It’s not like I haven’t been busy!
I made two of these – one in green and one in blue. Both commissions.
A joy to piece. Impossible to quilt, so I tied it instead.
Clara once gave me some squares. I’ve finally done something with them.
Nearly finished. Two commissioned cushions.
I’m making a pile of these jack-in-the-box blocks for an easy-going, old-fashioned quilt.
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It began as a pig-headed refusal to get rid of even the smallest scraps of fabric. Now my postage stamp cushions grace the settees of the crowned heads of Europe.
They grace the settees of a couple of friends’ houses actually. I’ve sold quite a few, made some as gifts and recently been commissioned to knock out a couple more. The one above is the smallest-scale yet, those squares being less than 2cm. Making these babies is a happy pastime, from the rootling out of the tiny scraps to pairing strips of all lengths. It’s very absorbing, watching the mosaic emerge, tiny broken images peering from the overall picture. There’s no reason why this couldn’t be adapted to a larger project, a quilt made entirely out of 2cm squares. Oh no, I’ve got to do it now.
This one (just completed) is bigger and therefore less effective:
The trouble with making things out of the tiniest scraps is that you’re working with a pretty stagnant gene pool, barely troubling the scraps basket for more than a fat quarter of fabric, if that. There are pieces in these cushions that date back to the very inception of that scraps basket and it still seems untouched. Sometimes, a bit liked a bored Roman emperor at a gladiatorial contest, you yearn for a bit of new blood.
I went and got some new blood. That’s new fabric, to you. I never buy new fabric these days. I get it all second-hand or cut it out of shirts and sheets and that kind of thing. New fabric hasn’t interested me for I can’t remember how long. But how can you fight love? I fell in love with the pattern you see below:
I went back and bought two more metres (unheard of!) and will use it to help back the string quilt. Normally I would use up large pieces already in my collection. But you just shouldn’t fight this kind of longing. You should always give in to it.
My conscience is still clean, however, when it comes to these winsome bunny girls:
They were cut from the felted remnants of R’s lambswool jumper, recently feasted on by an extended family of moths, and some old tweed remnants. I ask myself as I “design” and make these toys where I get an appetite for such “work” (I can’t help it – I’d put the whole blog into speech marks if I could). Then I remember that my grandmother had made the most exquisite and characterful toys for her only child, my father. I shall find some, photograph them and put them up here, but in the meantime I must use words. She made a little cat out of black felt, ready to spring, its tail in the air, a camel, a smiling white elephant, little pieces of dolls furniture, clothes, but most memorably the entire fraternity of the seven dwarfs and snow white herself, in a gorgeous flimsy gown of white georgette. As a child I was allowed now and again to remove them from the glass cabinet and inspect Snow White’s long silk knickers, run a finger round the rim of Doc’s spectacles and feel the animal fur of his fellow dwarf’s beards. The witch/queen looked not unlike my grandmother herself by the time I knew her. Dammit I’m going to go and photograph them now. Hang on…
I’m guessing they will be around sixty years old, if not more. They live in a plastic bag with mothballs in my cupboard. Maybe it’s time they were released and displayed again for my own chidren to marvel at.
Having said that my own children can find their own grim entertainment. Last night, I was picking stories from their bookshelf when I turned to find a stranger in the little one’s bed. I near leapt out of my skin. Here is the hulking brute:
From the other side of the room he was an eerie sight. I might have to make a chirpy little fabric version to put there instead!
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Clara and I were not what you’d call crazy and dangerous young people. (I tried to explain this to her wedding guests when I made my best woman’s speech: we just didn’t do anything worth hearing about. Sorry.*) When we should have been inhaling banned substances we were in fact in the haberdashery department of John Lewis inhaling balls of wool. The ones who know what I’m talking about, know what I’m talking about. There’s something about wool, still wound up and new and fresh, that is utterly desirable. Actually knitting with it is secondary to feeling it in the raw. When I first saw Clara bury her nose in a hank and draw a lungful, well I knew I had a soul mate.
