I’ve been busy.

The new job is going well, I’m pleased to say. I am settling in there nicely. On the embroidery front, the Second Yellow Mat is making good progress – it’s not far from finished now. It might even have been finished already except that I got sidetracked by another project… As one does. This project was figuring out an old crochet pattern on the Antique Pattern Library website. There was no actual pattern or any instructions: nothing but a hand-drawn illustration (probably a woodcut). You can see the printout I was working from in the picture below.

I had fun trying to  figure out how to stitch this. I can crochet, but I either follow a pattern or make up my own. Trying to figure out the pattern from a picture (which turned out to have a few minor inaccuracies) was quite a challenge.

But I rather relish a challenge like that. So with a lot of counting, trying-out, undoing, retrying and occasionally cursing, I did eventually figure the pattern out to my own satisfaction and produced the finished cushion front. And then came the equally tricky task of trying to turn my rough scribbles and scruffy notes into instructions that (I hope) will make sense to someone else. 

The finished instructions now have their own page on Tortoise Loft – the Blog: Crochet: Old Cartier-Bresson Crochet Square.

With the 4-ply cotton yarn I used, it was a very good size for a cushion. In a finer thread, it would make a handsome square for a bedspread, or something of that sort. I hope some people will have a go at working it. I also hope people will let me know if they spot any mistakes in the instructions, so I can make corrections.

I don’t intend to work out any other of the crochet patterns from these little booklets – one was enough! But I am very pleased with how well this one turned out.

Back to the two Yellow Mats of my last-but-one posting. Yellow Mat One – that’s the finished one, this one -was beset with problems. The main problem was the thread, which was not robust enough to go through the closely-woven linen without fluffing up. Particularly as I didn’t always get the needle in exactly the right place first time, so was undoing a lot of stitches. (Sometimes it seemed I was working backwards more often than forwards. It gets like that some days!) I was using a single strand of stranded cotton – you may call it cotton floss, sticktwist, mouliné, it’s all the same stuff. I wasn’t using an economy brand, this was DMC thread and the thread was in good condition. But I struggled to stitch with it, even after I started making sure that I was working with the nap of the thread, not against it.

Stranded cotton has a nap?

No, not that kind of nap, Flossie!

Yes, it does. It’s not a very noticeable nap with good brands. (I’d never paid any attention to which end of the thread went into the needle before. I’ve never needed to. It’s never made any visible difference to the finished stitching before.) Yellow Mat One showed me that even that tiny difference could matter when the going gets tough.

How do you find out which end is which? Well, the simplest way is to run a strand between your fingers – in one direction it will run very smoothly, in the other direction it’s just not quite so smooth. It’s nothing like as noticeable as stroking a cat’s fur the wrong way (I’ve never yet had a strand of thread turn around and claw my hand, either). But when it matters, you want have the nap running from the end that goes into the needle to the end that you stitch into the fabric; so that as you pull it through the fabric, the fabric is not rubbing the fibres the wrong way.

This may sound horribly time-consuming, but once you’ve found the nap on one of the six strands in a length of cotton, all rest will run the same way, and other lengths cut from the same end of the skein will also run the same way. How you store cut lengths so that you know which way up they are when you get them out of your sewing bag is up to you. My current best idea is to keep them in a loose hitch, as I usually do, but leave the two legs of the hitch unequal lengths – the long one is the tail and the short one is the needle end. It’s not a perfect storage solution. Suggestions welcome!

Okay, back to the story. Using the thread the right way around certainly helped with Yellow Mat One. It wasn’t perfect and I was still wasting a lot of thread and having to make a lot of repairs, but it was better. Eventually I finished the mat.

Now we come to Yellow Mat Two. The new one. Good thread again, this time a shiny new skein of Anchor Stranded, but still fluffing up and still very hard to get through the fabric. Worse, the strand actually broke a couple of times while I was stitching.

What do I check when cotton breaks?

The first check is the most obvious thing: Is the eye damaged on the needle? Mine wasn’t actually broken, but it was bent and battered and could have had a rough edge in the eye. I sent that needle into retirement.

