Lockdown Patchwork Project

| 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!

  • sitting room new year 2020
  • same cosy corner new year 2021!

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

| 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

Drawing Just Drawing

| janethaigh

Here is a set of drawings that have lain in a research book for more than 10 years, the reason that I did them was in a university research project workshop – making our own brushes with the amazingly inventive American maker Bob Ebendorf. I made several brushes out of grasses, leaves and branches, picked on my morning dog walk. None survived the drawing session, shown below, in any state to be used again.

But these are the drawings that I made and they are completely unlike any of my other drawings – ever. the colour is Red ink and the single pages measure roughly A2 (26x36cms.) There are other maker’s brushes used as well, and in some I have drawn the brush with itself, then taken it for a ride over the whole page. I still find them exhilarating and teasingly inspirational.

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Sea-heather brush and some small feather drawings,
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Hellebore stalk and Squirreltail Grass brushes draw there own self portraits
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Seeded grass self portrait.
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Red Ink – double sketch book page Left: squirrel tail brush. Right: grain stalks brush self portrait.

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Red Ink mark making double page: Left: metal jewellery chains brush. Right: racoon hair brushes
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Left: pattern making, metal chains brush & copper wire brush. Right: different brushes together.
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Red Ink and Long Human Hair brush over double page.

My Last Dream Pillow: Don’t Look Down

| janethaigh
          don’t look down!

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….

 

4th July 2020: My Corvid Birthday Look

| janethaigh
my corona virus uniform

Today is my birthday (no need to say which one). I am celebrating with a party for a very few neighbours in the garden in a style permitted by the loosened lockdown rules in England, starting today,

And here is the dress I am wearing ( Yacco Maricard -my favourite design company) bought at great expense back in March when I knew shopping was off the agenda for months; reasoning that it cost less than all those little buys necessary to seasonal adjustments, this year they include a mask and sunglasses. I admit it is one of my favourite photographs of me – ever!

I also thought that I would prefer to wear something lovely to enjoy everyday, even if I saw no-one else but my husband and my dogs, while continuing to work busily in my home studio.

How wrong I was – as further posts will illustrate……

Drawing Drawing Drawing

| 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…

my phone call doodles!

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My Comfort Blanket

| janethaigh

Affirmative sayings seem to be the philosophy of our times, the be-in-the-here-and-now mindfulness movement. But I have been collecting and pasting all sorts of sayings and mottoes in my work books and on my studio walls for years. Quotations, overheard remarks or messages and even poems from friends sometimes develop into pieces of work, but most often they just serve to enable me to grin and bear with it – see above!

A current favourite was heard when I was mid-way through making the ‘Butterfly Dream Pillow’ – “I am proud of it and I am ashamed of it” immediately struck me as the perfect expression for how I feel about the work I do. I wrote it down on my work-top with the first thing that came to hand – an indelible pink marker! I have read it out to other artists and makers, and they smile and nod in recognition.

A quote from an interview heard on Radio 4 by a musician having just heard his own work played, my heart goes out to him.

It almost made it onto my own Comfort Blanket, which is part of my ongoing work project, Make it Through the Night..and I did write it out along with the ones that have stood the test of time. I wrote all of them onto large scale graph paper so that my own handwriting could be resized, with the idea of stitching them easily. I have had this ‘affirmative sayings’ idea for several years, and for several different media, even as a vitreous enamel patchwork, but never had the time or energy to face making it. In between some commercial projects, late last year I started to make it – piece-meal.

the first attempt at designing the blanket as a strippy quilt with inspiration from an American quilt

Above show the first attempts to design the ‘blanket’ idea as a quilt; the inspirational Strippy Quilt above right is an American design, I love the wobbly lively stripes, like a flying flag. Initially I had considered stitching a vintage wooden blanket, then I realised that heaving around such a large piece of fabric would not be easy for a lot of hand embroidery. I remembered a Strippy Quilt in Unconventional & Unexpected: American Quilts Below the Radar” by Roderick Kiracoffe, it inspired me to change tack, this way I could stitch the sayings piece-meal and patch them all together at the end; it also meant I didn’t have to decide the order of the quotations immediately.

I started by using some scraps of vintage striped deckchair fabrics, but they were too hard to hand stitch into. I turned to my stash of scrap fabrics, Kaffe Fassett Studio’s lovely subtle shot cottons and woven stripes left over from various quilts that my team have made for his Patchwork and Quilting books were perfect. Very colourful and here very RED, and “the purest and most noble minds are those that love colour”. But not having enough of any one fabric for the background I cut my stripes into strips and joined the clashing shot cotton colours together as a background.

