Midwinter Stitchery

A strip of dark blue fabric, quilted with a design of circles, curves and lines. The piece is backed with grey linen, and rests on a wooden fence in woodland. — The Dark is Rising: 2 January 2022

In the closing days of 2021 and the opening day of 2022 I stitched along to Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising, a perfect audiobook listen for midwinter, as the story starts on Midwinter’s Eve and finishes on Twelfth Night. I started my quilting on Midwinter’s Day, and finished it on New Year’s Day.

The Dark is Rising (1973) is the second in a series of five books written for children, which I must have first read when I was nine or ten. At that age, I preferred the first book in Cooper’s series, Over Sea, Under Stone, which is a more straightforward adventure story. As an adult, I much prefer the subtleties of language and atmosphere of The Dark is Rising, which is the best known of the series today, and can be read as a stand-alone story. A winter re-read is now a regular part of my year, and this time round, I decided to use that re-read as an opportunity for some immersive stitching.

A strip of dark blue fabric, quilted with a design of circles, curves and lines. The piece is backed with grey linen, and rests on a tree stump on a woodland path

I didn’t plan the piece, or have any idea of what it should look like. It was an extension of my regular Random Stitch practice which I started in September 2020, and which I have found a very liberating way of working. But I haven’t used this sort of stitching for anything book-inspired before, and I didn’t know whether this method would work.

However, it turned out to be a very positive way of quilting. I used the unabridged audiobook (an excellent reading by Alex Jennings) and simply let the needle go where it wanted. My hands turned my listening into stitches that hinted at shards of ice and snow, the melting water of the thaw, a rose ring, green fabric from a velvet coat, primroses, flames, rooks, a joined circle, and the six signs at the centre of the story. I deliberately did not stitch anything figurative, as I wanted an abstract piece that could stand alone in its own right, as well as giving a fleeting impression of Cooper’s prose.

When I first thought of stitching along to The Dark is Rising, white or grey fabric seemed most appropriate, but to my surprise I found myself drawn to a piece of very crumpled dark blue, which had been lying around for a while, waiting to become something. I was well into the stitching process when I heard a reference to “the wrinkled sea” in the text, and I wondered whether my subconscious had prompted me to choose this particularly wrinkled piece of blue fabric to work on. Did a dimly remembered scene from a previous reading play a part – or was it simply a lazy decision made because the blue fabric was immediately to hand?

A strip of dark blue fabric, quilted with a design of circles, curves and lines. The piece is backed with grey linen, and rests on log against a carpet of leaves..

I finished stitching on New Year’s Day at the same time as I finished the audiobook. I I knew I didn’t need to add anything else – my stitching and listening had been perfectly entwined. The only thing that didn’t work out according to plan was the weather. The finished piece should really have been photographed in the snow, but it has been unseasonably warm this New Year.

A strip of dark blue fabric, quilted with a design of circles, curves and lines. The piece is backed with grey linen, and rests on a tree stump — The Dark is Rising: the six signs

A white piece of fabric, quilted and embroidered in a curving pattern, in shades of brown, orange, grey, cream, and red

Experiments in Random Stitchery

Last month, I decided to do something new. Well, new for me, at any rate. I was very busy preparing a paper about stitching in the Cromwell Trilogy for a conference about the work of Hilary Mantel which took place in mid-October, and I didn’t have much space in my head for thoughts of complicated sewing. What I needed was the equivalent of a musician practising scales – keeping my muscle memory in play.

I had read about the practice of doing a bit of unplanned sewing every day, and, earlier this year, I went to a fascinating online talk by textile artist Claire Wellesley-Smith about her longstanding stitch journal. I didn’t want to embark on anything large scale, especially given my ongoing Cromwell quilt work, but I was intrigued by what I had heard about the stitch journal and I wondered whether a few minutes of daily unplanned sewing would benefit my work.

White fabric with some quilting in chain and running stitch in orange thread — A bit of orange thread

I had an odd piece of white fabric lying around – about 13 by 10 inches – and an offcut of wadding of about the same size. And I picked up a bit of orange thread. I’ve been quilting with chain stitch a lot recently, so I started with that, then added in some standard quilting stitch. The idea was not to worry too much about stitch length but just to see what happened.

As ever, the first stitches on blank fabric looked fairly underwhelming, and I found the process slightly odd. I am usually quite controlled with my sewing and know exactly what I am going to stitch – especially when I am working with lettering – but here I was faced with a blank space and an attempt to let my needle go where it chose. I defaulted to curves very quickly, because I always prefer to stitch curved lines rather than straight.