It’s the same with fabric. I have been slicing up slivers to make this string quilt that I mentioned last time. I love to dig my hands into the basket of raw-edged pieces, to rummage amongst them, to just look. Just looking is such a vital part of making stuff, isn’t it. When R builds a table or paints a wall I often come across him just looking at it. He’s usually just standing there, peacefully, inspecting. I know what’s going on inside.
Having said that, applying the strips is hugely enjoyable too. This must be one of the most pleasurable quilt tops I’ve ever constructed. And there’s no more of that hand-quilting going to happen. I have tops waiting to be quilted in that elephant’s graveyard of unfinished projects in my sewing room that never gets touched. I’m dismounting from my high horse and from now on machine quilting my own work. (The fanfare of that bathetic announcement should give you some indication of how tame my life was and is – see Clara’s wedding speech).
Here’s a baby blanket I’ve finished. They sell well.
With a sale on the horizon, I get up and scurry to the sewing room and run up another seam or stuff another leg before gettiing on with the day. But it’s the school holidays and time to myself is a difficult thing to get away with. We got round it, Sylvie and I, by sewing together one morning in the little room. I was stitching away when I heard her struggling in with a small table. Then, she lugged up the little sewing machine that I’d found for her on holiday. And finally she brought her large box of fabric. And there we sat, both of us in rattling good humour, playing at work. I would show you the picture of her at her machine but she was, as ever, starkers.
So, here instead is the Vulcan Countess, British-manufactured, sturdy, for the discerning young sewer, made the very year I was born. What a lucky spot that was, while walking past a charity shop in Bourton-on-the-Water.
Talking of old sewing stuff, did I ever show you this? A silk-lined needlework box with various compartments and bakelite or bone sewing tools. It’s such a lovely thing. It makes me think of Jane Eyre for some reason, even though it’s much, much more recent that those days.
Well it’s a quiet, cloudy, aimless kind of day. I guess I shouldn’t be writing posts on a day of such little inspiration. Sorry
* Still, Jeremy Irons said he enjoyed it. I’m not kidding.
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I knew it would happen. I knew it. I’ve got my quilt mojo back. It was a case of just sitting tight and knowing that the long arid period would end with an almighty thunderstorm. It’s nice to be back on the sewing room floor with the cutting mat. And it’s good to be setting out on a big project again.
I write in praise of the long-term project. Many are put off by the enormous commitment of a complex quilt but if you accept that there is no deadline, that leaving it off for long stretches of time is part of the attraction, then there’s nothing you can’t attempt. Given that making quilts is no longer an essential domestic chore, let them be an indulgence. There are so many books around now promising us projects we can complete in a weekend, in a day, in an hour, that it seems all the more against-the-grain to be advocating something that will keep you occupied, on and off, for years. But That Patchwork Principle is all about making beautiful things and that can take time.
There comes a point in a long-term project – in my case about a third of the way in – when the end seems impossibly far off, when the prospect of completing such a vast task makes you queasy. But if you really intend to finish it, you will finish it. Rest assured. Put it away and pick it up again when you’re in the mood. That way it will always be a treat, never a burden.
I like my quick fixes, too, but they’re rarely as satisfying, and nearly always to be sold and not kept. While I was cutting out the pieces for the new project (inspired by the beautiful book String Quilt Revival), I also sliced out a heap of strips so that I could put together a quick quilt to sell. This one is a simple affair, with scrap strips cut at 22in lengths and then sewn into four 22in-square blocks. The blocks are set at right angles and sewn together. They will have a dark border strip and will be quilted by machine in a pattern of receding squares.
You don’t need a book to make a quilt. Of course you don’t. (You don’t need a book to make jam either, as I have learnt this week. How many batches of unset jam have I struggled over recently because I took the books seriously and I boiled my jam for no more than 15 minutes. And then dear, clever Dragana regaled me with tales of how her mother used to make her stand by a boiling vat of bubbling jam in the searing heat of a Croatian summer, stirring for what seemed like hours until the mixture had set and I realised that I had gone against my own advice and not trusted my instincts. From here on I boil the buggers to near extinction. It worked with my apricot jam yesterday).
