Flowers for Our Times:

March 27, 2022October 28, 2022 | janethaigh

Over the past few years I have been intending to start selling giclee printed versions of my personal stitched work. The latest pigment prints available are unbelievably faithful in reproducing my finely stitched work…but where to start? Flowers – where else? I determined to develop some new flower embroideries for this venture.

Following on from revisiting my old research books and past work, I decided incorporate the flower embroideries with the Kantha stitched skies as in After Winifred. I took a beautiful bunch of dahlias and held them against a large scale Kantha Stitched sky in progress on my studio wall. I had been brought the flowers by Helen Reed, who owns Court House Farm and runs a seasonal cutting garden amongst other ventures. And where I hold drawing sessions in the summer months.

I also eventually started to work on an idea taken from a rare photograph of my garden Hellebores in a vase and in front of my scarf design of Hellebore flower heads. What is odd is that while Hellebores are one of my most favourite flowers, am not keen on Dahlias and did find myself reluctantly stitching them onto a small version of the Kantha sky. Below are the first 2 prints in the series Flowers For Our Times, on the left is Dahlias, on right, Hellebores

Reflecting on the Dahlias and Hellebore pieces (made between winter 2021 to early 2022) I felt as if I had made a definite link between my old and new work in order to make the really vivid giclee prints, available soon at Heart Space Editions. But although technically demanding, using the new Inktense dyes from Derwent, I decided that this was not the way forward that I had imagined it would be.

I returned again to my early flower work and re-read the catalogue of my exhibition of Flora’s Legacy, held in Bath in 2000 ( yes – so many years ago!!!!!) and realised exactly what was missing – symbolism – or the half hidden messages often contained within these earlier works.The centre-piece from the exhibition, Flora – the Roman goddess of flowers, had what was missing from my new works…the hidden meanings and humour – here some blackish, bawdy humour.

Turning to the many and various dictionaries of symbols I keep in the studio library I thought I would invent a bunch of flowers instead. The meanings of plants and flowers are universal and every culture has its own beliefs, sometimes conflicting – sometimes they are entirely in agreement: a poisonous plant is a poisonous plant. Out of curiosity I checked what the 2 bunches meant adding, the meanings to my original studies…..

I must admit that I was shocked, relieved, delighted and then excited to find that I had embroidered War, Scandal, Uncertainty, Instability and Sickness within 2 pretty bunches of flowers. But everyone else around me was spooked. So – they asked – where did I get this information from? Well in my books of symbolism, the most curious and confusing is The Language of Flowers – but oh the possibilities that it offers for mixed messages and hidden warnings amuse me enough to keep going with this theme.

Using just my old folders and Victorian books of flower meanings lead me to a brand new fully comprehensive dictionary by S. Theresa Dietz – published by Wellfleet Press, and the here I discovered far more arcane information than I had gleaned from my all my original sources.

So now what to do next – can you guess?

returning to my sketchbooks

February 6, 2022October 28, 2022 | janethaigh

first page of my reborn Flora research/sketchbook – Flowers Again!

Recently, the “After Winifred” embroidery has inspired me to develop work to use as Giclee prints in order to add a fresh way of getting my work ‘out there’. I turned to my old Flora workbook, some 20+years old – but still alive for me as a source of inspiration.

last last pages of drawings circa 2000 in Flora workbook .
drawings and stitching samples for Auricular Theatre 1998
painted studies of garden Iris circa 2000
most used pages -Anemonies painted from life and photos.

I found some empty pages at the end of the old book and started to collate recent samples and drawings of bunches of flowers grown and made up at Court House Farm, where I conduct drawing workshops, using the cutting garden as inspiration.

second page of the book – old samples and magazine cuttings for colour

looking back at my Flora work, which is 3 dimensional and very heavily embroidery, I now want a freer drawn imagery to stitch into. So I bought some Derwent Inktense pencils that basically act as dyes when wetted and left to dry – I did many samples but found my drawings had too much information in them – I needed to loosen up further. Ha ha – the story of my working life!

