embroidered cloths

[placing and treading on my embroidered cloths]

I’ve been cutting up hand-embroidered tablecloths and tray-cloths. Better to stop reading now, if this is too much for you.

There was a little outcry a few years ago when I first made a crinoline lady quilt from old, hand-embroidered tablecloths, but my position remains firm. I am fine with taking a rotary cutter to an often stained, old, worn, no longer used piece of linen I have bought in order to liberate the best bits, then put them together in a big celebration of often skilled embroidery done with clear enjoyment and individual taste and wildly different interpretations of iron-on transfers.

Interestingly, Carl and Karin Larsson have been criticised for altering and painting old furniture in beautiful shades of blue and red. “From an antiquarian point of view, such a course of action is to be condemned, but CL’s artistry makes him an exception to the rule'“, says someone who blindly/unquestioningly accepts the ‘rule’ (ie the rule-bound authors of the V&A 1997 exhibition catalogue). Needless to say, I disagree.

I acquired a large number of hand-embroidered table linens - mostly tablecloths - a few years ago. They were cheap and plentiful at that time, so I was able to be quite picky about my purchases. I made two quilts with some, and the rest went into boxes. They came with us to Cambridge, and often made me feel guilty because we have very little storage space/I knew they were lovely and should be used. But it wasn’t until Open Studios last month when I put out the tablecloth quilts that I looked at them again with fresh eyes, showed them to people who visited, and began to think it was high time the remaining hidden treasures saw the light of day again.

It must be said that several of the pieces in my collection are so nice and of such good quality (according to my criteria) that I could not possibly cut them up, and they remain whole - but still in a box, because we don’t live a tablecloth lifestyle. (One of the features of the way we live has been a letting-go of a lot of the things our mothers thought were non-negotiable.) Cutting up second-tier tablecloths, however, comes easily to me, even though it undoubtedly still feels a tiny bit rebellious at the moment I attack a new piece with my rotary cutter.

I decided to use a single size of square (8” x 8”, finished size) rather than cut round every motif and end up with a mish-mash. This means that some stitching invariably gets cut off while other squares have space around the stitching. This time, I added a border made up of smaller 4” x 4” squares with little areas of embroidery so as not to waste them.

It has been so lovely to pick up quilting again after a long break. I stopped mainly because we had enough quilts, had written two books on the subject, and wanted to do something different (bookbinding, lino printing, smocking, rag-rugging all followed). But I’ve really enjoyed handling the fabrics, looking closely at them as I iron, cut, and machine-piece them. I’ve decided that this is the kind of quilt I’d want if I were convalescing or just feeling poorly. It’s the work of so many hands involving so many stitches, threaded needles, embroidery threads, designs, details, skills, techniques that it would keep me entertained for hours.

[finished top]

I’ve just made the top this week, but I can’t believe how nice it is to be looking at commercial quilting fabrics again, now that I need to choose something for the back. I’ve been away from quilting for a while, but I should have known that Kaffe Fassett is indefatigable and, together with Philip Jacobs has put out even more brilliantly exuberant florals while I was busy folding paper, cutting greyboard, and making a mess with ink and rollers. I feel the Beatles wrote Wait for this very moment (“It's been a long time/Now I'm coming back home”).

It’s not just the Beatles that have floated through my head while sewing. This top has made me think of the WB Yeats poem which we thought we were so clever to have discovered when we were about sixteen. Then you see it on a Poems on the Underground poster on the Tube and think perhaps it was not such a unique find, after all. I still love it, though. It reminds me of the way poets takes words we know and rearrange them in a different order, like the pieces of fabric in quilts.

And so from treading on my dreams I moved to the field of my dreams. Bury Lane Farm near Cambridge is doing pyo dahlias for the first time this summer.

What a fabulous sight: thousands of mad dahlias, a wonderful mix of varieties obviously chosen by someone who has no floral inhibitions and great taste when it comes to extravagant, dramatic, theatrical shapes, petals, markings, and colour combinations.

I’ll be back there soon putting together another psychedelic bunch.

Lastly, an admission on my part. I have this week for the first time discovered the ‘pledges’ page in my Substack account and found that a number of readers have not only pledged to subscribe should I move to a paid subscription model, but have also left extremely positive, supportive messages saying why they would do this. (I’m assuming Substack prompts this and I’m grateful to anyone who takes the time to write something.) So thank you, thank you, to everyone who has left a note.

I’ve now published forty-five of these free Sunday newsletters, so of course I’m wondering about the possible future direction. Any thoughts on the subject are welcome - they don’t have be public here, email to janebrocket@aol.com is fine.

Thanks and Happy Sunday!