patchwork textile artist, stitching by hand, thread, embroidery, stitch journal

Quilting time

You might remember this that began in June. It’s taken five months to put it together, in between other things, but it’s now one complete square, about 37″ or so.

removing the basting stitches – always the best job

I hadn’t originally envisaged ‘proper quilting’ it – as in backing, batting, and top, but somehow that just happened. Normally I would just have used a top and a backing. My batting of choice is Hobbs Heirloom wool, which is lightweight and very easy to quilt; I’ve never got on well with the cotton or polyester battings. The backing is cream cotton calico.

It’s very pale, and very neutral, and I’m currently undecided about whether that’s a good thing or a dull thing. It’s definitely quiet, and I like quiet. And it’s winter, which is a good time for quilts and quiet.

The circular outline (couched, black and cream silk bourette yarn) is a little thin, and the quilting so far is probably a little small.

But it’s a start. For now, it will rest on the chair while I look at it a bit more.

My problem generally, and this applies to painting as well as textile art, is that I usually like backgrounds as they are. I often have trouble adding the requisite focal point because I don’t want to obscure the background.

This little quilt has some really interesting patches, some of them made from layering sheer fabric over another, like this tea-dyed silk with a layer of dress net over the top:

And this vintage cotton with textured nylon chiffon over the top:

layered patch, cotton and spotted chiffon

I don’t want the quilting to trample all over the piecing and the more interesting patches, but I do need to quilt all the layers together securely. I may try tying the layers here and there. I think it just needs to sit on the chair for a bit while it thinks about what it needs (don’t we all!)

The sketchbook I’m plotting this (and others) in is an A4 landscape-format book, one of my favourite layouts.

Everything in this sketchbook is about remembering, recollecting, and forgetting. There are spots of time, there are ghosts (from time past), there are attempts to turn something intangible and unfathomable into something visual and tactile. There are shadows from time past, and there is the light of time present.

The thinking and the testing is all part of the finished thing.

Today I will be mostly looking at a small quilt as it rests on a chair. And yes, I call that work now. It’s ridiculous really.

Creative English Paper-Piecing

After weeks and weeks of work, play, and production, I think my new course on English paper-pieced patchwork is about ready to be let loose.

There’s a free preview, so make sure you watch that before committing – just so you know what you’re letting yourself in for.

Mostly what you’re letting yourself in for is me trying (and occasionally failing) to keep my hands in shot where you can see them. I think it’s probably – mostly – good enough though.

Many people think English paper-piecing is hexagons. Not the way I do it. In fact there are no hexagons here, apart from a few accidental or antique ones.

So, what do we cover in this course?

We start with English paper piecing (EPP) for absolute beginners, where you get to make a little box like this out of simple squares:

Then we make a paper-piecing sampler where you can practise piecing triangles, curves, and irregular shapes:

We get creative with fabrics and paper:

And we do some colourful sketchbook work:

Before you know it, you’ll be branching out unaided and doing your own thing.

And as if all that wasn’t enough, we do a (pretty brisk) overview of making a patchwork cover for your sketchbook, we have a whistle-stop look at how quilt-as-you-go works, and we see how to turn a pretty square of patchwork into this:

Do I sound as if I’ve recently taken a course on Basic Marketing for the Self-Employed? I promise you I haven’t. But here’s the thing about being self-employed. You have to do All The Jobs, including all the marketing and self-promotion, which is my least favourite thing. My second least favourite thing, by the way, is video-editing – as you’ll see if you embark on the course. It’s all very informal, as usual.

OK, enough self-promotion and advertising.

In other news, I’m now setting about trying to restock the shop somewhat as all the fabrics are sold out. More on that later.

In the meantime did I mention that I have a new course out…?

😎

Papa’s got a brand new pegbag

Sincere apologies to James Brown and Pigbag. Couldn’t resist.

Also apologies for the slightly surreal title and intro there. A week off has done me the world of good, as you can see.

But I genuinely did need a new pegbag. My old one was literally falling apart.

I used the old one as a template and made a paper pattern, which turned into paper-pieced patchwork, and then it all went a bit Mondrian:

Completely hand-pieced and hand-stitched, it went together pretty quickly really. It’s lined with medium-weight calico for extra strength and stability.

And the back:

I made its mouth a little less gapey than the previous one.

It’s full of pegs and ready for the next wash day.

I was even able to salvage some of the lining from the old one. This batik fabric was one of my favourites and I used the last of it many years ago. You can see the difference in colour and quality between the side that’s been exposed to the light and the side that’s been kept in the dark.

