I think I’m calling this one finished today – apart from finding some sort of stick to hang it from and making a label for the back, both of which still need doing.
Marking Time II detail
I’ve enjoyed working on this one. It seems to have taken its own time, as all things do – a few minutes here and there, whenever we could sit down together. But these things happen, one stitch at a time, like putting one foot in front of the other. Just to keep going and see what happens. It’s always an adventure and a voyage of discovery. We always seem to get there in the end, wherever it is we’re supposed to be.
Marking Time II detail
I’ll show a picture of its full length when I’ve sorted out the hanging rod. It’s about 43″ long and about 9.5″ wide.
Marking Time II top
I really like the long narrow format; it strikes me as quite practical because it doesn’t take up too much wall space and is pretty easy to hang.
On my work table today
I also like how the ancient cup and ring marks translate so readily to stitch, and how universal these patterns are. There are circles everywhere in life.
Cloth with the sketch that started it
The summer solstice tomorrow – and there’s my northern hemisphere bias again, for which apologies – is another circle, another turn of the wheel. And so we continue, keeping on keeping on.
…after the second bank holiday weekend in a row. It’s probably done me some good to take a couple of days out, though time off isn’t quite the same when you get to do what you love for a living.
The more industrious corner of my work table doesn’t know about time so it’s still exactly as it was when I downed tools on Friday. I see now it needs dusting. Thread and fabric shed their fibres all the time.
You can also see a couple of beautifully smooth pebbles from a recent trip to the seaside. I was lucky enough to find a hag stone, a pebble with holes in it, which you can just see hanging above. It’s sometimes said that they find you. I love to marvel at how old these things are, how many millions of years they’ve been around. How much time they hold.
work, waiting for me to catch up
Also on the table, appropriately enough, is Marking Time II (and thank you, Dawn, for naming it). This is another long cloth pieced from hand-dyed vintage fabrics and stitched with motifs from ancient rocks and prehistoric marks on the land.
ancient hill forts, couched cotton yarn with simple stitch on hand-dyed linen
The beautiful lightweight cotton fabric in the section below is eco-printed by Jane Hunter and makes the perfect ground for some couched cup and ring marks. I will add more stitch, of course.
cup and ring marks in progress
Easing myself back into the working week, and hoping your week ahead is a good one.
I gave myself a break over Easter. I’ve come back to the cloth that (as yet) has no name: the first in a small series about cup and ring marks, ancient circles and spirals, lines and basic marks.
Nameless cloth in progress
These lines and circles seem to communicate without words. Maybe they come from a time before language; certainly before literacy. There is a kind of magic about them, a deep and unfathomable wisdom in their shapes.
Couched spirals with running stitch and straight stitch
I’m enjoying the earthy colour palette here, and the repeating motifs.
Marks and lines
I’ve been invited to give a talk to a local stitching group and I’m just gathering together some inspiration. I’ll take this unfinished cloth too, mostly to see if anyone can help name it.
Sketchbooks, daily stitching, and mixed media all up for discussion
This cloth is the first in a series exploring the timeless marks found on ancient rocks. Circles, rings, spirals, and lines – all quite abstract but eternally symbolic and full of meaning.
Cup and ring marks in progress
I’ve used hand-dyed silk bourette yarn for couching the rings. It has a lovely soft texture and, unusually for silk, doesn’t have so much of a sheen. It looks and feels more like very soft wool.
The rings on the grey silk band are made with very fine silk tulle, which weighs almost nothing but has a strong will of its own and can be quite tricksy. You have to work very slowly with it and pin it down as you go, otherwise it tends to wriggle away and wander off. This is not a great photo but was only intended to show myself where the rings needed adjusting a little before committing to stitching them down.
Silk tulle rings
A few stitches later, they’re sitting quite nicely.
Silk tulle rings on hand-dyed silk, in progress.
It’s taking its time, and I’m sitting with each mark to see where it needs more. These plain running stitch circles may or may not be finished. The cloth in this section is textured silk, similar to silk noil but slightly heavier and thicker.
Running stitch circles on textured silk
Taking time to make time. All the time is already there. It’s just a matter of finding it.
Daily paint doodles have produced these little pictograms, influenced by prehistoric art and the images found on rocks and in caves everywhere in the ancient world:
Daily paint sketches, watercolour on cotton paper with pen added
Prehistoric art is something I’ve always found really interesting. Not so much the figurative drawings of the various beasts fleeing from human hunters, but more the abstract mark-making and simple patterns. They seem to crop up everywhere from the same kind of time. Shapes like circles, spirals, wavy lines, squares, short lines – basic marks. These are the marks I make most often in my sketchbooks too, and a lot of the shapes will translate very effectively from pen to needle and thread.
Sketches for long cloths
I’ve prepared a few long cloths, about 10” x 40-ish”, for adding timeless marks with thread. Just to see where it goes. I’m using linen or cotton as the backing fabric, and brushed cotton in place of batting. The top layers are strips of hand-dyed silk, cotton, and linen.
Long cloth ready to begin
I’m beginning with circular blanket stitch on hand-dyed textured silk fabric and looking forward to following the thread.
If you do a lot of hand stitching, you can’t help inventing new stitch variations occasionally. There are lots of variations on basic stitches, and many ways to combine one basic stitch with another.