On the subject of the long-term project with no end in sight, I have finished my meandering blanket after about three years. It had been picked up and put down according to whim and according to whatever scraps of wool I had lying around. Here is a section of it close up:
And here it is on the landing, because as we all know, it’s not what you do, it’s where you stick afterwards to take a picture of it:
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I’ve been reading about the rather, shall-we-say creative approach some members of the aristocracy had to their marriage vows in the inter-war years. There just seemed some de facto arrangement that came into play as soon as they got hitched, namely that one party wouldn’t make a fuss over the other’s eye-water infidelities. (In one case the groom began an affair on his honeymoon!) There was the long game of marriage (often based on a kind of love) and then the brief “occupation” of having affairs.
I don’t want to labour this metaphor too uncomfortably or inappropriately, but I’m something of a happily-married philanderer when it comes to getting my projects done. In my view I couldn’t stay loyal to my big, ambitious projects if I couln’t fool around with little flimsier pieces along the way.
My mother is shocked and saddened by my intemperance. For her there is only complete loyalty to the project in hand. You see it through to the end. But I always point out to her that I do see projects through to the end, only I get there via an utterly indulgent route.
Stitching together the tapestry wall-hanging was a tedious job. I felt like throwing it aside so often. It hurt my fingers and it had little in the way of artistic pleasure. I had to dilute the tedium with treats. If I stitched together a couple more tapestries, then I would be allowed to knit some squares or do a piece of hand-quilting (in itself a labour but at least with a lovely instant result).
But the “fourth plinth” is now filled. On the one side is R.’s psychadelic paint-work and on the other this patchwork of needlepoint images, from rural scenes to animal portraits. I like it.
It’s quite an arresting sight, this bright and complicated hanging. I’m glad I stayed loyal to it, even while I dallied elsewhere.
*
When I was a girl, quite young probably, I asked for an Airfix model, one of a range of famous historical figures, a rare female one: Anne Boleyn. My big brother, who was an entirely dedicated and fastidious painter of Airfix models allowed me to sit in the corner of his bedroom at a spare desk and paint mine while he continued with his (Oliver Cromwell? An Uhlan officer? A Wellington Bomber? I dunno). Getting it right was important to him. Using nice colours was more my thing. The result, a hideous and botched Boleyn and a rather professionally finished Uhlan. I’m still a botcher and I suspect that both my brothers would have made superb artisans, just as I think R. would have. None of them were encouraged to pursue artistic or creative careers, maybe it never even occurred to them. Little brother, or Litty Brother as he prefers, once many years ago had the genius to give me this as a birthday present:
I never fail to smile when I see it, which is daily, and I love it dearly, mainly for the utter inappropriateness of it as a present. My little boy caught sight of it for the first time the other day (I suppose he’s growing and his head is level with the bedroom mantlepiece now) and whispered in shocked tones: “Mum, you can see his willy. Is it bleeding?”
“No,” I told him. “Those are ginger hairs. He’s a Celt. It’s a fair bet they would have been ginger.” And even as I said it I marvelled at the brushwork. The figure is barely two centimetres high. That would make his admittedly prominent pubic area maybe a millimetre, no more. That’s some painterly skill.
Big brother has now transferred his prodigious patience into dealing with people with life-threatening illnesses. Litty brother has a beautiful shop selling beautiful things (www.rattlesnakebooks.com). I am proud of both. I guess they’re too busy to paint anything inappropriate for me as a gift, but I live in hope.
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One of our local parks (one of them! Was there ever a greener capital city than London?) has been transformed recently into a kind of mythical pasture. The river has been rerouted and kingfishers skim its most secluded stretches. Great horse chestnuts mark out its fringes. You can hear woodpeckers, smell wild garlic, run through swathes of tall grasses and cornflowers. Oh and you can dodge the piles of fly-tipped rubbish which appear with gruesome regularity on its roadside verges. It’s hard to describe that mix of rage and despair one feels when coming across a pile of rubble and old furniture where only a day ago the last lot had been carted off by the council.