To enable me to play easily with the new ink crayons I chose an old set of drawing research and photographs to work with. The colours of the crayons are very brilliant and I needed to find ways of making more subtle colours, so stippling, cross hatching and dotting colours one over another made for rich but softer ground colours – these techniques are still a work in progress. Below are 2 studies of the under drawings using pencil dyes ready to be stitched

Meanwhile I have been looking at all my old flowery finished works and their drawings to use as reference and then reframing/remounting stitched pieces ready for the printers.

original drawing for this older Hellebore embroidery right

the little Hellebore image above is my first Giclee print and the smallest at 30cms/12inches square.

My Patchwork Quilted Room – Da Da.

June 13, 2021July 2, 2021 | janethaigh

Here is the open door into my completed ( well just a few more pictures to put up) patch-work room, using fabrics from the Kaffe Fassett Collective. It has taken 6 months to achieve. I started 2020 during the last Covid 19 lockdown in England and we are still not entirely unlocked mid way through 2021.

I aim to take you around the room to see how it all has come together, here the door from the porch has a vitreous enamelled finger plate – now I want to make more of these for inside the room…the enamelled fireplace can be seen with our old furniture and carpets safely back into place.

turning left is the view into the small panelled room, our 2 Irish Terriers and the enamelled fire surround – see previous post for making this….luckily my much loved vintage Deco glass shade tones perfectly…now how did that happen?

Above are 3 views of the chimney corner with 2 different totally different Flag representations. the row of flags at the sea side is an old painting by Stephen Jacobson next to a ghostly silk organza flag by Nigel Hurlstone. this piece of work proved pivotal for me to see how the room could hang together using cooler colours

Once we had started to put the room back together our 2 Irish terriers, Maeve and Murphy took a particular if very relaxed interest in it.

I found on Ebay a beautiful discounted Zoffany silk striped fabric and bought enough to make 4 very large padded curtains for the big Victorian windows in the room. The fabric cost me about 4 times the amount I had spent on the rest of the room…but they work well once I had trimmed them with some vintage woven ribbon that I over – dyed to suit the colour of the paintwork – as you do! And then I found these mazing brass tie backs on-line at my favourite store for just about everything decorative, Anthropology.

Continuing around the room…

In the the corner between the windows hangs an old (and much loved by me) painting by my husband, Stephen Jacobson, of my father’s greenhouse that he built in my family’s garden on the Wirral in north west of England.

From the photographs I have posted so far it is hard to see that the patchworks are all padded and quilted, but it is evident that my ‘in the ditch’ sewing notbetter placed than my hammering in the copper tacks that fasten the fabric to the battens. On the tiled table is a flowery flower vase by Tean Kirby.

the opposite end of the room to the fireplace with the bay window looking out on the overgrown garden

one of a pair of window seats with an old canvas work cushion sample and the luxurious silk curtains and brass tie backs. Then to the other new thing I bought for the room – the glamorous mauve velvet mini chaise – from a TK Maxx sale!!!!!! Well I had to balance the spend on the curtains.

Coming Into Port – Stephen Jacobson

Above is ‘ Coming Into Port’ – I leapt on this for the room when it came back early from a “closed for Covid” exhibition and it fitted perfectly. Basically our house serves as a venue for our joint work. I made the large cushion especially – it uses all the major colours of the room, and in fact the whole house, in my wonky version of Flame Stitch; and I have been commissioned to make a design from this by Ehrman Tapestry so look out for it next year if you stitch canvas cushions.

So here we are at the porch door again – and the gingers are waiting for us – well actually for Stephen with the biscuits to get them to pose….

and that is it – at last after so long – finished enough for people to see it – with the doors and windows open and only 4 visitors at a time!

My Covid Project – Getting There:

April 23, 2021March 27, 2022 | janethaigh

Sunday 7th March : Downstairs sitting room

So, by the beginning of March I had at last finished stitching all the patchwork panels, and between long bouts of quilting them, I managed to paint all the woodwork and window reveals in the sitting room.

