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.

Quilt Archaeology: The piece I like best

*Cross Little Men Singing a Cross Little Song* (2016)
Photographer: © Michael Wicks

During my ongoing Quilt Archaeology, I unearthed the one piece with which I am entirely happy: Cross Little Men Singing a Cross Little Song. I handquilted them in 2016.

Cross Little Men Singing a Cross Little Song sing out on two pieces of cloth just 13 inches by 8. I must have been looking at the Isle of Lewis Chessmen when I thought of them (I have a replica of that chess set. I keep meaning to learn how to play, but I’ve been saying that for well over a decade). My needle had its own ideas, however, and my Cross Little Men decided to be rather jolly. They didn’t turn out biting their shields as I had originally envisaged them, instead they sprang off the needle wanting to sing about the sea. They make me laugh every time I see them.

I sometimes think about making a whole fleet of Cross Little Men, but I suspect that if I did, they wouldn’t turn out in the same spirit: they might be rather forced and become very bad-tempered indeed. And the original three might feel slighted and stop singing. And that would be a shame because this is the one piece in my collection that I love without reservation.

Quilt Archaeology

I have been digging around under the stairs and in the back of the wardrobe, in bags and in boxes, and finding old quilt projects – or, as I like to term it, indulging in Quilt Archaeology. I’m in between two phases of an enormous project and I’m having a bit of a break before picking it up again.

An enormous project: The Cromwell Trilogy Quilt as at 6 July 2021

I finished work on the Wolf Hall section of the Cromwell Trilogy Quilt on 19 August 2021 and have been busy writing up the project and matters relating to it for a conference about Hilary Mantel’s work which takes place in October. I started doing a bit of work on the Bring Up the Bodies section but I realised I was forcing the process, and that’s never a good idea.

19 August 2021: The Wolf Hall section of the Cromwell Trilogy Quilt is finally finished, and I am both exhilarated and exhausted

So rather than going back to my notebooks, index cards, and Hilary Mantel’s glorious prose, I started to sort some of my fabric stash into better order, and in the process unearthed some old and unfinished projects.

The difficulty of replacing a central star: not recommended

During my quilt archaeology session, I came across various pieces. There’s a star quilt, which I started in 2005. I abandoned it because the central star was off: the original fabric had a particular pattern and I hadn’t cut it with any thought to pattern matching. It looked terribly clumsy. In October 2019, I replaced the central star with a different fabric. This piece is now half way quilted, but I keep thinking about whether I should replace some of the outer pieces before going any further. The pattern matching is a bit off in a couple of places. So, yes, I probably will have a further fiddle with the piecing before I finish quilting it. Maybe next year…..

I also found a hexagon quilt which I paper pieced in 2013. I don’t do much paper piecing these days, as it is so hard on the hands. I had started quilting, but I can’t think what led me to want to place a circle on every single hexagon? I like the effect, but it’s going to take years to finish. Can I be less strict about the quilting design I wonder? Maybe finish it with something less dense? Or would that spoil the overall effect?

The most problematic piece I found is a very floral quilt that I made in 2007-8. I was figuring out how to handquilt properly, rather than by stabbing the stitches through the different layers. My taste has changed so I wouldn’t make anything so floral now, but I remember liking it fifteen years ago. Do I keep this piece to remind me of learning to handquilt? Do I finish it and highlight those painstaking learning stitches? Or do I decide it’s not worth the effort? When I examined this quilt more closely I found that there were multiple problems associated with the layering: I didn’t get the wadding properly flat and it has twisted slightly. It’s not fixable to my satisfaction without unpicking everything and relayering it. Can I be bothered? I haven’t decided yet.

Then there’s a bee folklore quilt top that I’ve just washed. I remember doing the research for this piece, but I have no memory of putting it together. My memory insists that that’s a project waiting to be started, so how did it get so far ahead without me noticing? There’s an aggressively bright strippy floral quilt, which is very near completion – why didn’t I finish that in 2009 when I made it? I’ve an unfinished purple and cream diamond quilt top that’s been lurking since 2013: I know my hands don’t appreciate the paper piecing involved so I can’t make it any bigger, but perhaps it can be appliquéd onto something else as a centrepiece? Under the desk, there’s a double wedding ring quilt top I painstakingly handpieced in 2018-19, just to to see whether I could. All that effort really needs quilting….