Second check: Is the needle big enough? Now this is quite a tough question. You want it small enough that you can get it into the right holes in the fabric. (It’s hard to see what you are doing with a big needle obscuring your view.) And on a closely woven fabric, you can’t get a very big needle through easily. But you want it big enough that the thread can get through without too much wear and tear. I had been using one of the smallest tapestry needles I have, a size 26. The replacement would be a size 24. One size larger.

The third check is worth doing any time you start stitching: Do you have a broken nail or a rough edge on jewellery or anything else that might be catching the thread? Oops! Yes, a split fingernail. Short pause for a five-minute manicure. (An emery board is useful in a travelling stitching bag – just keep it away from anything it could scratch.) I think the split nail on the worn thread was definitely the cause of the breaks.

There’s a fourth check, a very important one, if you don’t already do it from habit. That is: Are you sure you are not stressing the thread in the needle’s eye when you pull the thread through? It’s easy to do – especially when the fabric is hard to stitch through – so it’s worth getting into the habit of holding the needle and thread properly when you pull the thread. It seems awkward at first, but persevere with it. It will become second nature eventually. Here’s the grip:

The first finger and thumb grip the needle, then the second and third fingers trap the thread. So as you come to the end of the pull, all the stress is on the area of thread held between your second and third fingers. It’s not on the tiny bit of thread passing through the needle’s eye.

You probably already know to move the thread in the needle from time to time as well, so that same area isn’t always getting the wear. A slight digression: the risk of wear on the thread is one good reason not to loop one thread through the needle when stitching with doubled thread. The cut ends should go through the needle, if you use thread doubled. An obvious exception is for threading beads if you can’t get the thread through the holes any other way. I know that parents and teachers tell young children to fix the needle in a loop of thread – it saves a lot of dropped needles! But as soon as you are old enough to know better, you’d be wise to only put the cut ends into the needle, as if they were a single thread.)

And again back to the story. Having checked off points one, two, three and four, I tried again. This time the stitching went noticeably better. Better – but not as well as I’d liked. No more breaks, but I was still getting fluffing, and every stitch correction was making the thread more and more ragged. Who would rescue Floss Cotton from going to pieces on the Harsh Linen of Doom?

Cue the sound effects: the drone of the engines as the squadron races across the sky….

Back before the machine-perfect thread we take for granted today, before cotton was treated by ‘mercerisation’ and mechanically honed to silky-smoothness, there was beeswax. A wax holder was as normal a component of a sewing box as the scissors.

You don’t really want to use it when you can avoid it, but if you need to strengthen a frail thread on its journey through the hostile territory of awkward fabric and keep it from fluffing, beeswax is magic.

You can still buy special holders and expensive wax from shops that carry quilting supplies. (Hand-quilters often still like to use it to toughen up their quilting threads as they shove them through all the layers of cloth and batting.) You can also try a honey stall at a farmer’s market or talk to a beekeeper – they’ll sell you a chunk with no fancy holder, but at a far less fancy price. And all you do is pull the thread across the wax firmly, keeping under your thumb. (Pull it with the nap, remember – don’t rub the thread up the wrong way.) You might need to make two or more passes, but one may be enough, especially after threads have started to wear a little groove in the block, which lets the wax coat them more easily. It will make an alarming squeaky-creaky noise but don’t worry. You may overdo the wax a bit and end up with something as stiff as a cat’s whisker, but really you just need enough to give it that little bit of body – just enough to smooth things along nicely. It’s a matter of experience. Oh yes, you get that faint smell of wax and honey, too. (Hay fever, asthma and eczema sufferers – do make sure that you are not allergic to beeswax before you use it.)

So now Yellow Mat Two is progressing remarkably swiftly. Despite the extra time taken in waxing the thread, I am working much faster than I was without the wax on Yellow Mat One. I haven’t had to spend so much time struggling with the thread. It’s also proving easier to cut the fabric away without snipping through the surrounding stitches, because they are not fluffy. No more stopping to rework damaged blocks. I’ve got this far with the first border already – the surface stitchery complete and the cutting and lace stitches well under way. I’ve done just over half the surface stitchery on the second border, too. I am delighted – I’m making much, much faster progress than I expected to. The stiffer, faintly tacky-feeling thread is not as pleasant to work with as untreated thread, but I am happy to put up with that in exchange for easier stitching.

