sew long

[Kaffe Fassett for Burton Agnes Hall]

I am hopelessly fascinated by needlepoint. Mostly when stitched by other people.

This week I wrote about needlepoint on the Persephone Post and it made me think about how much time can be spent on pastimes such as needlepoint, tapestry, embroidery, and quilting (to name just a few). A long, long time; in fact it’s mind-boggling to think how many trillions of hours women in particular have devoted to decorative domestic stitching.

[Catherine Dickens (1847) by Daniel Maclise, stitching a Berlin woolwork overmantel, thimble on her finger]

I have very mixed feelings about devoting inordinate amounts of time to something which may end up in a drawer, unwanted, unused, unloved. I have never forgotten an article that Germaine Greer wrote in 2007 about textile crafts being an ‘exercise in futility’, a ‘kind of heroic pointlessness’, and that ‘for centuries, women have been kept busy wasting their time’. It was deliberately controversial - when is she not? - and had to power to wound many women. But many people overlooked the other part of the article which explains that the textile artist in question made her pictures out of fabric because she liked doing it and that quilts can be ‘dignified, dense and often very beautiful objects’. Nevertheless, Greer says, they are not art. Rereading the article now, I find her arguments contradictory but, as ever, she lit the blue touch paper and bang, she was back in the headlines.

[‘At the Bazaar’ or ‘For Sale’ (1857) by James Collinson, the version in Sheffield]

I wrote about paintings like this for my MA in Victorian Art and Culture (done when the children were little, totally brilliant) and I was able to look closely at representations of C19 women’s pastimes. A long time before that, I’d discovered it in the Weston Park Gallery which was then near where I lived in Sheffield for a year, and I used to study the collection of ‘fancy work’ and the doll-like woman with horror and fascination. It’s full of the sort of stuff that was made for charity fund-raising bazaars, hosted by affluent women, and for me it’s an indication of the way in which Victorian well-to-do women’s time and lives were wasted, unless of course they loved stitching needlepoint slippers for men. (And, in the end, it’s the woman who is really for sale.)

Germaine Greer’s provocative words aside, I still wonder about the choices that are made with time and stitching. I once had two mornings of tuition at the Royal School of Needlework and came away with half a tiny pansy in a small embroidery hoop. I learned a lot; not so much about the techniques and stitches involved, but more about how I choose to spend my time. It would have taken several years to make a little flower garden (had I been any good at such delicate embroidery), and then what? What would I have done with it?

Instead, I have always been more of a practical stitcher, wanting to see the end from the start, liking big stitches, easy patterns, fast results on canvas with a few holes per inch as possible. My stitching book encapsulated this approach, and I guess nothing has changed.

[my needlepoint quilt]

Unsurprisingly, the current popularity for ‘slow stitching’ has passed me by (not least because of the label). What Richard McVetis does and his meditations on time and the time it takes to produce his pieces with thousands of tiny stitches are at the extreme end of this slow spectrum. His thoughts are profound and well-articulated (great podcast here), but he does this conceptual stuff for a living. I, on the other hand, am too prosaic, conventional, and unimaginative to be able to ascribe meaning to my stitching just because it took ages. (Richard offers very good stitching workshops - highly recommended - and you don’t need a microscope to do them.)

It’s funny that I baulk at all this time spent on stitching when I managed to devote 361 days to reading Proust in 2020, an undertaking which was the ultimate in slowness, and something I definitely do not see as lost time. But the big difference is that this changed me from the inside, and I now carry something of Proust and A la recherche du temps perdu within me. By contrast, an exquisite piece of work eg embroidery or needlepoint or tapestry is always separate, having taken away something of me, but it can be very quickly forgotten, unseen, hidden, or it can wear out, fade, be lost or thrown away,

[Elian McCready’s pansy panel]

But coming back to needlepoint and my week of thinking about it. My first attempt was when I was newly pregnant with Tom and Alice and decided that a huge, beautiful Elian McCready pansy panel would be a perfect pregnancy project. Ha. I was very ill, couldn’t sit upright for long, and only ever completed one small corner. Then for years it sat in the bottom of a drawer, reminding me of my failure whenever I caught sight of it. Once or twice I got it out and tried to start again, but twins and another baby in short succession were never going to work with this ‘masterclass in colour shading’ ie spending ages on failing to decide which of the many close shades of pink or purple matched the one printed on the canvas, and trying not to notice that one square inch of completed canvas was probably equivalent to knitting a baby jumper/reading a good book/growing a few tomato plants.

[Yellow Gloxinia needlepoint by Kaffe Fassett, obvs not mine as mine is one-third finished and in a bag somewhere in a wardrobe]

Eventually I stitched a manageably large-scale Kaffe Fassett parrot tulip cushion cover which I loved but which fell apart in the end, and had a go at coming up with my own ultra-simple needlepoint designs (very enjoyable). More recently, I overestimated - you’d have thought I’d have learned by now - my capacity to enjoy very slow, small-stitch progress with a gloxinia needlepoint kit which looks simple enough, but which taxed my patience and just made me think of all the other things I could be doing.

[Ulla-Stina Wikander]

So now I collect unfinished, unwanted needlepoint pieces to make into quilts. I’m happy to be recycling and reusing the results of someone else’s hours, days and weeks of stitching to make something new and visible. The fact that there are so many unfinished/unused needlepoint pieces tells you something; I do think they were often repetitive time-fillers rather than a form of self-expression, which is a huge shame as the quality of stitching can be excellent. And this is exactly why they make such good materials for other people’s creativity, and artists/makers whose work with unwanted needlepoints I adore.

What Ulla-Stina Wikander (above) does must also be time-consuming - but not as much as it was for the people who worked the pieces. Her work is highly original, arguably more original than the stitchers who were following charts and grids and kits based on paintings by Grand Masters. She uses needlepoint work to covers domestic objects such as sewing machines, mixers, irons, rolling pins, hairdryers, spatulas, coffee machines, vacuum cleaners. She say, “These embroideries have mostly been made by women and are seen as kitsch and pretty worthless,” and that “by combining the old items and embroideries [sic], both are given a new lease of life.”

[‘Oh no, honey, I’m an angel, I swear’ (2015) by Sylvie Franquet]

Sylvie Franquet’s work is also amazing. She points out that women have spent countless hours working on needlepoint copies of famous paintings by men. She repairs, unpicks, alters, reworks and overlays them with words and quotes. She says, “I love the conceptual and subversive to something seen as a demure, domestic female expression”. (Good interview here.)

[‘Rapture Means Being Taken Into The Clouds’ (2014), Sylvie Franquet]

Here she is subverting Fragonard. It’s ironic that many Victorian husbands and parents thought that reading was not just a waste of time for privileged young girls and women, but that contemporary novels were actually full of dangerous ideas. Instead they were expected to stay at home doing decorative things while also looking decorative.

The world is a better place when we have choices and, in the end, does it matter if one’s choice is to enjoy an exercise in futility? If we are fortunate to have that choice, does that negate the futility? Maybe Kurt Vonnegut is right when he said in an essay in A Man Without A Country, “we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different.”

Happy Sunday!