I have a saying that lives with me – a mantra that I recite during my sleepless hours of most nights; it has subtly changed over the years I have used it to still my thoughts, and I can chart my state of mind by what I have decided.

My subtly changed mantra is stitched onto the same set of fabrics, ready to be cut up and placed in the telling positions….
slowly the ‘blanket’ collects more words and becomes unnervingly personal for me; The Reverend Sydney Smith’s sublime epithet for not judging a book by its cover is really barbed, and oooh how many times have I wanted to say this out loud!!!!!
The finalised order pinned together on the quilt wall, tells a story about my working life over the last decade and more……hard to display – but here I am.

Eventually I got them all into order, some sayings were dropped or the blanket would be enormously long I would need to re-design, others were added as they described more succinctly what I wanted to express about how I feel about the work I do. The quotations are all by individuals who have used their life to express themselves, teachers and critics, a bon vivant, a dancer – and me. They are in order from the top, The Rev. Sydney Smith, John Ruskin, Richard Sennett and the last 2 (heavily edited) are by the American dancer Martha Graham. The succinct “Do what you can, with what you have, where you are. sums up my husband’s philosophy for living…

Now to the ‘quilting’ or just a system of large straight stitches ‘in the ditch’ of the seams, to hold the the layers together. The finished piece is a tad wobbly, due to my inexpert ‘quilting’. Hey Ho, you can’t do it all!
Each quotation has its owner’s name and dates stitched onto the back of the quilt to be in line with the quotation
The finished piece pinned to my studio wall, waiting to be blocked and pressed;

And ” I am proud of it and I am ashamed of it” – go figure!

My Spooky Wooky Butterfly Dream

| janethaigh
Peacock butterfly

It is almost 20 years since I had this disturbingly beautiful dream but I have NEVER forgotten it. Re-visiting my sketch books archive, I found the original drawing that was hastily scribbled down when I thankfully I woke up.

Now, I have decided to complete my long standing/stitching on-going work project “Make it Through the Night“, after not working on it for more than 5 years. I have determined to complete the project to a degree where I can hopefully resolve it but so as not have it in my brain as frustrating “unfinished business”. I just can’t ignore it any more…. too much of me resides in it; and as the composer Gustav Holtz puts it ” Compose nothing unless the not composing of it becomes a positive nuisance”

The initial drawing , above left, is dated 28th July 03; the second drawing is another later version when I was trying to make a composition for a stand-alone embroidery….. now I have decided to add it to the ‘dream pillows‘ and I need a different composition. Recently looking very carefully at the 2 drawings I realised I had completely forgotten that the butterfly had a face – YIKES!

In the actual dream it was a giant butterfly several yards/metres wide, dying and lying on some grass underneath a tree, the remnants of wings scattered round it. People were picking up the large technicoloured pieces of shattered wing and I really wanted some as well – but I thought I would get it something to drink first, then decided to pick it up and take it to a nearby puddle, the result was my butterfly covered hands…I abruptly woke up.

I started to research the ways on which I could have held the massive butterfly. I looked at many different British butterflies and chose the Peacock mainly because it was so colourful but it has eyes as well – one of the major symbols I use in my work. Every year we get smaller butterflies over-wintering in the house but these beauties are rare here.

I had my own hand prints on silk, from an earlier area of research and I liked the way the lines of the palm were voided. I now transferred the palm lines to the outlines of my hands so that they would interrupt the wing pattern.
moving around with the photocopied cut out hand shapes to find interesting enlarged wing patterns to embroider.

I enlarged the first peacock butterfly image and cut out my hand shapes…next I had to add the patterns to enable me to stitch the whole hands……the original working drawings below with a a technical sample that I would use for the very complicated patterned hands. I decided to paint dye onto the ground first to give me guidance for the colour blending and to assess the amount of work I would have to manage.

the separate hand drawings with a very crude but vital painted dye and stitching sample.

Next I had to imagine the shattered butterfly – I tried many variations; the shape had to show a degree of violence and some direct connection in the shapes left after my hands had devastated it, because it shows the terrible result for the insect…

3 of many versions of the lay-outs for the pillow, the hand writing is in water soluble pen

I drew the hand outlines and running stitched them, then drew my palmistry lines on each hand and painted dye within the lines and fixed it securely – all of this before I could start stitching, which I was itching to do …..

2 images above show the first and last day’s stitching of the hands. I started this project in early August and now it was late September – I needed to move onto the butterfly now…

working from my research drawings, I drew and embroidered the main area of the butterfly and then placed paper shapes to act as the shattered wings to make some connection to my hands.

research materials and dyed butterfly with the embroidered version with paper shapes in place for the broken wings.