This is an experiment, so I have yet to find out how easily I can remove the wax from the thread afterwards, and find out if the sheen of the cotton will revive (it looks a little dull with wax on it, but I assume that the gloss will come back when the wax goes). I will report the results of this experiment when I get to the cleaning and pressing stage, even if it all ends in hopeless failure. Meanwhile, so far, so good!

Embroidery. Looking back at the last 12 months, I think I can safely say that I have done more stitchery in 2011 than in any year since the early 1990s. I’ve never totally given up on embroidery, but there have been years when I’ve done hardly any. This was one of the most productive ones.

I also seem to have developed more patience and more willingness to stick at a piece of stitchery than I’ve ever had before, making me happier to take on more labour intensive embroideries. I no longer feel the urge to rush projects and spoil them, and I am less inclined to give up half way through - most of the embroidery projects I’ve started in 2011 have been finished, not left half-done. I even took up several pieces that had been left part-finished a decade or more ago and completed them. (There are more old unfinished projects still waiting for my attention, but I’ve made a good start on the pile.)

So what has sparked this revival of interest in embroidery? The main influence has been one of the things that previously got in the way of my stitching and craftwork: the Internet. I like to study old needlework, and more and more old patterns and embroidery textbooks being made available online. The amount of museum reference material online, with good, clear images, is also growing.  It’s rather wonderful to be able to study samplers in the V&A without the train fare to London, or look at early pattern books that I have read of but never seen for myself.

A sampler of cut drawn and openwork embroidery, trying out stitches and techniques from books from the Antique Pattern Library

Heading the list of last year’s favourite discoveries is the excellent Antique Pattern Library – an ever-increasing collection of old books, charts and magazines, free for downloading for non-commercial purposes. (Not just embroidery – it’s a treasure trove for knitters, crocheters, tatting enthusiasts and more.) I’ve downloaded several books, mostly late Victorian and Edwardian, and they’ve proved very useful for both information and inspiration. It’s a wonderful resource which deserves to be much more widely known.

A bookmark for my mother. Made with a lovely variegated pearl cotton from Stef Francis, worked on 28 count Jobelan fabric.

And then there are the specialist suppliers for embroidery materials. Although I always try to source purchases locally and support shops in this area, it’s not always possible to find what I am looking for if it is something a little out of the ordinary – as it usually is. So then I am happy to support the small specialist companies who do business online. (The larger online concerns are very much my supplier of last resort.) It’s probably a good thing that I am short of money, because I can browse specialist thread suppliers websites for hours, getting more and more inspired in the process!  

I want to show you this piece, which I’ve been working on gradually for the last four or five months. (I was determined to finish it in 2011, and I did – just.) I am rather proud of it! It’s the finest fabric I have ever tried to use for counted cutwork, about 45 threads to the inch, although it is not exactly evenweave. These primrose-yellow linen placemats, already hemmed and with a narrow drawn-thread border, were on the antique stall in the local market at 50p each. I don’t know how old they are – even the hem is hand-stitched, so they were probably made for the love of it rather than for commercial purposes.

I decided to add some further decoration, continuing my exploration of counted cutwork. The stitches used are those used in modern Hardanger: satin-stitch kloster blocks, woven bars and dove’s-eye filling in the mesh areas, with Maltese cross filling in the large cut spaces and rows of single faggot stitch making the diamond shapes between the motifs.

A small, poor-quality photo of Swedish cutwork embroidery from around 1840.

The design inspiration was less from modern Hardanger embroidery than from Swedish and Danish white work from the 1840s. 

Here’s a clearer view of the stitchery:

I had to buy a new pair of embroidery scissors, as my old pair were not slim and sharp enough to cut these tiny holes. I used a single strand of stranded cotton for the embroidery. I also had to wear two pairs of spectacles at once in order to see the threads!
I am now starting a second mat. On the right of the photo is the mat in its original state, with the drawn threadwork border. I have just started working antique hemstitch around the inner edge of the border to neaten the raw edge. I will do the same on the outer edge. I’ve also marked out the area to be stitched. I still have to plan and chart the design for this one. I want to use different motifs (I think I shall have hearts on this one – another popular motif from the old Swedish whitework), but I will use the same stitches and the same Maltese cross motifs to be in keeping with the first mat. Maybe in another month or so I shall be able to show you the first completed section.