I had decided to make a strippy quilt for the chimney wall, partly to save time but really to overcome the problem of awkward door frames and lots of corners. I calculated the width of the strips on each wall, even taking into account my inexact machine sewing I managed to get them fairly evenly spaced. Well 4 cans of spray starch and a hot iron helped.

1 calculating design measurements on the chimney breast
2 stitched strips on studio quilt wall
3 starting at the centre the quilted panel is stapled just to the top and bottom wooden battens
4 stretching and stapling the patchwork to the skirting battens
5 going clockwise onto the next panel in the alcove

I seem to be a lot better at stretching the panels than I am at machine sewing them. We decided to work around the room from the least visible area. I wanted the walls to look like a total piece of fabric or a massive quilt that is just wrapped around the walls like a cocoon – but I had to make some adjustments to the finishing as things progressed….we sort of started with a vague plan trusting to nouse to see us through…..Things were beginning to take shape but I soon hit a construction problem, my errant stitching had made some of the panels far too big and they needed to be trimmed after stretching and folding, securing them neatly was difficult now that they were padded.

Above, the edges of the panels are secured with iron-on fusible web tape and staples to vertical battens before stretching across the entire wall. Then the diamond corners are further secured to horizontal battens with copper tacks.

The large window wall panel was joined to the alcove panel to assist tight and neat stretching into the corner- making it up as we go along!

Having negotiated the large wall panel I now assessed the look of what we had covered so far but was still concerned about the strength of pattern overwhelming everything else in the room ( we have very faded vintage furniture, carpets and fabrics in the house and I did not want to start making new covers and buying more carpets). I tried to think of ways to make the patterns less brilliant… I remembered a patchwork organza flag made by my old colleague and friend, Nigel Hurlstone. It was in a massive pale oak frame, sadly too wide for this alcove, I removed the flag and held it in front of the bright wall, the central stripe was the same size as the strips – it was meant to be.

I asked his permission for showing this de-framed (but as he gave this to me as a present for helping him decorate his first flat about 15 years ago) I thought he may agree and he did. The thing is that the addition of this piece of work suddenly changed the atmosphere of the room, it became more relaxed and so did I!

Over the next 2 weeks we worked our way around the whole room stretching, stapling, tapping copper tacks, while dealing with light switches and plugs using a combination of glues, bondaweb strips, an iron and spray starch.

finally the room is covered, just one last strip to join it all together – under the window. Now to start finishing, covering the staples with wooden picture rails and skirting boards and quadrant in the corners. BUT before we finally put the mirror back into position I write this dedication on the chimney breast -I am hoping it will be many many years before this house is sold and some one else uncovers it!

and here I am again before sorting out the rest of the room – flag in place and now to make tiles for the fireplace and then there are the curtains……possibly one more post ?

Cold Feet

February 28, 2021March 4, 2021 | janethaigh

It is the last day of February and have been working for 2 months making my patchwork wall coverings. When I started this blog I vowed to show the journey of the work that I design and make – to explain the problems and possibly the solutions……but this latest project has been keeping me awake and I am still not certain that I will get it sorted and onto the sitting room walls. I am suffering a severe case of Cold Feet!

*3 variations of possible stripes seen on the quilt wall – left, the original choice: centre, just playing with ideas: right, the chosen 3 colour system* – *yes I know that they all look the same*…………………………………………………………………………

After I had stitched a wall full of the original design I kept feeling that there was just too much going on – all those colours and stripes and collisions of patterns (all the things I normally love) just looked like porridge – multi coloured porridge – something had to go….What went was the yellow stripes – leaving me with Mauve, Blue and Green strips – this took quite a lot of grief and several days ( and nights) to decide to change things – somehow the well-honed critical faculty I use for all projects, professional as well as personal, has deserted me during lockdown. But once I had pulled apart the original piece and made another wall-full, things started to look possible. I made another design chart this time with repeating patterns built in – once a textile designer…….

*the new highly coloured “working drawings” for the main sitting room walls*

Things get back on track by mid January – the first panel is on the studio wall padded and quilted using the new walking-foot on my favourite old Bernina sewing machine.