If this were a Daily Mail leader I’d be employing all the “beneath contempt” terminology and, actually, I’d be right to, but that’s not what I’m concerned with here. The point is that you find dumped stuff just around every corner, stolen bags of charity clothes, suitcases, mattresses, entire ripped-out fitted kitchens reduced to a heap of tattered chip-board. Just about all of it could be re-used in some way or another.
Bertie and I, when we pass these abandoned items, sniff airily and tut-tut and wander away but not before giving them a once over. Our dog is a natural scavenger and he can sense it in me and hovers before skips to give me time to skim their contents. A while ago we found ourselves haughtily passing by three large black bin bags heaped up in a narrow passage at the end of our street. They had been resolutely ignored by everyone and the fact that it had been raining made the pile even more unappealing. After about three days I finally caved in and nudged a bag open with a foot. Inside were clothes, not of the greatest quality, but in very good condition. I checked no one was looking, snatched a red gingham cotton blouse and headed home.
Once washed, the seams were unpicked, the little flower-shaped buttons removed and the elastic taken out. I kind of harvested the entire item of itself.
I often advise, as a tennet of That Patchwork Principle, to go ahead and cut up an old shirt and release it from shirtdom and give it some other, livelier purpose. But how often have I lost my nerve as my scissors hung in mid-aid, unable to make the first destructive move? No such qualms this time. Whatever I did with it, it was going to be a better outcome for this poor shirt than its current incarnation. (Incidentally, as someone who hates making button holes, I find it useful to keep any severed button hole bands from old shirts aside for when I’m making cushions. I can then simply sew the old bands into place to make an instant row of button holes).
A small piece of the blouse yielded this little cushion, made to cover a (scavenged) miniature chair, which will go to a friend’s little girl.
Another little piece went into this lavender cushion.
And there’s plenty left over to add to quilts. You don’t have to say, incidentally, that these projects pictured above are rather twee and simplistic. Twee sells. That’s all you need to know.
Also, I’ve amused myself over my choice of an embroidered snail on this lavender cushion, given that I’ve seduced hundreds of them into their beery deaths in my garden and fly-tipped bag-loads more over the cemetery wall. We’re clearly all guilty of dumping our unwanted stuff one way or another.
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I keep thinking about things: things that get left behind after we’re gone. Not my things (I won’t be worrying about those) but things I’ve taken on that have almost too much resonance to bear.
The other day I was wandering past the Salvation Army shop when I saw a heap of finished tapestry canvases sitting in the sunshine out front. I picked up a couple and went in to buy them (already struggling with any sound justification for having them). When the shop assistant saw them in my hand she beckoned to me to follow her into a back room, where she showed me a mountain of the things. There they sat: somebody’s lifetime of stitching. There were the usual twee cottage scenes, and flowers and birds, the stuff of most needlepoint canvases. Judging by the style of design, they dated from the sixties or seventies to nearly the present day. Before I knew what I was doing I offered her a price for the the lot.
Where do I hide them? Where do I hide them? was my preoccupation on the way home. Then it hit me. The big new empty wall. It’s been like the fourth plinth that empty wall, ever since the loft was built. I said we should keep it bare until the right thing comes along. And here it is, unquestionably the right thing. Between us, Mum and I are tidying these canvases up (none of them were finished on frames and are therefore very skewed and will need blocking and stretching) and then we’ll put the whole lot together to make a huge, colourful collage of needlepoint: like a modern-day medieval wall hanging.
A heap of needlepoint
Somebody stitched these throughout her adult life. Printed canvases don’t require much skill but you can tell she was deft enough with a needle, although some are less pristine than others (maybe due to the stitcher’s age). How would she feel about them going up on the empty wall? Maybe, like me, she didn’t care about what went on after her, but the pleasure they gave during her lifetime.
