flower gardens

birds in skirts

| janethaigh

I gasped when I first saw these 2 topiary birds when visiting Hidcote to discuss my exhibition “Inspired to Stitch” for the Manor House gallery in 2025, where were the large bases of yew that they had perched upon for over 100 years?

Hidcote then
Hidcote Now

It was explained that the loss is in part due to necessary pruning( after the covid closures) needed to maintain access to the steps to the pool. Now they sit on top of bare but beautifully dappled trunks. I immediately thought “I can mend them”, visually of course! My idea was to create 2 wide ‘skirts’ of different fabrics – but when I started to think about making skirts my mind started to race with ideas. I quickly scribbled some down onto the only scrap of paper I had to hand…..

I decided to make small drawings of the 2 birds and then I could dress them both in a fabric skirt. Now how make this look feasible in reality. Using Inktense pigment crayons A4 sketchbook paper I roughed out the basic hedge shapes, but I had so many different ideas when I looked at my vintage fabrics scraps, that I decided to make a 2 sets of giclee prints, in order to illustrate all my ideas.

Above, the 2 giclee prints developed from the original drawings from my photographs, the first design was for a lattice or Jacobean Laid Work (see below the samples on the rough drawings).

The first skirt sample was stitched straight into a bird print, using a fine twisted cotton thread. When beginning any new project, I always attempt a challenging piece of ‘inspirational’ work, by which I mean it will make me want to carry on with all my new ideas.

Above is the first design I completed for a whole set of 22 ‘Birds in Skirts” and I made them especially to sell at my ‘Inspired to Stitch’ exhibition This is an unusual step for me as I very seldom sell my stitched works. So now they have all been mounted, framed and glazed ready to be delivered to the buyers after the Exhibition closes.

There will be more posts about these stitched prints, as this is a new and exciting way for me to work. It combines my love of drawing and stitching and opportunities to develop many variations using my collection of vintage fabrics. I am now conducting new classes to cover some of the ideas and new-to-me techniques that I developed for creating the Birds in Skirts edition

HIDCOTE REVISITED: NEW EXHIBITION

| janethaigh

Invited to exhibit my embroideries at Hidcote Manor, a National Trust Garden, in April 2025, I immediately thought of my first visit in the 1970’s; I had just started to embroider, and the effect that it has had on my stitched work ever since. Above is a small selection of my first-ever embroideries that were inspired by my delight and fascination with gardens and flowers.

I stared with basic canvas work and enjoyed the restrictions imposed by the strict stitching and its filling-in-until-you-finish discipline. I was designing pictures in order to learn to embroider my ideas.

It was after visiting Hidcote that I started to draw gardens, mostly details of planting and of course, topiary. I took photographs and scribbled down notes to remember colour planting and topiary shapes to develop into embroideries. Now I realise that this was the time when I found my own way of stitching by using blended colours and really just stitching my drawings. I always scribbled drawings, took too many photographs and made notes ready to be tranformed into working drawings, and this is how start my work now, almost 50 years later.

Above a rather creased poster from my first one person show at Francis Kyle Gallery in 1979, showing my small scale canvas embroideries. My early fascination with topiary is evident.

Oddly I do not actually like the idea of strictly clipped hedges, specially when trimmed into animal and bird shapes, but this feeling completely disappears when I actually see it for real. I find this ambivalence really useful and for me it provokes new ideas; why bother to make anything that holds no meaning, mystery or is simply a puzzle for you to try to solve? But mostly I am delighted by the sheer absurdity of it. Why do we tether bird-shaped hedges to heavy domes of yew – to stop them flying off?

And I have continued to embroider the topiary figures that are often seen in grand gardens. Above is ‘Great Dixter’ a small silk embroidery circa 1980, that was very inspirational in making new pieces for this exhibition. Right is ‘Lytes Carey’, another National Trust garden, this is made mainly with simple large running stitches in woollen yarns onto a wool ground for a big woollen panel, in 2001. I always enjoy seeing the dense green walls of hedges surrounding an abundance of flowers, as seen below on my several visits to Hidcote in 2024.

Insired to make new works for the exhibition, back in the studio I combined different drawings, prints and photograps of several aspects of the garden’s abundance and used some old stencils and wonky photocopies that had been over-printed with my embroidered flower images. From this I developed a collage from shoji paper and stitched silk. Then found an old photograph of the birds as I can remember them with their crowns as peacocks.

The abundance of planting in the garden beds reminded me of Gustav Klimt’s flowery lanscapes, I began to imagine the plants at Hidcote developed into a wall of flowers. I had bought a packet of paper napkins patterned with a Klimt garden for presents to friends, from a museum in Vienna, but had kept them myself. I took one and pinned it to my studio wall, with the other half formed ideas.

Stages in the inspiration: designing, drawing, dyeing and stitching my homage to Gustav Klimt. I stitched a bird in twisted silk thread on a fine silk ground, then painted dye onto another silk ground adding many of the flowers and leaves, found in my photographs, to make the flower wall. Eventually I stitched the finished bird into postion.

The finished ‘Vintage Topiary Bird’ has become the front cover of the picture book/catalogue that I have produced specially for this exhibition. It has just been delivered to the publishers in time to be printed and for sale at the start of the exhibition Inspired to Stitch: Hidcote Revisited.