Tag: Announcement
Very Exciting News!
My most long term readers may recall that when I first started this blog, it was for accountability, in a sense.
I had plans for a two-panel embroidery inspired by the book “Nefertiti Lived Here”, by Mary Chubb, and with Life the way it is for all of us, I thought the only way I would keep at it was if I’d said, in public, that I was going to do it.
Well.
Some twenty-odd years later, that two panel project turned into 27 embroideries, 117 watercolours, and A Book!!
You may think I’d have nothing left to say, given how much I wrote on this blog as I was making the pieces, and when someone said “Why don’t you write a book?”, I rather wondered about that myself.
But it turns out that with the distance of having done a lot of other embroidery since, and a lot of painting, and a lot of thinking, there’s actually a lot to say. Not about the technical aspects; there are plenty of books of technique that as specialised books have the space to explain techniques in detail. But as someone who developed their own approach to design and design development, what I can do is share some of that approach.
The Embroiderers Guild have now published “Dreams of Amarna – Stitching An Egyptological Adventure”, and it is available to buy from their webshop now. It is copiously illustrated, with photographs by the wonderful Bernard Rose, showing embroideries and paintings, all done by me. I am thrilled to bits, and I hope you will love it, too!
An adventure on the (distant) horizon
I have been asked to plan a week of embroidery next July for The Watermill, Posara, a rather wonderful place in Tuscany that hosts painting and knitting holidays among other things. Bill and Lois Breckon, who run The Watermill, have been gradually restoring and improving it over the past thirty years or so, and they have a gift for unobtrusive excellence of organisation I’ve never seen bettered.
At the moment, we are thinking of running an embroidery week along the lines of the knitting courses, with studio time alternating with the excursions and fabulous lunches, and I have been thinking quite hard about what might make for an interesting week.
The painting classes are “plein air”, so involve setting up somewhere and painting all morning, followed by a delicious lunch (when I painted this watercolour I had my back to the trattoria where we had lunch) and painting some more in the afternoon. Apparently the knitters sometimes set themselves up somewhere and Knit In Public as well – the locals in all the destinations being so accustomed to artists and tourists that they barely even notice.
My idea for the embroidery week is to go adventuring Beyond Long And Short Stitch, to play with the ideas that are my first love in embroidery, the use of the ornamental stitches and varied threads to recall texture and pattern, to bring pictures to life without too much detail: “Impressionism in stitches”, if you will.
So I’ve started to plan Impressionistic stitcheries inspired by The Watermill and the excursions, which can be put together into a Watermill Sampler. The first (this is a detail) is inspired by the stands of bamboo which are merrily naturalising themselves up and down the valley, and by a recent post on Queenie’s Needlework blog about a stitch she calls “Danish Knotted Cross Stitch” (since the book she found it in didn’t give it a name at all!). When the stitch appeared I was already thinking about the Bambouserie, as they call it, and it occurred to me that it might make an effective stitch for the joint in the bamboo stalks – and sure enough, it does!
The long, rustling leaves of the bamboo are worked as clusters of long Detached Twisted Chain stitches, which I think are somehow much more evocative of the rustle than straight stitches would be. “Bambouserie” has set quite a high bar for my next “Watermill Stitchery”!
Episode 65 of SlowTV Stitchery is now live, in which we make an early start to avoid Noises Off, and thoughts of the sky as a sampler of graduating colour lead to a reconsideration of the idea for canvaswork cushions inspired by the Ironbridge and “Coalbrookdale by Night”.