Talking about not resisting things, I bought (for only a couple of quid) a selection of vintage fabrics from an American dealer on Etsy. It was a medicinal purchase and highly efficacious. They’ll get used – they always do – but I was charmed by the almost curatorial approach the seller has used, labelling each tiny, treasured scrap.
The last thing I made with vintage scraps
There’s been a lull in the old blog of late, thanks to other more pressing tasks, but I’ll be back. I have plans for a three-shirt quilt – a challenger to the “quilt-for-a-fiver”. I am as committed as ever to making (or trying to make) beautiful things for next to nothing and just because I haven’t written about them, doesn’t mean I haven’t been making them.
Oh and that “fourth plinth” wall. The other side has already been adorned. I left it to R, who was itching to convert some left-over tester pots into a mural. This is what he came up with:
It took a lot of dedicated work and a precariously balanced ladder and, in the tradition of our truly laboured jokes, I told him he put the cyst into the sistine chapel. But who’d have thought my R was an adherent to that patchwork principle, too.
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There are, of course, lulls even during Christmas. Brief ones and usually accompanied by guilt but I got over the guilt and ran to the sewing room for ten-minute bursts of cutting strips and sewing them together. Because it occurred to me that another way of making a basic block more interesting would be to make the actual fabric yourself. If I couldn’t invent an original block, then I could at least make some original fabric.
So I put together strips of the same width and then put those with strips of different widths until I came up with a rectangle of patchwork. From this I cut quarter square triangles. I also cut triangles from fabric I already owned, preferably featuring horizontal stripes.
It’s a bit of a faff and rather time-consuming (obsession is a powerful engine to creativity and makes you work at a frightening rate) but the reward comes when you put your triangles together. Suddenly striking, unpredictable and jagged mosaics appear before your eyes. I could have gone on for ever had other obsessions not intruded.
The strips convene
...they get sliced into triangles
A rare bit of machine quilting and it's nearly done
Well, it’s not going to set the world alight but it was more interesting than Christmas TV, for me at any rate.
*
One of the lulls was just a second or two long and it came when I paused for a moment during the frantic burst of activity that is getting the room ready for the children on Christmas eve. As they play upstairs it is transformed into a Christmas grotto.
It made my heart beat wildly as a child, that magically transformed room. And it has a similar effect now, even if I am the one preparing the surprise, rather than receiving it. I took a picture of the mantlepiece later, to see if I could capture it. I can’t, of course, but I like to see it all the same – particularly the candles, seen through the mirror, lighting the way down on the stairs.
(Thank you to my own R.)
*
Mum knew what I was getting her for Christmas and she bought a bag of yarn in preparation.
One of the first pieces of needle work I ever completed was a printed tapestry canvas of a still life that I gave to my father to put up in his study. I had watched my mother stitching them and she had even completed an antique one with the precision of a picture-restorer. It’s been years since I had a go and there’s been en element of snobbery, I have to admit, due to the fact that you can’t really do your own thing with a printed canvas. But I laid that aside and she chose a country scene online. As I was buying it, I found myself drawn to a canvas with a thirties London Underground style picture of hot air balloons. Go on, I thought. Indulge yourself.
And so we’ve been stitching together here and there, Mum and I, but it’s been mainly Mum alone, lost in the peaceful pleasure of needlepoint.
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So, just to recap then: That Patchwork Principle is all about making beautiful things without a) having to copy them slavishly from elsewhere and b) having to fork out for a hundred quids’ worth of designer fabric. I stress the “beautiful” because what’s the point of doing anything else? Antique patchwork quilts made out of old flour sacks and bits of faded dress fabric command huge prices now not because they were constructed out of the finest materials, but because they are lovely in themselves and because they are lovely despite themselves. As I’ve said before, there was no obligation for the tired, struggling Mid West farmer’s wife to make a beautiful quilt: any bland thing would have done just as well to keep out the cold. But she chose to put the joyful effort it. The same goes for the intricately quilted “stippy” of North East England. Quilts were the way ordinary people could bring complex artistry into their lives and homes.
