June 2016 – Pomegranate Studio

Brunel Broderers’ Exhibition at Newark Park

On my recent visit to Newark Park I was lucky enough to see the Brunel Broderer’s exhibition, which was of work made in response to the house and gardens. I really hate singling people out in exhibitions, because often it is just a matter of taste as to whose work you prefer, but there was some glorious embroidery on display. I particularly liked seeing the sketchbooks accompanying the work, and I liked the way that it was spread throughout the house and not just in the gallery. For example, my good friend Liz Hewitt had this rather lovely piece in a little ground-floor reception room:

This is a little taster of the rest of the show:

The combination of this very high quality contemporary needlework, and the older pieces I mentioned in an early blogpost make this a really good day out for sewers of all sorts.

30th June 2016/0 Comments/by Ann Rippin

Applique, inspiration

My last post was about Newark Park and the Laura Ashley bedroom. While I was there I also found time to admire some of the wonderful needlework around the house. There is a good range of embroidery, although nothing very modern. This is just a picture show, as I do not know enough to make sensible comments:

I begin with a selection of cushions. The one at the top is an outstanding example of shabby chic.

Chairs and benches also got a look in. I liked this florentine needlepoint armchair, again on bare boards and doing its bit for shabby chic country house charm.

This is a nice, and I think, quite modern needlpoint rug. Rather brave to have a cream background here:

I felt a pang of recognition about the star quilt hanging in the stairs. It was mounted on a cotton bedspread. Doing all that work over papers clearly was enough and the idea of quilting it was just too much.

There were some very old fragments of embroidery but these had to be kept in very dim light. These photos were taken with a phone camera and so are not brilliant, but I wanted to include some of the older work.

I might well do something with these images. I love the way the stitches are used to create volume.

Apart from the pieces of needlework themselves, there was a lot of inspiration in the gardens:

Because the day was rainy and overcast the white flowers in particular really glowed.

29th June 2016/0 Comments/by Ann Rippin

Great quilting heroines/heroes, Laura Ashley, Patchwork

A period Laura Ashley bedroom open for visits

The Medieval Historian and I brushed the gathering dust off our National Trust cards and went to Newark Park to see a bedroom specially decorated to feature in the Laura Ashley home catalogue:

I was told about this at a quilting group I recently visited. The room was featured in the catalogue, and the entry had been photographed and laminated, but sadly no date was included:

The whole room felt like a trip down the memory lane of Laura Ashley at her height:

I am not sure if this is original but it looks like some of her high victoriana fabrics:

This was a rather nice little terrarium-type decoration:

And this was the landing with a rather nice mirror just outside the room:

I don’t have anything very profound to say about the visit to the period bedroom, except that it felt very familiar and it was interesting to see the whole soup to nuts decor. I knew that the family used their own homes as room sets for the catalogues but not that they used other people’s.

27th June 2016/0 Comments/by Ann Rippin

Uncategorised

Textile at at Southmead Hospital Bristol

I went up to Southmead Hospital in Bristol the other week for a bit more prodding and poking, and in the brand spanking new building they have decided to include a small gallery. My eye was initially drawn by this painting, which I thought, as I dashed by it to get to my appointment on time, was of quilts on a line, but which is actually pretty patterned aprons. All a bit modern vintage and sentimental, but I rather liked it. On the way out I had a bit more leisure, and noticed these rather nice pieces of textile art:

I just wondered which genius had been in charge of hanging, as the three pieces (and I apologise about the terrible phone camera picture) form a continuous wave, decided that it would be brilliant to arrange them thus:

I also wonder a little bit about who framed them as the combination of the white element at the top and the lack of space at the bottom of the frame really does make them look as if they all falling off their mountings.

That aside, they were a lovely surprise.