It was at this point that something strange started to happen….I found a trapped Peacock butterfly in the window of my studio, I was delighted, I had never seen one of these in the house; the weather was still warm, so I let him go….

But then more and more Peacocks came into the studio, and in different areas of the house… in all we had 11 different Peacocks visit us. SPOOKY WOOKY……

the 3 photographs are of just some of the 11 different butterflies that came into the house over the last 3 months while finishing the embroidery. The image of the butterfly lying in my palm was taken on 25th December – amazingly it died with it’s wings folded back to show the eyes, I take this as a rare and wonderful Christmas present.

Sadly some of them died indoors and I keep them in m studio – they are all in different conditions; some very tattered wings and faded colour but others still beautiful.

my small collection of some of the autumn visitors I think there is another embroidery here……

so I eventually finished the pillow, completed the writing in running stitch and it is ready to join the Make it Through the Night project.

the finished Butterfly Dream Pillow.

Stitching on a Roof Tile!

| janethaigh

The Curzon Cinema in Clevedon, North Somerset, https://www.curzon.org.uk is my favourite (actually our only) local cinema; it looks and feels like the picture houses of my childhood in the 1950’s. (photograph above courtesy of Go Bath Bristol) Saved by the community from total dereliction some years ago, it now has a major problem, the roof is leaking and needs major money for repairs. So there was a call – out for local artists to help – decorate an old roof-tile in any way whatsoever ………and they are being auctioned on line next month from 1st December 2019.

the roof tile when it appeared was a bit of a shock, very curvaceous, I applied a layer of organza and turned it on it’s side….a felt a sea scape emerging.
the headland of the Kilkenny Bay seen from our house and garden, on late sunny evenings…utterly magical.

The central curve reminded me of the the headland at the end of the bay where I live, Battery Point, on the Severn estuary, fanciful I know but I have many drawings of this view and have made many different types of work from the studies.

I tried many variations of colour scapes from my earlier drawings. I liked the glistening nylon shot fabric for the water, trouble is that the water of this estuary is never a deep true blue, air-force blue is as good as it gets. For some reason I started with the lump on the left…so the view was of the other end of the bay where the sun sets and all the colour emerges from…but it wasn’t working for me – then one morning I just changed it around so it looked like the Battery Point headland…I was suddenly on home ground..or should I say water?

I added the salt marsh fabric, a piece of green and orange shot cotton is the perfect colour of the marsh when the late afternoon sun lights it up in the autumn – the rest of the sky and sea seem purple in comparison.

The task now was to organise the layout of the fabrics so that they would lie in straight lines when they were eventually placed onto the undulating tile …this took some calculations as the tile is wedge shaped but the sea level and the salt- marsh horizons are straight….

I start to running stitch the sky …..but I have decided against the brilliant blue sea I hid it under a translucent layer of silk!

I used the simple running stitches of Kantha technique for this appliqué, I have to get the fabrics to stay together in a soft and malleable form so that I can easily manipulate the fabric over the lumpy tile.

I continue to stitch down the length of the tile – it takes several days but as always fascinating to handle the colour changes. The stitching is quite large and almost crude using a heavy gauge silk thread but very satisfying to do; usually when working this technique I use one single thread of silk and it takes ages and ages to cover the ground

As I continued to stitch the colours became muted and now the once brilliant orange sky was being challenged by the bright green of the salt- marsh; reluctantly I changed the fabric after several different variations of shot cottons had been tried, but there is enough going on in this small space as it is – hey ho!

eventually the finished piece is ready to be mounted onto the tile covered in wadding.

I then covered the tile in a layer of very thin wadding, sticking it down with thins lines of fabric glue so that I could continue to embroider the silk piece to it. I have evolved this technique for covering 3D shaped objects over many years of trial and error but this was a real challenge.

Having aligned the top of the stitching to the top of the tile I tacked it into position, then pinned it all along the undulations…it’s really tricky work trying to keep the horizon lines straight…all those years of pattern cutting came into play! The top and bottom were secured by over stitching onto the back of the tile wadding, pulling and stretching as I proceeded eventually it was securely stitched and bedded into position.

the back and front of the tile side by side – now photographed the tile just looks flat and with wobbly sides…but it feels lovely to hold.

I am really liking the feel of the tile now it is so softly padded and am thinking of possibly making some more stitched covers for other objects – one day. Meanwhile my husband Stephen Jacobson, has painted another view of the estuary using the imprint of the tile manufacturer as a flag with a view of the band stand at Clevedon. And artist Alfred Stockham has painted eyes to create a curious face and called it ” The Man in the IronMask “

All the 40 odd tiles are for auction on the curzon.org.uk/art-on-the-tiles.