Having said that, the quilt pictured above may not be your idea of beautiful. It’s not necessarily mine either. It’s the Five Pound Quilt, now very near completion. The object of the experiment, if you recall (if you don’t, see “older posts” below), was to construct a half decent quilt without spending more than a fiver. In fact it came in at less than a fiver in the end because I couldn’t bring myself to cut up the duvet cover that I bought for £2. It was in very good condition and has now gone to a charity shop to continue its work. Instead, I used a curtain that I’d found in a skip and washed.
Let’s just stop there for a minute for a disclaimer on skips. I don’t normally find anything other than rubble and the remnants of builders’ lunches on skips. I don’t get off on rummaging through skips. I don’t wear that “I-found-it-in-a-skip” badge of honour. This was a one off. A house was clearly being gutted and all its contents thrown out. Bertie and I passed by the rain-sodden contents of this skip many, many times on our walks before I mustered up the courage to drag out the floral material I saw wedged under some bricks. And even then I took it home secretly and threw it in the washing machine before I could be found out and ridiculed by R.
It was lovely actually, that old curtain. Here it is, pinned in place for the backing:
I also discovered that the two baby blankets I had bought for 50p and 75p to fill the quilt were not enough so I used some old cut-off remnants of wadding. I always construct my quilts in the kids’ room after bulldozing their toys out of the way. While I was puzzling over the jigsaw of wadding scraps, I noticed a pair of those airline anti-deep vein thrombosis socks on the floor beside me. They had been part of an in-flight kit given to Sylvie by a visitor. She had ransacked it for the good stuff (miniature toothpaste, eye mask, that kind of thing) and flung the socks on the floor in disdain. So I lobbed them into the quilt, too. It wasn’t part of the original plan but they had the right cottony, springy consistency. Here they are:
The socks sealed into their pharoah's tomb
I’m not creating an heirloom here (unless of course my children develop a dereliction of good taste and actually ask to keep this quilt) but there is no reason why one couldn’t. This was an experiment and it’s good to know that you can rustle something up from not much at all. Next time, I’ll choose pillow cases and sheets I actually like.
It’s not my first sheet-based quilt incidentally. This one saved a torn pale yellow double sheet from going into the recycling bins.
It did, however, also contain some very fine reproduction civil war prints that I’d bought new. And there’s nothing wrong with that. I’m not saying you should never use gorgeous new fabrics. Just saying you don’t have to if you don’t want to.
*
The meandering project is an easy-going, non-committal kind of thing. You do a bit here, you do a bit there. Who knows how it will end up?
This blanket is just such a thing. Destined to be sold, it just gets added to when my mood dictates.
And this magnificent bag was done by mum when she came across a piece of canvas and some odds and ends of tapestry wool. She tells me that it had no pre-planning: it merely grew up to be what it is. Like her blanket of many colours (see “older posts”) it is a masterwork of colour-use.
*
I’ve been telling the kids since around mid-October to put the brakes on their preparations for Christmas otherwise it’ll all be so old hat by the time Christmas actually comes around.
I’m laughing as I write this. Old hat? They could’ve been preparing since last December 26th and it wouldn’t have diminished their enthusiasm. Every single day new creations are added to the panolply of hand-made Christmas artefacts, from the Christmas greyhound biscuits (for human consumption) to this eye-catching post-box:
I have contributed to this frenzy of making by making a rod for my own back. I thought how nice it would be to have little token advent presents – a small package to open each day in the run up to Christmas. Well, firstly finding and wrapping 48 small items is more of a bind than I had thought and what’s more, a fun-size Milky Way is just not going to cut it. To be fair they haven’t complained ever. It’s just that I feel bad when all they unwrap is a small Aldi chocolate lollipop – again.
I mentioned my basket of disappointements to a friend who said her husband’s family, who were Danish, used to enjoy the same gift-giving advent tradition. “Just little things,” she said. “perhaps a walnut.” (I’m laughing again as I write that bit). A walnut! Those crazy Danes.