In most countries, the indigenous music, songs and dances of an area are seen as a part of regional and national identity. They are well-promoted, encouraged and supported as a vital part of the culture. In England, it seems that folk music is dismissed a something of interest only to a small group of enthusiasts, ‘hippies from the hills,’ ‘the knit your own museli brigade.’ But it flourishes – perhaps flourishes all the better from being out of the eye of major commercial interests. There is plenty of commercial music broadcast on the radio, there is very little folk music in comparison. Very little. And we need to keep what we still have left.

With the planned changes to BBC Local Radio, we are told we will lose those local evening radio programmes which do such a great job of letting the listeners hear local music as well as music by performers coming to our area, often live performances in the radio station’s studio; along with a thoughtfully chosen selection of other folk music on record, news and interviews. One such is Radio Shropshire’s Sunday Folk, which is presented by Genevieve Tudor and syndicated to Radio Hereford and Worcester and Radio Stoke. A great many folk music radio shows have already gone from other stations, I know that a number of listeners now enjoy Gen’s show via the Internet, having lost their own local shows.

I hope there is some point in my writing to you, asking you to reconsider the ending of all genre-music programmes on BBC Local Radio, even if this means moving the best of these programmes to daytime positions to allow the evening switch-off you are planning. Far from being mere fillers, vital, grass-roots programmes like Sunday Folk allow people in these four counties – and, increasingly, a nationwide and world-wide audience through the Internet – to stay in touch with what is going on. It is good for the area, good for small local businesses and charity events in this largely rural area, it is good for morale and for social-contact. It’s also very pleasant and enjoyable listening, of course, providing a fine introduction for those new to the genre, the folk music lovers of the future. Above all, Sunday Folk, its presenters and its audience feel like family and friends. Please don’t take it away from us.

Kevon came over here on holiday in August. We started with a day at the Shrewsbury Flower Show. Where Kevon’s pleasure in the musical fireworks of the Band of the Coldstream Guards was equalled only by his pleasure in the musical fireworks of the, er, musical fireworks – Kimbolton’s pyrotechnic finale being the best I’ve seen yet. We spent a couple of very pleasant days in York – with time to see the National Railway Museum and the Castle Museum as well as stroll around the walls and along the riverside. The holiday ended with the Shrewsbury Folk Festival. I asked Kevon if I could post his comments on the Festival here on Tortoise Loft. I’ve added a couple of pictures that I took at the event; the words, the links – and the opinions – are Kevon’s own.

Sabrina.

The third day of the festival found us in the Sabrina Marquee. The Shrewsbury Folk Festival is neither small nor cheap. It has about 6 venues in fairly continuous use from Friday afternoon to Monday afternoon of England’s famed August Bank-Holiday Weekend. The venues range from a circus tent with computerised coloured spotlights and smoke machines, down to more intimate spaces that only hold a couple of hundred. The opening performance in the circus tent was all amplification and coloured lights, which is not my idea of Folk Music. I want to hear the words; not be pummelled by the bass. Perhaps the smaller Sabrina Marquee will be an improvement?
 
The first act was three old men with fiddle, melodeon, and I forget what else. They sang traditional songs and I could hear the words. This was good. After them came four young poms, one of whom works for NASA in the USA. They began with a quiet song; restful, contemplative; full of long silences and instrumental solos; perfect for a warm Sunday afternoon. As near as I can recall it went:

(Start with refrain)
This is the sound-check; this is the sound check, baby.
This is the sound-check; this is the sound check, baby.

This is the sound-check, we’re just checking;
That our instruments are all plugged in.
(repeat refrain)

This is the sound-check, it’s not a song.
We make it up as we go along.
(repeat refrain)

They also did the story of Rhys and Meinir; the traditional Welsh love story that ends when Rhys finds his beloved’s skeleton in an oak tree, still in her wedding dress. He dies too; and all live happily ever after.

