Wednesday, 30 April 2025

Wakehurst Place


For Mother’s Day this year I was treated to beautiful blue sky and sunshine (obviously organised by Toddler F), and a trip out to Wakehurst Place - part of Kew Botanical Gardens and also National Trust. It seems to be more Kew than NT these days as the shop doesn’t resemble a usual National Trust shop (no badges for my camp blanket) and, to be quite honest, the food from the restaurant was expensive and not all that nice. 


We used to come here fairly often as a family when I was a kid but rarely come here now so seeing the gardens again was a bit of a treat. Especially with the time of year matching up with their Magnolias being in bloom. That was always my favourite part. 





We actually had four mothers on the trip out, myself and my sister, our mum and Reece’s mum, plus the various men and boys in our lives. 

It’s nice just to get out somewhere where the kids can run and be free, dance under falling petals, watch giant fish in still ponds and slide down weather (and other bottoms) worn grooves in giant rocks. 






The house itself isn’t open, when it is open there isn’t anything in it really, it’s not furnished with items from the period or anything like that and I think it’s mostly used for functions or educational visits. 
It is a huge place, with wide and manicured lawns, ornamental ponds, rock gardens, woodland areas, a valley walk with amazing Rhododendron trees and a stream at the bottom leading to more ponds and lakes. It is quite a steep walk to follow if you do go into the valley toward the bottom lakes, we had a buggy with us which was an effort to push back up so that bit isn’t entirely accessible for things on wheels but we managed it so it was ok. 
Around the side of the house there’s also a garden full of grasses and those fiery red stemmed plants interspersed with Silver Birch trees for contrast, a walled garden, a vegetable plot and a mud kitchen which we hadn’t noticed before and the small boys absolutely loved. Clearly some people had come prepared for the mud kitchen and their children were dressed in waders and wellies. 



I can recommend the ice cream truck that was sitting outside next to the restaurant though. We had absolutely delicious salted caramel and triple chocolate ice cream cones which had big chunks of yummy goodness inside. 

There is also the seed bank which you can visit but the boys don’t find that particularly interesting so we didn’t go down that way. We were all a bit worn out after our trek into the abyss so trundled our way back to the car - passing the most enormous queue of people waiting to come in! Timed our visit well I think.




Toddler F fell asleep on the way home (which we had anticipated) so I even had some quiet time to myself, sat in the sunshine in the car - with coffee! - working on my pond life ATCs. I don’t think I could ask for a better Mother’s Day. 

North Kent Embroiderers Workshop


I was back in North Kent, Southfleet to be precise, at the end of March for a Stitchscape workshop. I had previously given a talk to this group in 2023 I think and they’d booked me fairly quickly after then to come back, but way in advance. How far away 2025 sounded then! 
I had kept in touch with the group between times as a couple of the ladies joined in with the Stitchscape Swap for a while and I had the occasional email or letter about what the group was up to. It is lovely to have that kind of correspondence with many of the different groups I’ve visited. Quite often links are made and relationships forged which hopefully are mutually beneficial as I will occasionally contact them back with events coming up that they might be interested in. 


It was a mixed theme workshop, a half and half of coastal scenes and countryside sheep with a volcano mixed in. One lady had brought in an inspirational card with a design by Jo Grundy that she was using to help her map out her landscape. (I had a Jo Grundy calendar one year and saved the gorgeous images as prints for a while on my wall.) 
Most of the other ladies were coming in completely blind with no real thoughts to what they were going to do - using the fabrics and perhaps my suggestions to start them off. 


I had created workshop packs for them, which contain five fabrics that I put together - all completely different - in the hopes that it would kick start an inspiration for them. As I’ve said before though, they don’t have to keep to those fabrics; they can swap them with a friend, take them out completely, rummage in my stash bag, use their own…. Whatever they'd like to do but it does seem to help at least eliminate what they don’t want to do. 