By February the work gets properly underway – a whole stitched wall – full – but still very uncertain about this entire idea.

I try these first panels around the room seeing how the whole thing will look – trying to imagine it without those brilliant pink walls is hard…and how will it look behind all our pictures – yikes – it really needs to accommodate paintings and other art works that cover every other wall of this house…I start to realise that what it needs is more GREEN.

Trying the panels on other sitting room walls – it needs more GREEN to reflect the garden

back to photoshop to play with a version of favourite “Green Blue” or is it Blue Green” by Farrow and Ball which is used throughout the house

I decide that if all else fails the patchworks will look lovely in one of the bedrooms. But this still leaves us the problem of the damp disfigured walls and meanwhile the rest of room is being demolished …. did I mention we are cutting and making verdigris copper tiles for the fireplace?

Lockdown Patchwork Project

January 6, 2021January 6, 2021 | janethaigh

Determined to make the most of the new year 2021 winter lockdown in the UK, I decided to cover my damp (although supposedly cured) and now ruined sitting room walls…….with patchwork!

And with real fabric. the left-overs from my work organising quilt making in the UK for Kaffe Fassett‘s books of patchwork and quilting designs. Below are 2 of my favourite quilts from previous books that I have worked on and which I referenced for both colour and patten.

2 of my favourite quilts from Quilts in Ireland, by Kaffe Fassett and Liza Lucy

Patchwork is part of my professional textile practice and I have always used it for all types of furnishings, from wall papers for Heart Space Studios to my old but still glamorous dining room curtains.

Now I chose fabrics that reflected the colours in the rest of the house: basically turquoisey blues, buttery yellows, mauves and greens – I like colours to blend through the rooms. I had painted the hot pink walls for a New Year’s Day party 2 years ago….as you do!

I really loved the first fat version on my studio quilt wall above, but seeing it in situ was another thing. I wanted to cover the whole room and suddenly I felt totally overwhelmed by colour and pattern – the photoshopped version confirmed my misgivings…..it just hit me in the face and made me feel hot and sticky!!!!!

photoshopped version of sitting room walls!!!!!

The larger size of the fabric pieces, 21inches in length, made the patterns fight one another; in the smaller pieces used for quilts the patterns meld together as the eye sees so many at once AND there is only 1 quilt per room. Here there will be at least 6 large quilt sized pieces from floor to ceiling on all walls. Back to the studio.

And back to the oldest and simplest way of softening and unifying coloured fabrics – dip them in brewed tea. Above see the different shades to be had using: top = 1 bag, middle = 2 bags, lower = 2 bags boiled. It is a shame to kill the brilliant singing colours of the Kaffe Fassett Collective’s fabrics but hey ho! These wall coverings will take months to make and mount on the walls and then we have to live with them for ever…….I am not doing this again!

Back in my studio sorting out newer softer colours. Meanwhile the Kaffe Fassett Studios had kindly sent me lots more fabric strips based on my original sample….dipping a few of them in week tea I placed them on top of the quilt wall – wow this looks like a mad Japanese kimono design! Should I introduce stripes?

I am now 3 weeks into this sampling phase, I am still uncertain about the design on the wall. My Christmas star light reigns over chaos.

Time to get a grip! sort out the separately coloured triangles and tidy up

the whole 4 sets of coloured triangle patches, mauves, greens, yellows and blues, cut, pressed and ready to stitch.

I set them all out on the table ready to start work – tomorrow. Looking at the fabrics the next day they appeared to look so calm totally unlike the design on the wall. Maybe it is the Covid experience of the last 10 months but now I seem to want calm from my colours. I looked at the table and my eyes just glided over the strips of colours – back to the quilt wall again – to organise the diamonds into stripes.

Final Photoshop version of the striped diamond patchwork

Now my eyes tend to glide up and down rather than dotting about to see other diamond combinations. But that is as far as I can take this designing phase: there comes a time to every project when you just have to commit, and we are now into the first week of the new year. So I am simply sewing one single coloured strip at a time, and when I have finished them I can start to play with the design again – it should see me through until I get vaccinated.