When they had finished a girl wandered onto the stage and told us that she had a sticky mouth from the lunch she had just eaten. She had a guitar. She also had green hair and the strap of a thong showing above the waist of her leggings. I considered leaving. I checked the programme notes : “Her …strong, pitch-perfect, delivery and the maturity of her songs can reduce an audience to tears, …” It can. She favours songs about women’s hardships. She was the best act of the day. Her hair wasn’t green either; it was blue. It looked green in the light that filtered through the yellow canvas of the tent. Appearances can deceive. — www.lucywardsings.com

The last act, the one that I had come to see, was a group of five mature men singing sea chanteys. They were good too, but Lucy was better.

Ceilidh.

At least once every day there was a ceilidh in the dance tent. In deepest England; as far as can be from crofts, skerries, bogs and uisge beatha; we are having traditional celtic night gatherings in daylight? Wikipedia explains :

What is now called English ceilidh [ ... ] has many things in common with the Scottish/Irish social dance traditions and can be considered part of English Country Dance [ ... ] English ceilidhs always use a caller who calls the dance figures the dancers need to make. [ ... ] Most of the dances involve couples staying together for the whole dance, though people often change partners after every one or two dances.

The one I went to was lively, crowded, and great fun. The caller invited couples to form fours, or parallel lines, or concentric circles. Some of the couples were boy and girl, many girl and girl, some were parent and waist-high child, and one “couple” was a wheelchair with pusher, occupant, and occupant’s partner. The caller described the steps of the dance and talked the dancers through a few sequences, then the music and mayhem began. There was Strip-the Willow, The-Dashing-White-Sergeant, and I know not what else. Couples galloped between lines of their fellows, ducked under arches of outstretched arms, separated to swing around strangers and meet again 4 bars later. Groups of six or eight formed mini-centrifuges. There was a lot of flailing about, looking for the correct hand to grab next but, remarkably, things mostly kept skipping, galloping, spinning, and swinging, more-or-less in time to the strong beat of the band. Perhaps some of them had done it before.

Morris and Clog

It’s hard to describe Morris Dancing without making it sound ridiculous. A half dozen or so grown men, with solemn mien, tie bells to their legs and caper in unison. You can get a bit of an idea of the leg-work by watching John Cleese from the Ministry of Silly Walks. There are many styles, but to the uninitiated the main difference is that sometimes they wave white handkerchiefs,

and sometimes they bang sticks together.

The dancing is accompanied by a Melodeon, a kind of squeeze-box, but where normal dancing follows the music, a Morris Melodeon player follows the dancers. It they need more time for a step, the player will extend the beat as required. This can sound awkward, and it requires the musician to walk backwards when leading a parade. The antiquity and origin of Morris is uncertain, but it may have originated as a celebration of casting the Moors out of Spain. Morris = Moorish, perhaps? In any case it is old.

Along with the Morris dancers we had cloggers. Clogging is not old. In the Industrial Revolution lots of mills were built in Northern England, and lots of lasses worked at t’mill. The traditional mill-girl’s shoe was a wooden-soled Clog, and a Clog makes a satisfying bang when stamped on a wooden floor. Clogging is girls having fun; and it is fun to watch.

We also had Rapping. Weavers must periodically push the weft threads together to close them up. At t’mill this was, apparently, done with a rapper. From a distance a rapper looks like a sword with a handle at both ends. Some teams danced with these, and wove them together as they swung around each other with the rappers held aloft. This must require great skill and fitness,  but the clogging looked like more fun. I could have watched Morris and
Clogging all day.

Thank you, Kevon. ‘I could have watched Morris and Clogging all day?’ You are a braver man that I thought. (I had not realised the Folk Festival would be your first real exposure to it – we take chaps wearing bells for granted in these parts.) I prefer to have Morris in much small doses. But you were right about Lucy Ward’s fine singing - definitely a name to watch.

When I show someone a piece of my counted-thread embroidery – either a piece that is a work in progress, or one that is not obviously a specific item such as a tablemat or a cushion-cover – I tend to get two reactions more than any others:

The first is ‘that’s very nice, what is it?’ Or ‘what is it going to be when it is finished?’

The second is ‘You must have a terrific lot of patience, Sue.’ Or ‘I would never have the patience to do that.’