25th June 2016/0 Comments/by Ann Rippin

Laura Ashley, Paper piecing, Patchwork, Quilting, work in progress

Still more applique

This piece is backed onto some curtain interlining and then washed in hot water to give it a vintage feel. This particular interlining seems to turn into tungsten steel when you give it this treatment so I thought I would stick to something fairly simple for this piece, a spray of leaves. Once more it is based on a lovely piece by Mandy Pattullo:

Her’s has a lot of dynamism because of the swirl of the quilt piece behind it. Mine is much more stable and sedate:

I wanted to use these lovely purple-y Laura Ashley pieces which were given to me by Gill Bonham, one of the Bristol Quilters. They were mainly quite fine lawn pieces and very easy to applique. I decided to embroider them in pink because of the lovely foliage on some flowers I was recently sent:

I love that pink edge on the shiny strappy leaves. I was wondering what to do lift the piece and I decided to add some buttons:

I am not normally a big fan of buttons, and I do actually know someone who genuinely has a phobia of them, but on this occasion I thought they matched the naive quality of the piece. Furthermore, these all came from my mother-in-law’s button box which I inherited when she died. Most of them are fairly vintage, which fits in with the general theme of the series.

This little piece has some really old Laura Ashley prints. The background has some of what looks like Indian woodblock print and this is some of the first designs the company produced for clothing. The navy and white prints in the above piece are also quite old ones.

It was a delight to do, and I think my hand applique has really improved over the course of this project.

23rd June 2016/0 Comments/by Ann Rippin

Laura Ashley, Making, Paper piecing, The stash, work in progress

More applique

This is the latest of my Mandy Pattullo/Laura Ashley pieces. The background is pieced paper (English method) hexagon patchwork with an overlay of Laura Ashley fabric applique. I had thought that I would do a fairly minimalist piece with just the dark flowers at the top like Mandy Pattullo sometimes does:

but I thought mine looked a bit bare:

I wanted to use these big plastic rose buttons that came as a free gift with a magazine as the centres of some somerset puff roses, and I think that worked quite well. I wish I had taken a photo before I put the roses on, because the hexagon looked like a cartoon cactus sticking out of the pot. Anyway, I decided this needed more, and for some reason, I suddenly thought of the Baltimore originals I had in mind when making the pieces: the rick rack braid rose.

I don’t particularly like rick rack braid apart from the really tiny stuff which looks lovely on borders if you have the patience to stitch it on, so this was something that I didn’t have in my stash. I went to Flo-Jo in Bristol which is a great shop selling fabric and haberdashery and running workshops and dressmaking classes. It is run by really lovely enthusiastic people and stocks particularly gorgeous ranges of unusual fabric. Of course, they had a range of rick rack and I bought some red, pink and orange. Old Baltimore quilts seem to me to delight in virtuoso effects and experimenting with the latest thing, and they often have 3D elements like these roses. They are really simple to make. You take two pieces of rick rack, twist them together like plaiting and then roll them up. The final stage is to pull back the outer rounds to make unfolding petals. There are lots and lots of demonstrations of this on You Tube in particular, and they are mostly stuck together (opinion varies on the merits of a hot glue gun), but I stitched mine for authenticity (although I expect the ladies of Baltimore would have used a glue gun if they had had one available). As an aside, there was a wonderful video of a woman making daisies rather than roses out of rick rack which she then fills with pearls and sticks on lace and which are really not to my taste. At the end of one of the videos she makes leaves out of synthetic ribbon. ‘You need to burnish [i.e. singe] the ends together,’ she trills gaily and proceeds to take what looks like one of those things used to light gas rings on cookers and to waft it in front of her ribbon, slightly singeing her fingers. ‘It doesn’t hurt,’ she says, ‘well not really.’ I am not sure that I really want to scorch my finger ends for ribbon leaves but it doesn’t seem to do her a lot of harm. Pyrotechnics aside, there are some very clear tutorials available, and, of course, fans of Baltimores will know that Elly Sienkiewicz’s books contain explicit and well-illustrated instructions, particularly her book on dimensional applique.

I am not sure if you can tell from the photograph at the top but I made a big central rose of red and pink twisted together, and four large red roses and four small pink ones. They are really good fun and quick to make, and the best bit is at the end when you pull back the outer rounds and the rose almost leaps forward. The You Tube demonstrators tend to stick them on rings or brooches or hair slides. I would just recommend going easy on the lace.

I finished off with some big mint green leaves with the veins done this time in fly stitch. In the end, I rather liked the naive charm of the piece, and I think it is an interesting example of something I have written about before: your relationship with your work. You might think that you have finished, but your work will whisper, or shout very loudly as it did here, that it is not finished. And you have to finish it because otherwise it will go on shouting until you do.