I definitely influenced the volcano hoop after talking with the lady about how one of the Arundel stitchers had used a similar fabric colouring and made a volcano and lava field by accident. She loved that idea and went for it with a brilliant golden exploding volcano in her hoop. 

Quite a lot of people had also brought some items from their own stashes which is always fun. Stitchscapes are such a brilliant way of using up those small odds and ends of things that you can’t bear to throw away but accumulate in places. Different lengths of yarn or half a packet of beads, the rest of a thread card from a kit. 





I love this piece with the sunset and lapping waves. The yarn for the breaking waves at the front is from my stash (Stylecraft Moonbeam yarn - sadly discontinued) but the variegated yarn waves further in was from their stash and I think it goes absolutely perfectly with the sun and thinking of a light reflection on the water. There’s so much movement been created there just by having the right coloured yarn, and stitching it down into rows. 



The piece above is laid out so that you can see the seabed looking up to the top of the water and the sky above. We'd discussed using the big pink flowers in the print as a base for pink corals, stitching textures over them to take away from the flower-look, perhaps adding in textured rocks for them to grow out of and using lots of trimmings to make other coral types and seaweeds so that it becomes a real haven for little fish and sea creatures to live in. She had just started to think about how to texture the flowers/corals on the right hand side there with tufty moss stitch in pink so this one will be really different when finished!

The stitchers have given themselves until the end of the year to finish their pieces so hopefully I will get some finished photos from them at some point as well. 

Thursday, 24 April 2025

Common Threads Exhibition


Well! I can officially say that I have curated a successful textile exhibition! How exciting is that? Another notch on my life skills tool belt.
I'm so pleased that it went well and was received so well by the visitors who came. Some of them drove for over an hour to get to the exhibition and there were many friends and acquaintances from groups that I've taught workshops at or given talks to so I was over the moon that they thought our little self organised space was interesting enough to come and visit.

The weekend seemed to take ages to actually arrive. Isobel Moore and I were talking about it over a year ago and making vague plans in a coffee shop over cake. Then, towards the end of last year things got a bit more serious and picked up again. The other artists were chosen and invited at the beginning of this year and suddenly it was all hands on deck to get the information out, decide where each person was going to display, find out what they needed, advertise, arrange workshops, invite visitors and spread the word. 

I must give a huge amount of credit (and thanks) to Helen, the arts director for the Arts for Wellbeing programme at Victoria Pavilion Arts (part of the Sussex Support Service) who had rented us the space. She did an enormous amount of work for us, organising the marketing, doing social media posts on their Facebook/Instagram pages and tagging us in all of the posts. She sent out newsletters, initial emails to invite the artists (as they are well known for artistic events so we thought it would be taken more seriously if she approached them first), got flyers printer for us and gave us lots of advice in the various meetings we had with her. 
They hold all kinds of creative workshops and events through Victoria Pavilion Arts so they are well worth a follow in case a workshop comes up that tickles your fancy. 


We had nine textile artists display their work, including myself and Izzy. Dawn Johnson, Jennifer Grant, Katharine Rabson Stark, Melissa Kosar, Marilyn Willis and Ana Kirby. (Links on each name for you to look them up.)
All of us are completely different! Different approaches, styles, methods of working - but all using textiles and threads and colour, which is how the exhibition name, cleverly come up with by Izzy, was born. There was a Common Thread between us all. 


I took more videos than photos it seems - you can find the reels about the exhibition on my Instagram or Facebook - so these are the only few photos I have. The above is Dawn's work, she makes the most amazing art rugs which can either be hung on the wall or actually used as a rug. She also dabbles with fabric collage and stitched pictures among other things. 

Below is Izzy's work, lots of beautiful recycled textiles and papers machine stitched with trimmings and other found bits. By the sounds of things she's a bit of a magpie, and an even worse fabric hoarder than myself! 

Both of them sold some original pieces which was amazing!



