Category Archives: News

The Great British Sewing Bee

Thank you everyone for your emails, and encouragement for the new website and blog. I’m pleased that people are starting to find their way here. I’m told that it can take several weeks for a new website to be ‘found’ and indexed by the googlebots. I picture them as rather grumpy little earwigs. The lazy critters are probably curled up together under a stone, so they need people to stir them up and send them scurrying. If you’re a kind soul who would like to help them find me, then you could do several things to help. You could add me as a ‘link’ to your own website or blog, you can ‘pin’ me (ouch!) or you can add a link to this website on Facebook or Twitter. Apparently this is what gets the googlebots really excited. When the critters wake up and do their job, it will be great to start getting new visitors who have stumbled in here through other routes. If that’s you, do say hello.

I think this might improve my time-management.

This might improve my time-management.

Tuesday today, and for the first time for weeks there’s no new episode of The Great British Sewing Bee. Like so many fellow embroiderers and sewers, I’ve been glued to the series. As well as showing great technical sewing skills, and flair for fabric and design, I thought it was a lovely demonstration of people refusing to be forced into competitive conflict. There was none of the false friendship, followed by back-stabbing, that seems to be ‘entertainment’ in most reality TV. Even when Great British Sewing Bee contestants were working under time pressure, if one person had a problem then someone else would help them to sort it out,. Imagine someone stumbling in a race, and the leader pausing to help them to their feet – how refreshing! As well as enjoying the sewing, I enjoyed the humour and banter that went on while they were working under such pressure. It’s interesting how many people watched it and talked about it, which just goes to show how popular sewing is. What did other people think?

 

 

‘…a heaven in a wild flower’

To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.  (William Blake) 

People ask me why I’m setting up a website and blog. Sometimes I burble something about creativity and joy, but I often trail off in favour of the ‘sensible’ reasons, such as ‘I hope to develop my textile art more professionally’ or ‘I plan to offer work for sale’. Occasionally I talk to someone who ‘gets it’ straight away, which encourages me to carry on with my rather vague and half-hatched ideas (thank you Holger in particular, for insight and encouragement just at the right point). 

Dali's clock

Dali’s clock. What a sensible way to organise time.

Anyone with a passionate special interest may know the intense pleasure of being totally, ridiculously absorbed. I find that a strange thing happens when I’m involved in art or stitch. The annoying, insistent logical left brain gets blocked, and the more diffident, easily intimidated creative right brain finally has space. Irritating things that get in the way are quite simply shut out (clocks, timetables, sharp or jagged noises, and all the insistent things that bleep, ping, flash, ring and insist on our attention right now). Time quite literally seems to stand still; but at the same time, in a way that I don’t understand, an hour can expand to become a day. Whoever decided that the day could only have only 24 hours in it is tricked into allowing some secret extra hours to slip in. You really can go to Narnia, have adventures for months, and get back in less than a minute. There is time to really look. Eventually something from the so-called ‘real’ world forces itself back in, and the volume of the ticks and tocks gets turned up again. But something wonderful happens when you share this total absorption with other people. The two worlds become less separated, and it is easier to cross from one to the other. I’m grateful to my fellow students on the City and Guilds Stitched Textiles course at Missenden Abbey for their shared obsession and absorption in minute details of important things, like colours, textures and shapes. I appreciate things that other people share on their websites or blogs (images, ideas, original work, thoughts and observations). So it’s time to add my own offerings.

Kevin, the magician who set this website up with me last week is away travelling, so I’m like a brand new driver out on the motorway with no instructor. I promised to try not to break the website while he’s away. I did manage to delete the whole Gallery instead of one image, but thankfully I found a way to reinstate it. Please bear with me if strange things happen. Anyway, I’m glad you’ve found my blog, and I’d love to know who you are and how you got here.

 

Goldwork embroidery: 3D floating fossil rock

This embroidered floating fossil rock was a Goldwork piece for the City and Guilds Diploma in Stitched Textiles (Embroidery). It uses traditional metal thread techniques. Silk and viscose velvet was dyed with Procion dye, and the ‘veins’ in the rock were machine-stitched with Madeira FS20 thread in black and gold. The goldwork fossils are stitched with traditional metal thread techniques (leather kid, jap, purls and pearl purl) and the fabric is then scrunched and tweaked into the 3D rock. It floats on electro-magnets, using ‘Levitron Fascinations EZ float’ technology.

I hope you enjoy it.