Both of these responses seem to me to be very, very revealing about the way people view the kind of geometric embroidery that I create. The first tells me that counted-thread embroidery is only seen as having ‘value’ when it is part of another object, and usually of an object which is seen as having a lot less status than a ‘work of art’. If it were a drawing or a painting or a photograph that I was showing, or even a more-obviously ‘creative’ piece of embroidery, this question would rarely be asked. But because I am working in a very old, formal tradition, and perhaps because this type of counted thread embroidery has been traditionally a female leisure occupation, I am not seen as making an object that is to be considered in the same way as a piece of artwork is to be considered: on its own merits and for what it is, what it says, how it affects the observer.

As for the matter of patience, it occurs to me that most of these people have sufficient patience to drive a car for an hour, to read a book or a newspaper, or concentrate upon some other task for pleasure or for profit. So the patience is there. (I rarely stitch for longer than an hour or an hour and a half at one sitting.) What they are really saying is again related to the work’s perceived value: ‘I could not be bothered to spend that much of my time, and do that much work, just for a piece of decorated cloth.’ If they were talking to a painter or a sculptor, they would perhaps mention a lack of skill, or a lack of inspiration, but they would not devalue the work itself in the same way. Instead they might well imagine the work to be more challenging than it actually is to someone who is well practiced at doing it. Because they would see it primarily as a piece of ‘art’.

So how can I get a piece of work in this medium of thread and fabric, and in this tradition of geometric, non-representational, counted embroidery seen as ‘abstract artwork’, not as just an attractive bit of hobby-handicraft? Obviously the setting in which it is found affects the viewer’s expectations. I could put the work in a frame on an art gallery wall. (Lots of white-space around it, and a discrete label to give title, artist and price.) However, putting this type of embroidery into a frame takes away a valuable part of it – the tactile nature of the stitched cloth. Better, then, to invite the visitor to touch and handle the material, but in a formal, gallery setting. Perhaps a ceremonial washing of the hands first would impart a certain amount of distinction to the handling, allowing the viewer time to prepare, for a change of mindset? Building up an expectation that what is to be seen and touched is not just a bit of hobby-stitchery, but something that may provide an experience to savour.

What else? Information panels, talking about the nature of the work, the spiritual value of the repetition and the meditative nature of stitchery? Notes on the history of the different stitches used, and on the sources and inspirations for the pieces on show? Short essays on the development of the ideas, what I learned during the stitching; what I thought about, the frustrations and triumphs, what it felt like in my hand? Perhaps a display of photographic enlargements and drawings showing the needlework in new ways; particularly showing the interplay between the thread and the fabric, between the various degrees of randomness inherent in the materials and the formal, geometric nature of the patterns and stitches? All these things, for me, lift embroidery from a pleasant hobby to something that answers a deep-seated need, part of a long, ongoing personal journey and a means of self-expression within a constrained environment.

But first and foremost – and here is where my ambitions are doomed to grind to a halt – I would need to have the drive and self-confidence to talk about my needlework and myself in a manner in which I prefer not to talk about them. I can discuss the techniques, I can discuss materials and I can talk about the history of the subject and my personal journey through it, and what I am learning in the process. I love to do all those things. But I hesitate to say ‘I am an artist. This is a work of art.’

After all, it’s only just a bit of embroidery.

Thoroughly cooked, I welcome you all again. After my long propinquity in the forum is not, I could not procure the open sesame to your time-honoured vignette and started a chic one. I’m glad that I am again with you.

Nothing like a time-honoured vignette to cheer up a grey and very windy Shrewsbury morning, is there? Except for a new washing machine that works – and works even better than I expected it to. I have one of those. I’ve just fed it a second load.

The old washing machine died just a few days after the ice in the courtyard was finally removed and normal drainage restored. Eleven years of good service, and three months of gradual decline in its spinning ability as it wore itself out. But it has needed no repairs – until it passed utterly beyond repair last weekend. I was rather sad to see it unceremoniously lugged  down the stairs by the delivery men who brought the shiny new one. (I felt sorry for them, too – there are a lot of stairs. 56 steps in total.)

It left  its fanbelt lying in the hall as a souvenir.

I’m also very busy at the office, and things-to-do keep mounting up at home too. But I am working on a new project for the embroidery pages. Nobody has asked me to tackle any specific topics, but I’ve noticed ‘Hardanger’ cropping up as a search term on the blog. So I am working on a small Hardanger embroidery project which will teach the stitches and techniques that are also used in this cushion:

It may take a while, though!