Jobs for next week include trying to get my new patchwork course videos recorded. The shop will remain closed while I attend to recording the lessons, and then I’ll try to dye/restock threads probably in September.

Always busy.

Past and future life

I’m piecing together a new course on patchwork and accidentally found some pictures of past work. Patchwork past work, you might say, if you like tongue twisters.

I was a bit startled by this one, from around 2009-ish I think. Far too colourful to be me, surely:

I remember the patchwork cave art creature was fun.

silk patchwork animal inspired by cave art

Lots of very tiny squares in this one – about 3/4″ I think.

Today it’s all much quieter, but equally productive. It takes a few weeks to plan and produce an online course, so I hope to have this one ready some time next month.

In the meantime I’ll be closing the shop for a couple of weeks from 13th July while I take a short break. My Teachable school will remain accessible if you’re looking for PDF templates or current courses.

Piecing it together

Everything patchwork here this week. A little sketchbook cover, with one of Jude’s moons finding a home:

You can see that I’ve couched a thicker thread (silk perle 3) over some of the seams, just to define some of the lines.

couching in the ditch

The little book of patchwork, I’m calling it. Somewhere to collect and join fragments of thought.

Inspiration comes from unlikely places. This outdoor paving kit from The Range translates perfectly:

I’ve dug out these fragments of late Victorian patchwork, just to look and to touch the antique papers.

Victorian patchwork, impossibly tiny stitches

This week I’m putting a patchwork sampler together, just to see how that might work. At some point there will be a (hexagon-free) paper-piecing patchwork course. Nothing wrong with hexagons, but paper piecing is much more than granny’s flower garden.

Looking at, and thinking through.

hand-dyed silk organza patchwork 6″ square

Online homes

Progress on piecing this patchwork is slow, but that’s fine and exactly as it should be.

hand piecing

Sewing by hand creates plenty of thinking time. I’m currently thinking about where I live online. I have the blog here on WordPress, an online shop with Big Cartel, and a Teachable school for online courses, plus Instagram and Facebook. Big Cartel and Teachable are quite heavy on annual maintenance fees, and ideally I’d like as much as possible in one place to simplify things more. I’m basically a Luddite, so I will need to investigate the technical options for reducing or combining everything I have into fewer separate spaces.

At the same time I’m weighing up whether to create more online courses with Teachable, or whether to create some sort of exclusive subscriber-only content for sharing more process videos and techniques etc. That would probably mean setting up something like Patreon, which would result in even more online homes, unless there’s a way to do something like that here on WordPress.

I’m also considering whether to continue offering overseas shipping for physical goods like fabrics and threads. International shipping is very expensive, it can take several weeks to reach its destination, and there can be additional customs charges when it does arrive. I have no control at all over any of that, but fielding the questions and occasional complaint does take time and energy. Customs charges seem to be particularly prevalent in European countries since the UK, in its ill-informed judgement, decided to leave the EU.

The box of patchwork pieces is basically a box of separate thoughts, plans and ideas. I just need to join them together.

Playing Tetris with Time

There’s a lot going on here. Lots of beginnings but, as always, nowhere near enough time for the middles and the ends.

I’ve rounded up (squared up) some neutral and tea-dyed scraps for patchwork pieces, which will be a quilt eventually. (Cream pieces on a cream rug – someone tell the photographer the artist could have made this easier. Oh hang on, that’s me. And me.)

Patchwork, for me, is always about finding or defining connections. Puzzling things out, making sense of things, piecing things together from a few clues. The joining of fragments, little flashes from the past, collecting memories into one place. Because we are our memories, to a certain extent. When we lose the ability to remember, our sense of self feels less secure because the thread that holds us between past and present is broken. We end up losing ourselves along with the unremembered experiences. I think of patchwork as a kind of holding together.

I like to piece patchwork in the evenings while watching TV or listening to music. Nice relaxing thing to do.

And that would be fine, except there’s already a nice relaxing evening job in progress. I either have to finish that before I can get to the patchwork, or I have to put that down (again) to work on the piecing.

If you’ve been with me a while, you might recall the beginnings of A Long Life, which has become the current evening project. I started it a couple of years ago and have been picking it up and putting it down ever since.

It’s about six inches wide, and when it’s finished will contain 30,000 stitches. I have no idea how long it is – I won’t measure it until it’s done – but I do know that currently it carries 18,788 stitches. Yes, I count them as I go along.