White fabric, quilted with orange and grey thread in a curving design — Trying not to worry about stitch length

I got into the habit of using whatever thread was to hand, provided that it fitted in to a fairly restricted colour range – brown, orange, red, cream, black, and grey. Rather than allowing cut off pieces of cotton from other stitching to sit in my pincushion and get tangled (a bad habit of mine), I started to add them on to the random stitch piece.

White fabric, quilted with brown, cream, orange, red, grey and black thread in a random curving design — Random Stitches spreading out

I usually did about ten minutes random stitching at a time. I didn’t do it every day; I live with a migraine condition which means I tend not to commit myself to a daily practice, as I can’t maintain it. But I did add stitches on most days, finding it beneficial to have something I could pick up in odd minutes.

As I very gradually added more stitches, the fabric changed texture – something that never fails to surprise me – and I started to see random patterns becoming something else. Was this a rockpool? Or some sort of shale rock formation? Sometimes an unstructured stitch takes a needle somewhere entirely unexpected. It was exciting to see my ten minute stitching sessions actually turn into something – a fairly coherent piece of sewing that started from nothing.

White fabric quilted in a curving design with orange, red, cream, brown, black, grey thread — September Stitches

I found the practice so beneficial that, at the end of September, I cut out some russet coloured fabric and added it to the first piece so I could carry on in October.

So far, October’s random sewing looks less interesting – largely because I have been so preoccupied with other work. And I find that interesting, albeit not surprising: a ten-minute random stitch practice is impacted by what else is going on elsewhere. This month, there are no swirling curves, just some rather unadventurous wavy lines. I’ll have to watch how it develops in the last week of October.

Picking up a needle again

For most of 2018 and 2019, my quilting inspiration was notable by its absence, and I was starting to wonder if it would ever come back. But with the help of a long-abandoned project – which required some creative remedies – I’m definitely now back in the quilting spirit.

The pleasure of completing a very long standing quilting project.

Quilting took a back seat while I worked on writing up my PhD thesis about the early career of Maurice Elvey, which I submitted in February 2018. I passed my Viva that August, was awarded my Doctorate in September, and attended my graduation ceremony in November.

I just passed my Viva!

Lucie with picture of Maurice Elvey at her PhD graduation

Maurice Elvey at my PhD graduation

I anticipated feeling a bit dislocated once my PhD was completed, but I didn’t realise that this dislocation would extend to my sewing practice. As one of my quilting friends commented, “I thought that now you’d finished, your quilting would be unstoppable!” Rather than being unstoppable, it almost stopped altogether. I spent months picking up projects and putting them down again, unable to find satisfaction in any sewing at all. Nothing seemed right and I kept bemoaning my lack of inspiration.

In January 2019 I decided to make a Double Wedding Ring just to see if I could – precision piecing isn’t really my thing but I wanted to challenge myself technically – and I completed the patchwork, but couldn’t decide how to quilt it.

I then fiddled about with some quilted drawings but they didn’t capture my imagination. I was starting to think I’d never really quilt properly again, when I came across an unfinished quilt I started back in 2006.

I was fairly new to quilting then, and at that time, I was trying – unsuccessfully – to get to grips with using a sewing machine, so I pieced the patchwork by machine, and then attempted to handquilt it. I decided to use a big stitch pattern – and some of those early stitches really were huge!

In 2019, I couldn’t remember why I had abandoned this quilt until I washed it, had a good look at it, and found that there were significant problems with the construction: uneven seams, some seams that didn’t even meet, a misguided use of seersucker around the edges, and some terrible fraying in places. As a new quilter, I hadn’t known how to address any of these problems so I’d stuck the whole thing in a bag and moved on. But all these years later, I knew what to do. I unpicked some of the uneven seams, patched over the largest gaps, and cut off the frayed fabric. The seersucker – a real mistake – was anchoring some of the quilting stitches so I couldn’t remove that entirely, but I did cut it down and made a mental note never to use seersucker in a quilt again.

I added finer quilting to contrast with the original big stitch design

I agonised about the original big stitch quilting, some of which was really badly executed, and unpicked the worst of it. But in the end I left most of it in place – it was done to the best of my ability when it was first sewn, and it felt important to acknowledge this. And it’s a useful reminder of my learning and developing my quilting technique – and knowing when to let go: I could probably have spent another year unpicking and resewing, but there are other things to stitch.

I added new borders and stitched the long process of making into the quilt itself, so the bottom border reads I started this quilt in 2006 and completed it at the end of 2019. And suddenly, this abandoned quilt was bound and complete.

From being crumpled in a bag and hidden in a cupboard – a reminder of frustration and failures of technique – over the last couple of weeks, this newly finished quilt has been out for a walk by the Thames, been blowing in a friend’s garden on a windy day, and is now a favourite way of keeping warm during the colder weather.