Above is some of Jennifer's work, although she had much bigger pieces hanging on the wall which had brilliant textures in - they were kind of layered, machine stitched and then cut into and destroyed to make a different texture which was really interesting. 

Oo, here's some of mine. We all had about three metres of wall space (I'd taken the floor plan and worked out where everyone would fit) so I had a bigger wall to the left of this table, and then a few little spots on here. The building is actually the top half of a cricket pavilion so there are lots of quirky eaves and funny shaped walls to fit in with. For gallery purposes they have installed picture rails in every available space, but other than that you can't have things on the walls, or use blu-tac, so it is slightly limiting where you can have things. We made it work though. 



The only part about the weekend event that didn't work was the meet-the-artist evening on the Saturday. We had bought snacks (which I had beautifully presented onto charcuterie boards, with fresh rosemary from Izzy's garden) and purchased wine for the evening but actually I think about three non-artist or VPA staff people turned up. Perhaps if we had done this on the Friday as a sneak preview it would have worked better but, if there's a next time, I wouldn't necessarily bother with this element, nice as it was to eat cheese and salami and olives and sip white wine whilst watching the sunset out of the window. 



Aside from that, both days were really well attended. I think we had around 250 people through the door and there seemed to be a constant hum and buzz of people. I had some brilliant conversations or catch-ups with those walking round and it was so nice to see all of the hugging and smiling taking place! Lots of connections were made or re-established and there were no awkward moments or absolute silences. Art was being purchased, business cards taken, newsletters subscribed to and workshops signed up for as well! Even The Mother signed up to one of Melissa's slow stitching workshops further into the year. 



The hubbub was definitely helped by having workshops running through the weekend. These were over subscribed - we had initially said a maximum of eight per workshop but I think I ended up with twelve on mine and all of the others had extra people snuck onto corners of tables. It was part of the success I think because some people who lived further away, who may not have come just to look at some textiles, definitely came because they had signed up for a workshop, paid their £10 to cover material costs and stayed for a whole morning/afternoon. A couple of people had signed up to all four workshops because it was such good value and thoroughly enjoyed the different processes. 

On Saturday we had Melissa teaching a stitch journaling workshop in the morning, and Marilyn a sashiko one in the afternoon. Then on Sunday Izzy was teaching an intuitive stitch workshop in the morning and I had a Stitchscape one in the afternoon. 



When I wasn't teaching a workshop I was helping to steward, although I wasn't there the whole time, we all kind of dipped in and out. I did stay all day on Sunday though as I forgot to leave over lunch. Luckily the VPA have a pop up cafe on these events so I could purchase some cake for lunch (needs must) and there was a steady stream of coffees during the day. 
I had also taken a big shell hoop to stitch in case there were any quieter moments, or to act as a conversation starter. It was the one I'd been working on during Artwave last year at The Stitching Post (still not anywhere near finished) and it was a really good way to show people what the Stitchscapes look like before they're polished and framed. 


For my afternoon workshop I had put together simple little packs with 10cm hoops in - we only had an hour and a half per workshop (although they were all overrunning because people didn't want to leave) so it was quite quick. Some absolutely gorgeous results coming out though! 



I am still buzzing from the whole event I think. It would be brilliant to do it again and I do have a few ideas on how to perhaps improve it, or to make it a bigger event, involve others...but I'm trying to reign myself in. It wouldn't be until about 2027 anyway I think to give people time to build up new work. We had such lovely comments in the visitors book, thank you to everyone who took the time to write a little something - they've all be shared with the artists and VPA. 

Kasumi Koi Stitchscape

 

My Kasumi Koi kit design is finished! Although the actual kit itself is only half written so you'll have to bear with me whilst I finish that part. The photos don't quite do the colours justice, I am very much missing my big camera whilst it's out of action thanks to a vindictive cat-shove off the desk, my phone just doesn't give the same quality or colour. And it also doesn't do close up images very well at all. 

