card mounts for buttons and even the thread that attached them...all good quality and yet discarded. I picked up my treasures for 10p or 50p, the prices often crudely written straight onto the paper in felt tip pen. 

  At my great grandmothers' home I found many more treasures and among them were packets of shelf edging which have paper lace borders to make decorate the shelves of larders and dressers. Many were untouched with pretty bands of paper to secure them but the packets that were opened I allowed myself to use on my shelves. Over time they wore away and like the old lace they emulate started to yellow and disintegrate.

  Old empty snail shells do not last forever, I collect them from around the garden and use them on top of garden canes but was surprised to see that they fade. Always a collector of organic packaging, shells, seed pods and galls, to me they are just like the ribbon reels.

  The web is a single Brussels stitch needlelace mesh made in the finest lacemaker thread I could find. I would have put a spiders web across them if I could but instead I made my own.

The Embroiderer's Crown

  

All those needles I get through.... I save up all the ones that have gone rusty and found many of my great aunts' too and from them made a crown! An old ribbon reel which had a metre of paper wound onto it was pressed into service as the holder of the needles. When tools have done their job we should say thankyou.

 

This joins the other pieces made from discarded objects in the 'Evidence' series.

Grey Moth

 

A little grey moth for a special occasion, commissioned to sit in a place of honour.

 A complex cordonnet, wired for resilience and covered in a hand dyed grey cotton. The wings are what I think of as skeletal needlelace in that there is no infill between the veins of this creature's wings. The design was taken though from a peacock butterfly as the structure of the veining is very suitable for this technique.

  The body was a tufty one, more hand dyed silk in Turkey stitch or Ghiordes knots with a secret design of gold initials amongst the grey.

initials on the reverse

  After the body and wings were joined he was mounted onto a simple nettle shaped silk leaf and the stitches hidden by beading. The leaf was chosen for its appropriate shape under the wings giving just enough contrast to lift it out. It was nature's genius really though as the peacock butterfly lays its eggs on the underside of nettle leaves.

He fastened to a special dress by the simple ruse of a hair slide and there he stayed all day.

(I know he's supposed to be a butterfly but he was always a moth to me)

 

 

Leave us not Little, nor yet Dark

 

 

 The second piece from 'Evidence' using the crewel work embroidery needles that I found in a 1930s pin cushion. I was aware that there were a few in there as I could feel the resistance when I put my own needle into the velvet top. As I massaged them all out there were more than a few and they were all the same type.

  The previous owner had also been an embroiderer but of crewel work. I decided to honour her needles by mounting them onto paper as they would have been when new. I then used their eyes as a cordonnet and made a simple piece of needlelace or stumpwork. My needle was then left on the end of the last strand of heavy silk buttonhole thread. 

 

  The mounting is a glassine envelope, so often used by stamp collectors, and inside is a collection of empty used envelopes. They are all addressed to the same man and date from WW2 up until the 1960s, some being sent to him whilst on active duty.

The title is a quote from the BBC production of John Masefield's 'The Box of Delights'.

Thus in the Winter

 

  A new series of work called 'Evidence' using antique discarded ephemera, this piece is an embroidered antique silk hairnet. The net itself is a work of art as it appears to be handmade, the silk filaments being split to create the mesh. It came to me wrapped in faded tissue paper and so I have embroidered over the net and through the paper.

the split silk strands

After a drift of french knots I inserted some 'mudlarked' pins to stabilise the tissue. The pins are at least C19th and very probably much much older.

 

I have a passion for such fragile and transient items; the hairnet, pins and paper are all disposable in their way and yet they are such personal items. Anything that is handled as much as these things carries memory and I like to catch that last gleam of energy from the previous owner.

 

The title is a quote from the Edna St.Vincent Millay poem 'What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why' (1923)

What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning; but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply,
And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain
For unremembered lads that not again
Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.
Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree,
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:
I cannot say what loves have come and gone,
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more.