Stitching a Sky

August 28, 2020August 28, 2020 | janethaigh

Pastel drawing of dramatic cloud hanging over the Welsh coast seen at dawn one Sunday in February 2020…Something wicked this way comes?

I want to show how my stitched work progresses; here is a very heavily edited set of images taken over the last 2 months – from July through to the end of August 2022. Not shown is the unpicking, pulling apart already stitched fabrics and rearranging that leads to frustration and doubt but mixed with delight, calm contemplation and my eventual recognition that, having captured my original vision of this ominous sky, I can stop working on it. The drawing above took less than 1 hour, the piece shown below, more than 8 weeks…..

Week 1

The first stages were quite tricky to lay out using strips of silk georgette onto a pale cotton ground, that had to be kept scrupulously clear of stray threads while building the applique ground.

Week 2

By the end of the second week I had managed to cut the clouds and baste them all into position, then I checked them against my original drawing. The tiny sample of energetic Kantha quilting inspired the way I attempted to stitch the cloud.

Week 3

I started the running stitches in rows of single silk threads to create an undulating rippled surface. After a few unhappy days I stopped stitching, undid as little as i could get away with and inserted more pieces of rust coloured silk organza to give the cloud ‘depth’. The chalk drawing, above right, shows the paths I need to stitch along; I think stitching rhythms into cloth by using the Kantha technique is a bit like patting your head and rubbing your tummy at the same time – tricky!

Weeks 4 & 5

I was determined to use this piece of work to try to find a way of controlling the outer edges of the appliqued fabrics; usually when I make very large drifting Kantha Stitched Skies I leave them to be contained and wrapped out of sight when stretching the finished work. But here the view is much smaller as this black cloud did not extend the whole length of the estuary – it faded out just beyond my window frame. I looked at Georges Seurat (who is a great influence on the way I have developed the colour mixing within my stitched work) and adapted his painted canvas frames – his dots are my stitches ). And eventually the marsh starts to emerge, using large straight slanting stitches

Weeks 6 & 7

However as the stitching progresses the different tensions start to exert itself onto the fabric – where the stitches are close together the fabric width starts to shrink, which is to be encouraged as this gives the curious patterns that I feel are so like air currents…. So the side borders are unpicked and the the whole embroidery is squared up. When I had almost finished stitching I outlined the whole piece using a machine stitch to give me a better guide for the dozens of running stitched lines for the frame.

The finished work **“The Dark Cloud”** approx.18in ( 45cm) square

My Last Dream Pillow: Don’t Look Down

July 17, 2020July 19, 2020 | janethaigh

These rapid drawings below are early attempts to express one of my most vivid dreams lest I ever forget it…. But the dream was not ready to be forgotten, it has reoccured often in one form or another – evidently I have not learned its message; the loosening ladder rungs and the tiny impossible blue window never change

the earliest drawing above on the left has some written comments that I was interested in using for the embroidery also I seem to have both shoes on; the one on the right is scaled up for embroidering on a sheet! What was I thinking?

Here I am again some years later ( the shoes are getting looser) climbing out of the chaos of my scribbled darning designs for a book that eventually never got published!!!!! with a burning heart to the right and no way back down that ladder. Circa 1998.

So I recently decided to embroider it as a pillow for my ongoing project Make it Through the Night . It is a simple idea and my friends who saw the drawing were highly amused by me in my nightdress losing my shoes…but I started this piece just before the lockdown and now I see it in a very different light.

The most recent drawing I made using a photograph of me in my nightshirt climbing on a chair.

drawing now traced straight onto the pillowcase in water soluble pen – all the drawings alongside

The interpretations of dream referring to ladders are many and varied depending if you are climbing up or down, and a broken rung (just the one) means “you will never achieve your greatest ambitions” while “to lose a shoe is indicative that you have forgotten something important ” or “finding your direction in life difficult” – and as to the lack of underclothes whilst climbing a very high wall in your nightshirt……

I found stitching the ladder the most challenging piece of work, a vintage pillow has only a limited space for inserting embroidery hoops and working straight onto fine linen needs stretching. I preferred to use some natural linen yarns and whip them into position making a more fluid line – finding knots and drawing them became a fascination.

above are the various ways I managed to stitch the ladder into position, with and without a stretcher.