This is another BIG kit, made up in a 20cm hoop, purely because of the scale of the koi fish pattern. I experimented with using a 15cm hoop but you would potentially only get one or two of the fish in at that size -  thinking about the different strips of pattern everyone will get. With a 20cm hoop, and a much bigger strip, you are more likely to get three or four fish which seems a better number. 

It's quite a relaxed hoop, I feel like it's quite tranquil - there aren't lots of textural bits and bobs really, no large trimmings, just gentle, soothing colours. 


That isn't to say that it's not exciting, with lots of different techniques and types of thread. I've experimented with different kinds of thread in this one so it uses the usual Anchor stranded, as well as DMC Eco Vita thread (slightly more woolly and raw looking), DMC metallic stranded thread, DMC variegated stranded thread, and also used two different metallic crochet yarns as trimmed edges to help add to the sparkly, wateriness, so the thread cards should look pretty exciting!



This kit also features (for the first time in a kit), the workshop favourite - drizzle stitch! How I am going to write up the instructions for that one I have no idea. Once I've figured out my diagram, I think I'll write up a full photo tutorial for it to go with my other tutorials on my website (here if you're interested) so that there is a back up with further, step by step guidance. 
These drizzle stitches will be placed in different positions at the bottom of the hoop, depending on where the gaps in your fish and lily pads are - and you can do as many, or as little, as you like (thread dependent obviously). 


There are a few little plays with colour in other layers; the top layer is seed stitch but in groups of two different colours to add some interest, the second layer down follows lines in the print exactly, but with two colours so it brings out a diamond shape which is nice in that one. 


The third layer follows the print, and you don't fill in all of this with stitches. There are bigger white and blue flowers which you add detached chain stitches too, then smaller ones which you fill in with satin stitch (four colours in total- white and three shades of blue to match the print). Metallic thread in gold makes tiny french knot centres in the flowers, and leaves are picked up with a single strand down the centre of each. 

The fourth layer uses the variegated thread which goes from blue to green in very similar shades found in the fabrics so it works really nicely to add a bit of interest here. It's used to make rows of running stitch across the layer, then perpendicular whip stitch over the running stitches. I ummed and aahed over this layer, trying to decide if I liked it or not, and I'm fairly sure I do - it's grown on me. Perhaps if I were to do it again I wouldn't make the french knot border so uniform, but scatter knots down and make the line a little less straight. 



The fifth layer uses simple straight stitches to follow lines in the pattern and give a kind of waterfall feel so I've added french knots in here too for froth and bubbles. There are kind of little flashes and dots within the print so they are mostly following those - with some artistic license to fill in any areas that are slightly gappy. 
One of the metallic crochet yarns has been twisted in with light blue stranded cotton threads to edge this layer and the second, slightly darker crochet yarn has been twisted with other colours for the edging of the bottom layer to bring an element of shading. 

The waterfall effect fades into the pond, where all of the fun and focus is. Some of the lily pads are already printed with metallic gold so I've gone over those lines with stranded metallic thread, and worked a stem stitched around any that also have a metallic border line to. The darker lily pads have a slightly darker area within the print which is what I have followed with my stitches. They lent themselves to a mix of fly stitches and straight stitches but are fairly clear so you should be fine to stitch those. 
More metallic thread has been used on larger dots within the print, covered in a french knot, and in the centre of little leafy shapes. 


The water lillies themselves are detached chain stitches following the outlines of the petals. The fish have their spots filled in with satin stitch, and then they've been outlined with whipped back stitch using a single strand, just to bring out the shaping and details, and french knot eyes (one strand, one twist). I've left the gold on those because it would have been too complicated - similarly with the dragonflies in the print, but there's nothing stopping those making up the kit themselves to go for it and cover everything with stitch!

So, the full stitch run down for this piece is; whipped back stitch, seed stitch, french knots, stem stitch, detached chain stitch, satin stitch, running stitch, perpendicular whip stitch, straight stitch, couching, fly stitch and drizzle stitch.