20th June 2016/0 Comments/by Ann Rippin

Making, Quilting heroines, work in progress

More embroidery

My last post was about the fox piece that I started at the Mandy Pattullo workshop I attended. I really like Mandy’s work and I wanted to do a bit more with some of the ideas that we discussed at the workshop, so here are a couple more pieces. They are worked on top of a variation of a hexagon rosette all done in Laura Ashley fabric and then applied to a base. These were then washed at 90 degrees and tumble-dried. This gives a nice antique-y feel to them, but it also makes what is already pretty dense fabric almost impossible to stitch into. I live and learn. I thought just embroidering through the top layer would be okay but the furnishing (decorator) weight, if anything, got denser rather than softer. Still, the end results were pretty and confirm me in my view that more is more with regard to decorative pieces. A few tasteful marks would have been useless.

First is this piece which has a vague look of seventeenth-century crewel work to me:

Compare it to one of Mandy Pattullo’s pieces and you can see the influence:

The second is rather more folk-arty, I think:

It reminds me a bit of Pennsylvania Dutch art which I have always loved since my mother’s penfriend sent me a tiny PD pendant when I was a very little girl:

This one is applied to an IKEA linen tea towel cut in half. This would be lovely to stitch into were it not for the upholstery weight rosette behind it. I am particularly proud of this piece for an odd reason: I managed to find my set of yo-yo or suffolk puff makers which I bought years ago before I realised what a fruitless task making suffolk puffs is. But on this they really work and the gadget makes them quick and easy to make. I had three go-s at the plant pot before this finally worked.

I am really enjoying making them, and the medical profession is very keen on my doing embroidery at the moment, and so everyone, temporarily at least, is happy.

15th June 2016/0 Comments/by Ann Rippin

Applique, Great quilting heroines/heroes, Laura Ashley, Workshops

Laura the fox takes a moonlight stroll in her new lacy black stockings

Last week I went to Bristol Quilters’ workshop with Mandy Pattullo. I had a great day. Mandy Pattullo is an artist whose work I have admired since I saw it at the Festival of Quilts a couple of years ago. Her work is with old and often recycled textiles and embroidery. She was very generous in allowing us to photograph her work and so here are a few photos to show the sort of work she does:

She gave us each a piece of a plain old quilt and some templates for flowers and hearts and things, as well as a couple of pieces of very worn old quilts which we used to start the background. I decided early on that I wanted to make a fox as we are having fun and games with our dogs getting us up at 4.00 am most mornings to root out whatever is in the garden and which I think might be a little vulpine friend.

I was sitting between two great quilters, Alison and Nathalie, and they gave me the fabric for the fox’s body and legs. I was really pleased to be able to use Nathalie’s Laura Ashley fabric for the fox’s body as this fits in with the project that I have been doing for ages. Alison gave me the fabric for the legs – which I would make much finer if I did it again. Foxes have black legs, surprisingly, and this was the best we could do, but they do look like lacy tights, which I rather like.

The method is to block in some thing like the fox body or a vase and then to take a water soluble pen and draw a line and then improvise round it. I drew my line which I turned into a tree. It’s done with chain stitch in stranded embroidery cotton. The whole piece came together at the end when I put those black flowers clipped out of a quilting cotton and then stitched down with detached chain stitch and colonial knots, the latter done in orange to try and tie everything together.

The fox was done in needle-turned applique which I enjoyed doing far more than I expected. Then I put a mix of slivers of leopard print cotton and straight stitches in a variety of threads, some of which were given to me by my good friend Mary from her mum’s stash:

I embroidered the eye and nose. I finished the piece with a backing of terracotta Laura Ashley fabric to echo the fox.

This is the page from my notebook/sketchbook about the piece:

I really enjoyed the workshop and meeting Mandy, who was great. I want to do a bit more in this sort of style but without the old quilt as I don’t have one to cut up.

6th June 2016/0 Comments/by Ann Rippin

Applique, Making

Little piece of improvisation

Just a quick post. This is a little panel – 12″x12″ which was an improvisation as part of my on-line art class. The starting point was to have a person, an animal and a plant. You had to change something towards the end which is why I put the little door on the tree trunk. I think it was a mistake and makes it too twee. Also find the figure rather derivative of the popular sketchy girl style. But it was fun and quick to do and I enjoyed making it. The dogs, I suppose, are examples of broderie perse where you apply something that you have cut out of one fabric onto another – usually to make the patterned feature fabric go further.