Now to the window: in some dreams it is impossibly teeny tiny, in others I get to go through it – only to find a steep and shaky descent on the other side into more blueness, the one thing always in common is that it is always a brilliant and shining deep blue

the background of the sky is painted with cotton dye, then embroidered in silk threads, it is high up in the farthest corner of the pillow case

and here it is finished – washed, starched and pressed as a proper piece of Household Linen

I feel now that it makes its own statement without the added words; and why should it balance? I mean, what am I describing?

AND it is only after finishing this that I see this is a perfect portrait of how I feel right now – just coming out of the strictest lockdown period….uncanny!

However, we were well into the current lockdown before I had found the impetus to finish this work. And while stitching I realised that I just wanted to stop this whole project that excavates very personal ideas, dreams, mottoes, and observations….I did have more ideas that I planned to stitch, but now I no longer want to make them. It has taken me over 10 years, off and on, to get here.

Now I aim to celebrate….

Drawing Drawing Drawing

February 14, 2020March 29, 2020 | janethaigh

I use drawing to express myself to myself. I feel that Drawing is the language closest to my heart; my second and most used language after English, followed by the most difficult to have mastered, Stitching. It is the foundation of my chosen discipline of hand-made stitched textiles and almost all my work starts with a drawing, sometimes just a scribble or as a written note, but it will be expressed as a drawing with enough information for me to proceed.

Scribbled thoughts are put down as lists for skies I see when waking up, and on whatever is to hand. The imagery is enough to lead me to another drawing…..

the first annotated drawing left, was made in pencil in my bedroom in the dark as I saw the setting moon. The second later that day in my studio in order to make the full colour version that became my working drawing for the Kantha stitched embroidery

The working drawing stays with me though-out the stitching process; left the first attempt to translate colours to fabrics and later the stitch patterns were added to the original drawing to help me to understand how I am going to hand stitch the fabrics

Very occasionally when I work from photographs, I will start an embroidery without a drawing – and it always leads to difficulties as I am torn between the ‘real’ thing as recorded by the camera and my initial vision of it. Basically the drawing is the first edit of the image, it concentrates me on what was important when I first took the photograph, but the camera sees everything and I get seduced too easily by captured colour, and sometimes the colour isn’t the same as my memory.

Below are various single pages from individual sketchbooks – the top 2 are observational drawings taken directly from life, the red in pen and ink is a detail from of my garden, the iris was from a friends garden. The the others are all working /design/ research drawings, (with added photographs of finished brooches)

I keep all my working drawings in a series of books that go back some 40 years! The types of drawings collected in them range from a scribble on the nearest available paper, as above, through to straightforward observational drawings that then get re-arranged or even collaged together

above are the collages design drawing and the finished embroidery of the great garden designer Gertrude Jekyll.

then eventually the detailed working drawings are assembled and kept together, and accompanied by any other research materials.

The images above are open pages of my own research books from different long term projects, they really show the way my mind works, both visually and mechanically.

The 2 pages below are anemone flower drawings made from photographs in a garden magazine many years ago for my Flora embroideries, they have inspired many many different pieces of work in a variety of materials; good drawings have their own energy and life.

a few of the many different works that have been generated directly by the drawings above.

The images above are of vitreous enamel dishes and a silk applique with a machine stitched drawing that plays with the idea of anemones, another name is windflower.

Occasionally I do make finished drawings ready for exhibition.

Three Noh Masks: crayon drawing on paper.

but somehow the stitching seems always to get in on the act.

Sanderlings flight postcard: paper, crayon, silk.

and here are I suppose my most personal drawings ( sad isn’t it) that just arrive onto any page near me, usually when I am talking on the phone to friends and colleagues, and sometimes prospective clients but always when i am fully engaged, they do not arise out of boredom. What is very strange is they have never changed over all the years I have been making them…