New Embroidery Group

You may have run up some loose covers, but have you ever knitted a throne? That is what I was asked to do in early January 2010.  I had recently started working on a part-time freelance basis for an organisation called Stitches in Time (www.stitchesintime.org.uk). They are based in the old Limehouse Town Hall Building and are involved in community-based publicly and privately funded textile projects. I only really wanted to do one or two days a week with them, enough to give me some contact with like-minded people but not enough to take over my life. Stitches had done some projects with Historic Royal Palaces (www.hrp.org.uk/kensingtonpalace) in the past, and were invited to tender for the knitting of a throne to be installed as part of the Enchanted Palace exhibition in Kensington Palace. This exhibition opened to the public on 26 March 2010 and will run for at least a year while part of the Palace is being refurbished. HRP had engaged an international theatre group based in Cornwall called Wildworks (www.wildworks.biz) to create the exhibition and Wildworks’ artistic director, Bill Mitchell, decided he wanted a knitted throne as part of it.

As a woman with a little time on her hands, passionate about knit as well as stitch, I was invited by Di England, director of Stitches, to go with her to the Palace on 7 January to meet Bill Mitchell and the HRP team. Bill explained his concept to us: he wanted a knitted throne, cosy (“I’m thinking tea cosy”, he said) and hand knitted by a number of people, which visitors would be encouraged to sit on and “feel the power” – a people’s throne. He gave us a watercolour sketch he had done of what he had in mind and the Palace had a large high-backed, chair with arms which we could use as a base. We were to use community groups to help with the knitting, we were not to use wool (fear of moths) and our deadline was 19 March. Di and I discussed what was involved, she put a bid together and within a week we got the go-ahead and Di appointed me lead artist on the project.

From that point on, for the next 10 weeks, all my working time, almost all of my waking hours and quite a few when I should have been sleeping were devoted to the knitted throne. I began by dividing up the knitting into its various elements and deciding what could be divided further into smaller units to be knitted by community groups of varying ability. I wrote patterns for each of the different elements and sourced materials (acrylic, cotton, viscose tape and ribbon, lurex and jute) from a wonderful company called Texere Yarns in Yorkshire (www.texereyarns.co.uk). I knitted a great many samples. Di England identified five community groups that Stitches had had dealings with before and invited them to participate in knitting workshops during the second half of January and February. Two of these groups consisted of seniors (all women), one in North Kensington and the other in Tower Hamlets, one was a group who met in a café in Limehouse, there was a group of young mothers and nannies who met in a church hall on the King’s Road, SW1, and the fifth group was an after-school club in Portobello. As it turned out, no-one in these last two groups could knit, though all were keen to learn, and some did.

I taught three of these workshop groups myself, and colleagues from Stitches led the other two. I assessed what could be expected of each group and within what time frame. Our deadline was tight and I knew I was going to have to knit quite a lot of the throne myself. In the end I knitted the finials, the face, which was then embroidered by me and others at Stitches, the edges of the back, part of the seat, part of the skirt, the hands and the feet. The workshop groups knitted the petals around the face, 10cm squares which make up the front and back of the back (74 in all), the arms in ribbed sections, the remainder of the seat in Aran stitches, the remainder of the skirt and the gold coverings of the legs, the knees and the uprights between the back and the seat.

Not only did the knitting have to be done, it then had to be stitched together, backed with fabric and fitted onto the chair. Until the final week, the chair remained in the Palace, so we were praying that our careful initial measurements were accurate and that the knitting of 30 people could be stitched together and made to fit. A week before our deadline, the chair was conveyed by white van to Limehouse and, with the help of the production team at Stitches, fitting began in earnest and, almost, round the clock. The work was finished at 8.30pm on 18 March 2010 and the following morning, Di England and I went with the throne in the white van back to Kensington Palace. We were not sufficiently relaxed to permit anyone else to carry it, and insisted on heaving it ourselves up several flights of stairs to its plinth in the throne room. Since then, a speaker and microphone have been installed under it and when visitors sit on it, a voice invites them to make a wish: sitting on the throne may invest them with the power to make that wish come true.

I do not want to think about people sitting on our work and I am not certain that a year from now all our knitting will be intact. But I suppose one must let it go: it is public art to be enjoyed by the public. It was a great experience to have been involved in. I met and collaborated with some excellent women, who worked very hard, and some very exuberant children. I knitted until my hands and arms ached, often into the small hours of the morning but never lost my love of the process. I can’t say that I would do it all over again, but I would contemplate something similar. The Crown Jewels perhaps?