If you work entirely by hand – as I now do – quilts take a long time to make, and there’s a good chance of becoming disenchanted half way through stitching. Or of deciding that something isn’t working. Or of finding a structural problem that you don’t know how to fix. Yet. But one of the joys of making quilts is that they don’t go off: you can put them aside for days, months, or even years, and pick them up again. You can fix what defeated you before, you can unpick, rework, and restitch, or possibly even decide that the thing that was bothering you before is actually all right.

Scrappy quilt – finished in 2019: 13 years after I started sewing it.

The scrappy quilt above is a case in point. I started it way back in 2006. I felt then that I should learn how to stitch by machine, even though I hated doing it, and I was a very inexperienced quiltmaker. I got half way through handquilting it, and then found that, structurally, there were real problems, due to my inability to machine stitch a straight seam. So I stuck the whole thing in a bag and refused to think about it. I picked it up again in 2019 and realised it was fixable with some unpicking, some restitching and some patching. I finished it in late 2019. These days I quite like having it around. It’s comfortable. And it reminds me that one day’s abandoned project can become tomorrow’s finished quilt, with just a touch of rethinking.

Embroidered fabric with the words Anna Regina and a postcard of Anne Boleyn

The Cromwell Trilogy Quilt: Designing around the Text

The last time I wrote about the Cromwell Trilogy Quilt Project, I mentioned the absence of planning when I started embroidering the chapter titles from Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies, and The Mirror and the Light. Yes, I made sure there was some regularity about the lettering I stitched, but I didn’t have any sort of scheme for how the pieces would fit together or how they would be quilted. It is unsurprising therefore that once I got into working out the quilting design, this presented challenges.

A rectangular rush basket full of embroidered wording — A basket of embroidered chapter titles waiting to be quilted

There are two main issues. Firstly, once I started putting the pieces together, I wondered why I hadn’t simply quilted the chapter titles from the start. I can quilt using chain stitch, so why had I simply embroidered them, thus necessitating a whole separate quilting exercise that might lead to distortion of the lettering? The answer of course lies in the fact that I had never really intended to stitch all this text at all – I just intended to sew Mirror and Light but I carried on for five months until the chapter titles from the whole trilogy were done, and my left thumb ached from gripping the thread.

The second issue is one of design. Some of the chapter titles are short – Early Mass, Angels, Wreckage, Salvage – and the text, as it is sewn on to the fabric, provides space for prominent quilting designs before or after the words in question. Other chapter titles, however, are almost as long as the fabric strips that make up the different elements of the piece – An Occult History of Britain, Alas, What Shall I Do for Love?, The Image of the King – so adding very prominent quilting would both confuse the eye and detract from the text.

The trick with these longer titles is to come up with a quilting design that fades into the background while still conveying meaning. For An Occult History of Britain, for example, I spent hours studying pictures of snakes so I could design a serpent to sit behind the lettering, in homage to the snake that slithers through the trilogy – I picked up a snake in Italy – after biting Cromwell. I enjoy the appearances that snake makes on the page, so I wanted to add him to the quilt.

Embroidered fabric reading Entirely Beloved Cromwell, with a copy of the play script — *Entirely Beloved Cromwell* – Lettering takes up the entire length of the fabric

And for The Dead Complain of their Burial I was stuck until I found a description of Cromwell and George Cavendish watching Cardinal Wolsey’s possessions being ransacked at York Place:

“He and George Cavendish stood by as the chests were opened and the cardinal’s vestments taken out. The copes were sewn in gold and silver thread, with patterns of golden stars, with birds, fishes, harts, lions, angels, flowers and Catherine wheels.”

Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall (London Fourth Estate, 2009), p.282.

That gave me my start. I designed fishes, stars, and a Catherine wheel; and for the bird designs I consulted a book of sixteenth and seventeenth century sewing patterns: Richard Shorleyker’s A Schole House for the Needle. That book tells its readers to ‘compose its patterns into beautifull formes, as will be able to give content, both to the workers, and wearers of them’. So I quilted these designs in the background in silver and gold thread – subtle enough not to detract from the chapter title while glistening in the light.

Embroidered and Quilted panel — Fishes and Star

Embroidered and quilted fabric — Fishes and Star

When I started quilting this project I had an uneasy moment when I thought “If I were starting again, I wouldn’t start from here”. But by that stage it was too late to restitch all those chapter titles. And I also reflected on the fact that the Cromwell Trilogy Quilt has its own history – it’s a project started in lockdown. Being able to read Hilary Mantel’s work during lockdown, and finding a way of engaging with it creatively, and stretching my quilting design skills is a privilege.

is there room for me to sew?

Quilting, Reading, and Keeping the Needles Sharp

quilting