Do you remember your first piece of embroidery, and have you still got it? I think most of us know where we have ‘got to’, so to speak, in our embroidery journey. We can trace our current projects, both the design source and the techniques, but where did it all start?
I always think it’s fascinating when an embroiderer has a retrospective and you can see the development of style, skill and ideas and the changes that occur from outside influences from the sixties, say to the eighties, nineties and now the noughties, but the childhood pieces are never featured. It would be fun to hear how other members of The New Embroidery Group started their embroidery journey. Here’s my story.
I went to boarding school aged 4 – yes, I know it was rather young but the headmistress was a friend of my mother’s and I had rather elderly parents. It probably accounts for my nervous tic and the fact that I am in and out of prison (only joking! ) The school was very old fashioned and very keen on sewing and embroidery. I made a canvas-work needle case that my mother used all her life and I now use, a shadow-work lamp shade (very ambitious and long since thrown out) a canvas-work belt for my sister–in–law (my half brother was much older than me ) It was just long enough to fit a rather small teddy bear and proved a lasting joke between us, remembered long after the belt had gone, and as a pièce de résistance, when I was eleven, a canvas-work sampler. This last I was very proud of and it hangs above my computer today, as I type. It is truly ghastly! It is worked in wool, on 10 stitches to the inch canvas and has my name underneath the date and the initials of the school, and round the outside are flowers, rabbits and cats etc and the background is beige tent stitch. It is full of missed stitches and mistakes. There is rather a lot of the beige background and the frame is gold. Yes, I did say gold. Much too grand for such a horrible offering but my mother was very proud of it.
Across the hall in our bedroom hangs a sampler worked in silk on linen, in about 1790 by an ancestor of my husband, when she was ten years old. It has about 28 stitches to the inch and is very, very pretty, with the alphabet and numbers and a beautiful scrolling border. I don’t think I have ever or will ever, work anything as fine, in both senses of the word, as this. I leave you to draw your own conclusions!