Mum's basket of disappointments
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There is, of course, no such thing as an original idea and so I shan’t be troubling the copyright lawyers yet, but I’ve “invented” a new type of quilt pattern only in as much as it came entirely from my own head and I hadn’t seen it elsewhere. I was in a fervour of creativity. This is what it must have felt like for Newton, I said. And then I said, “it isn’t actually” in case anyone thought I was serious.
It’s such a simple formula and the beauty of it is that it requires nothing more than consistency. In fact, if you lived in a totalitarian state where all forms of measuring devices had been confiscated (and it might happen, I suppose, if a disgruntled fruit and veg market stall holder got into power and wanted his own back against the “metric overlords”), then you wouldn’t even have to measure anything.
Let me explain: start with your classic scrap strips. I cut them roughly 2cm wide and of all lengths and then sewed them together and pressed the seams. Even the tiniest pieces can be swallowed up this way. You end up with a nice catherine’s wheel of fabric strippage.
I had a metre of red fabric hanging around (bought years ago from a remnants pile at John Lewis) and from this I cut a square of, I think, 6 cm. I stitched two strips to opposite sides of the square. Now here’s the bit that would rile serious quilters (if only serious quilters ever read this) but thrill those residents of the totalitarian anti-measuring-device nation: you don’t have to faff about measuring through the centre of the work. You can just as easily hold the strip against the raw edge and snip off the excess. Or even sew it on and snip off the remainder as you near the edge. Whatever.
Then the other opposite sides get sewn on.
Then cut some more border pieces. I made them the same width as my centre square but from there on the border got narrower and narrower and the effect would have been rather nice had I not run out of fabric. So it’s strips and borders alternating. It’s an idea, incidentally, to have an ironing schematic (an ironing schematic! Listen to me!). I pressed the seams towards the outside edge with each round of strips or border pieces.
After the fervour of inspirational sewing had died down a bit I was left with a few sobering thoughts. Firstly, that it wasn’t such a spectacular piece of work to look at. For that, I’d need a lot more of the red border fabric or indeed much narrower widths of it. So that will be the next attempt. Also, if you hate grinding away at a sewing machine sewing what feel like miles of straight seams then perhaps this is not for you.
I whipped it off the sewing machine last night and showed it to R who – and I doff my cap to him – always tries to dredge up some kind of enthusiastic adjective for what he’s shown. He said it had a kind of Art Deco feel to it and I kind of know what he means and so I have named this pattern Deco Strips. For those who recognise it as a boring and pretty well-known form of patchwork, I apologise for this audacity. But like I say, you’re unlikely to be reading this.
*
That’s the last time I mock Andrea for her production line of hand-made dogs. Because, look! I too have a production line of dogs.
Andrea is our generous Craft Club hostess. For her second project she knitted, from a book I lent her, a kind of retro poodle bottle cover. It looked good, I must say. Plenty of other people thought so, too, because she then went into overdrive, churning them out for friends and family. My heart sank for her every week when I saw her take out that familiar cerise wool and set out on another poodle head.
Well, my dogs are patchwork and they come from a couple of pictures I saw in oldish craft books. The Liberty print one I’ve already paraded on this blog. The one in the middle is made almost exclusively out of vintage fabrics. Even his collar is old furnishing braid. The biggest one, more cushion than toy, is for Sylvie for Christmas. He is made up of some of my cheeriest fabric and is heavy on her favourite colour, red. His collar is a tiny piece of very old embroidered ribbon that Sylvie has been trying to get her hands on for ages. This is my compromise.
At times I am pricked with a little guilt, a little shame, at sitting at my desk in the sewing room of an evening, the radio on, the children busy elsewhere…well, how can I say this…enjoying myself. The other night I started cutting bits out of some old chintz and by the time I’d raised my head I had completed three decorative collage-style tags, little old pearls or buttons in their centres. What did I just do that for? I wondered to myself. I looked back at the messy desk and smiled to myself and thought it’s all just pointless.
Why have I turned out to be so good at pointless?
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thatpatchworkprinciple 