I change colour for every decade (every 3,500 stitches or so) and change thread for the start of each new year. Factoring in leap years, when it’s had its thirty-thousandth stitch, it will represent the number of days in the life of someone who is just over 82. I have no idea why I’m doing this.

On top of that I have a couple of other possible big projects whirring away in the background, one of which might be a new online course on zero-waste stitching (aka Using All the Scraps).

Definitely playing a game of Tetris with time here. Move one thing up to make room for another thing, and so on more or less indefinitely. Good job I like to be busy.

Apron Two

I love it. I would totally wear it as a dress:

Thank you to Annie (in the comments section on my last post), who suggested that the scrap of orange could be an extra pocket. Yes it could:

There’s room for lots more stitching, but in the meantime it’s fully functional and ready for wearing.

And here’s the back:

Now of course I don’t want to spoil it by accidentally splashing paint and dye over it…

Aprons one and two

My plain white linen/cotton apron is now structurally complete, sewn entirely by hand, and I’m very happy with it:

The top stitching took a while but it looks OK I think:

Difficult to get a sense of scale from the photo but the stitches are just under 1/8th of an inch. I’ll be working some kind of embroidery on it when it knows what it wants to be, so the top stitching will be less obvious when there’s some decoration in place. It’s definitely a blank canvas at the moment.

I’m very impressed by the pattern and the way the pieces fit together so perfectly. The fit is pretty true to size too. I’m a UK size 8-10 and I made the Small, which fits really well. I trimmed about half an inch from the centre front as my shoulders are quite narrow, and I made it a tiny bit longer.

The second apron (same pattern) is now under construction, pieced fairly randomly from hand-dyed cotton and linen fabrics.

I’ve used a couple of hand-printed fabrics on the front; this one was from Hippos in Hats on Etsy and I’ve been saving it for just such an occasion as this:

…and with the hand stitched outline completed (it’s just straight stitch with cotton thread over the printed outline):

I’ve also used a couple of eco-prints from Jane Hunter, to which I’ve added a bit of very simple embroidery with colonial knots and straight stitch:

As before, I’m stitching all the seams by hand:

side seam showing notches for pocket placement

The lining for this one is very lightweight calico which I dyed a while ago. I wasn’t keen on the way the grey/red turned out, but it will do just fine as a lining. There wasn’t quite enough so I’ve added pieces of the same fabric in turquoise/brown:

lightweight calico lining, hand dyed with Procion

I accidentally dropped this earthy orange scrap onto the apron after stitching the front and sides together. I really like the splash of colour against that green and magenta/purple, so I’ll find a way to add it somewhere.

Looking forward to seeing this one done.

Joining

You may recall this sample made as an example of what might happen with the 2024 stitch journal map

stitch journal 2024 (artist’s impression)

and this failed sample of the patchwork version:

Two orphan samples, both alike in dignity, but – unlike Shakespeare’s ill-fated star-crossed lovers – destined for a happy ending after all. I’d prepared my stitch journal for next year, tracing the templates:

stitch journal 2024 (yes, that’s blue biro)

It’s the same fabric as the last two years – vintage cotton/linen, from an old French bed sheet. Next year will be a large square rather than a long strip, just to see how that works. It’s ended up about 36″ inches (ish) square (allowing for a little border around the stitched area), and folds up quite nicely. Then I thought it’s going to need a cover of some sort, just as a little protection from dust and light.

Aha, I thought. You probably know what’s coming next:

A little extra work, and it looks as if that might be a nice way to combine both samples into a Useful Thing. Not that everything needs to have a purpose, but they turned out to be exactly the right size, and I always think that’s a Sign. I’ve made the cover slightly roomy to allow for some expansion because the cloth will become slightly thicker as it’s stitched. I’ve found it surprising to see how much bulk is added by thread as the months pass.

A few hedges (textured yarn, couched with one strand of DMC) and a little extra stitch here and there:

And there it is – it’s almost making itself. I’ve folded the lower half up, stitched the edges together, found a piece of fabric exactly the right size to make a lining, and then the other (embroidered) end will fold over, like a very simple clutch purse:

Still not finished, but you can see how this will work:

Ready for a new adventure next year.

Tag: patchwork

Quilting time

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Creative English Paper-Piecing

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Papa’s got a brand new pegbag

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Past and future life

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Piecing it together

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Online homes

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Playing Tetris with Time

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Apron Two

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Aprons one and two

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Joining

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