Embroidery

Landscape Heritage

Some initial stitching to do with landscape. The heritage aspect of both British landscape and embroidery is uppermost in my mind. I am taking inspiration from some of my paintings which can be viewed at http://www.zarinakeyanistudio.wordpress.com.

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The Unfinished project is a project based at the MAC in Birmingham. Artists are asked to participate and ‘finish’ pieces of art that had been left for one reason or another. I was intrigued to find out what sort of art would be considered unfinished and I took along a couple of my own ‘unfinished’ pieces.

My eyes were drawn to this piece of embroidery probably because being an embroiderer myself I could see that a lot of work had already gone into it. There was a short statement written by the embroiderer, Janet, who had done the work, and in it she said that failing eyesight had forced her to give up something she really loved which was cross stitch embroidery.

This being Janet’s last piece of work, I wanted to enhance what she had already done and celebrate something of her. To this end I decided to turn the work into a sampler recording something of Janets life and history. To begin I looked at samplers from history.

Traditionally samplers were a way to learn and perfect embroidery techniques but also numbers and letters of the alphabet, usually done by children. Girls as young as eight created samplers which had borders, text, names and dates together with pictures of houses, people and animals. Helen Stevens has created and written about samplers and also has a site on pinterest where you can view some antique samplers.

I looked at the borders that were used. I chose a border from an heirloom sampler from the 18th century. This is featured in the book written by Yvonne Mathieson called ‘Simple Samplers’. It was embroidered by Caroline Morse in 1831.

I wanted to keep with the colours that had already been used in the cross stitch by Janet. I worked out where the border will sit on graph paper and then began to embroider. Cross stitch takes ages and it was something I had never really done a lot of as I generally like to use freehand embroidery.

Once the border was in place I could see what space I had and was able to plan what would go where. I asked Janet a few questions which she was happy to answer. I asked about her parents, where she lived, her kids, favourite things, hobbies, careers, favourite colour, flowers, memories. I wanted to incorporate as much as I could. I also asked her for a line from a favourite poem.

Janet had lived in a house in Tyseley when she was little. I googled the address to find out what it looked like. Nowadays its painted white but thats not an easy colour to use on a light background so I used grey and kept the roof colour the same. I again used graph paper for the design and then stitched using four threads. On the left hand side I added two leaves for the childrens names as Janet had two children and three hearts in blue for the grandchildren who were all boys. Janet’s grandparents were originally from Wales. They moved to BIrmingham when she was little together with her Welsh Nan who was her great grandmother. She lived with Janet until she died. Janet was only eight Janet remembers her well. The welsh mountains are represented at the back of the Tyseley house.

In the top area I wanted to put some text in. Traditionally the alphabet and then a moral or saying would be added but in this case I decided to dispense with the alphabet as there is limited space. A favourite poem of Janet’s was one that her grandfather used to say to her grandmother when they were married, called ‘One of Us Two’ by Ella Wheeler Wilcox. She let me have her favourite part of that poem which I have placed at the top of the sampler. So far most of the work had been all cross stitch and although some of the text is bolder and in cross stitch I used black stitch for half of the poem. This allowed me to use less space as well as creating interest in the two different sizes. I then used some freehand stitching for the names.

Janets Welsh Nan was blind through diabetes but still crocheted and tried to teach Janet how to skip. I have popped the skipping rope in the right hand corner of the sampler and her Welsh Nan’s initials on a book, as Janet used to read to her by making up stories from picture books. Her mom and gran bought her a little black scottish terrier for 11 guineas, she was thrilled. The puppy and Janets favourite flowers lilies and freesias are going to reside at the front of the house.