Blanket stitch tree with interlaced blanket stitch border
Here’s an interlaced/woven running stitch/blanket stitch combination, which looks best in two colours:
Sound on: Lovely Day, Bill Withers
You need to work a row of running stitch first, keeping the stitch and space between stitches as even as you can. Then you can work a blanket stitch into the gap, using a different colour, and weave through the running stitch to start the next blanket stitch.
Interlaced blanket/running stitch
A simple enough idea, and easy to stitch. It probably needs a better name though, combining blanket and running. Blanning stitch. Runket stitch. Oh dear me, no. Suggestions on a postcard please.
And a very warm welcome, firstly, to new subscribers – thank you so much for joining us here. If you’re looking for a quiet restful space, where nothing much happens except some hand stitching and gentle reflection, then you’re probably in the right place.
On the subject of which, I do enjoy my quiet Sunday mornings. At weekends my husband likes a long lie-in, and I don’t. I’m generally wide awake and out of bed the second I wake up, usually driven downstairs by hunger. I have the metabolism of a hamster and need frequent refuelling. Once the need for breakfast has been met, the rest of the morning is my own and I can stitch away in my workroom until lunch time. I call it a workroom – actually it’s the spare bedroom. Maybe I should go all Proper Artist and call it a studio.
Continuing on the Winter Time Traveller’s quilt
This quilt, originally a (Time) Traveller’s Blanket as part of an online class with Dijanne, has become a celebration of winter, my favourite season, and maybe it will be finished in time for next winter. It certainly isn’t anywhere near done at the moment. The top and back are hand-dyed silk noil, with some soft flannel (brushed cotton) as the middle layer.
This little tree is an experiment in making branches with blanket stitch and so far I like it. I’m using hand-dyed cotton perle size 12 thread, on a scrap of hand-dyed Swiss cotton fabric applied to the quilt top. I really like the way the woven dots in the fabric look like snow.
Little tree, in progress
The rest of it seems enormous, but it’s only about a metre square.
Very much still in progress; hand stitch on applied fabric scraps
I’ve added a layer of sheer fabric to some of the patches. This one is simple embroidered tree pictograms on hand-dyed silk organza, and then I’ve layered a piece of painted dotted tulle over the top. It’s impossible to photograph, but in real life the dots create little shadows on the organza beneath.
Painted tulle layered over embroidered silk organza
I always think this multi-layering is one of winter’s best gifts. It’s the season that most brings time to reflect, to look beneath the surface, to embrace the shadows, to see in the dark. To see through the dark too, because it doesn’t last long. It will be spring before we know it, and if you’re on the other side of the world it’s already summer. If that isn’t time travel, I don’t know what is.
Ours doesn’t go up until the day before the winter solstice. This is because husband and I both have birthdays before Christmas, and it can’t be Christmas until after the birthdays. That’s the rule, and a completely arbitrary illogical one it is too. Strictly speaking, it isn’t Christmas until Noddy from Slade shouts ‘It’s CHRIIIISTMAAAS’ and neither of us has heard that yet this year.
Until it’s time to haul our thirty-year-old tree out of the loft, I will make do with embroidered ones. The traveller’s blanket has a little Christmas tree panel, made with herringbone stitch and cotton perle threads:
‘Little tree, little silent Christmas tree… who found you in the green forest and were you very sorry to come away?’ – e.e.cummings, ‘little tree’
Every so often our feather duster sheds one of its lovely ostrich plumes.
Every home should have one
I’m currently working on the traveller’s blanket and thought, like a womble, waste not want not and all that. A quick trim of the feather and it kind of looks a bit tree-ish doesn’t it?
Trimmed ostrich feather
In ordinary circumstances of course an ostrich is going to need a lot of help if it’s got any hope of getting into a tree, but here in my creative little world where (nearly) all things are possible, here we are:
Ostrich feather tree
Just adding to the story collection really.
Leaves worked with silk and cotton hand-dyed threads on hand-dyed cotton lawn
Doesn’t it just make your heart sing when something like this happens?
Ostrich feather tree with seed-stitched falling leaves
The definition of good morning: a cup of hot black coffee, a cloth in progress, and a little collection of fabrics ready for their auditions.
Traveller’s blanket in progress
These are non-competitive auditions because they will all win in the end. I really like just looking at fabrics – although it’s never just looking, is it, because I have to pick them all up and touch them as well. It’s just seeing with hands, I suppose.
Fabrics that say Winter
The Traveller’s Blanket is turning into a short story collection. I’ve found it quite challenging to adopt someone else’s technique while making it look like my own work. Dijanne makes these cloths so beautifully and I didn’t want to produce an imitation. I imagine it’s a bit like doing a cover version of a very well-known song.
It’s a good opportunity to include some treasure, like this silk velvet, eco-dyed by Arlee
Eco-dyed silk velvet with couched silk bourette yarn on tea-dyed silk noil
Fine silk, eco-printed, with hand stitch. No straight/square edges happening here.
And then a few vignettes are happening here and there:
Traveller’s blanket, centre. Antique fine lawn cutwork embroidered panelHand-dyed vintage cutwork, more eco-prints by Jane Hunter
Now that a few fabrics have been applied, the cloth is stable enough to work on without support from the table. Eventually there will be some kind of quilting or seeding in between the motifs, but I think that point is still some way off. In the meantime it can carry on keeping my knees warm while I stitch in the evenings.
