thatpatchworkprinciple

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 heart-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.

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.

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. 

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.

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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.

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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

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.

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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?

My dearest old mucker Clara was born, poor thing, with an unnaturally large swelling in the hemisphere of the brain relating to good taste. And I think when nobody was watching the nurse injected her with an extra few millilitres for good measure.

This was the girl whose university room was a haven of good taste, all pot plants and nice bedspreads, a cello leaning against the wall in the corner. A few doors down, my room had a couple too many soft toys.

Naturally, this tyranny of good taste informs her quilting and her finished and nearly finished quilts today, though few in number, are lovely, serene things which make mine look garish and overdone. The only claim I can make is that I sparked her current interest (or obsession) with quilting and that we often find ourselves alone in a sea of people who just don’t get it. I do seem to remember her making a beautiful folk-art-type quilt many years ago when I just didn’t get it (when I thought a quilt was an affected form of  a duvet).

But it was when she showed me proudly the other week her fabric collection – all neatly folded and stored in a very tasteful dove-grey painted cupboard – that I found my heart beat faster with fellow-feeling. Forget the vogue for Amy Butler et al; here was a collection of beautiful scraps and fat quarters picked by a discerning hand, by someone who knows what she likes and is not driven by obvious trends. There were a fair few old shirts, too. This was a fabric cupboard based entirely on That Patchwork Principle.

And here are the quilts they produced:

And now to a new mucker, a dear one, too, who has handed into my temporary care a family heirloom which has been in the making for roughly forty years. Rosalind’s mother started hand-piecing a quilt in the early sixties and then put it aside some time in the early seventies when the last of her four daughters was a toddler. That daughter, Rosalind, picked it up to continue her mother’s work when she was pregnant with her daughter in 2003.

What makes it so interesting is its outrageous leap from modernist-style textiles of the sixties to today’s fabrics with next-to-nothing in between. This head-on collision works very well, despite the utterly random nature of the quilt. It just goes to show: there’s very little point in planning a scrap quilt. It always looks better with a little happenstance thrown in. 

It is destined to be returned to its original maker, Rosalind’s mother, as a Christmas present. My job is to bind it but I spend most of my time just looking at it, mesmerised by the those little pieces of modern social history.

That's how they did flowers in the sixties

One of the things we brought back from our stay in the States was an idiotic fondness for Halloween. And they do all became happily idiotic over what is at best a superannuated religious commemoration of the dead. We got infected with a bit of that idiocy and one of my sweetest memories is carving pumpkins on the porch in Ann Arbor. Here is Sylvie reliving that tradition two weeks ago.

A trip with mum to the Knitting and Stitching Show at Alexandra Palace blew a welcome waft of inspiration through us. For me, it meant putting aside commercial projects and returning without guilt to the self-indulgent ones.  So I cracked on with the Most Beautiful Quilt in the World (see earlier posts for disclaimers re name) and actually finished piecing the top. I pieced the back out of my most precious fabrics, leaving them virtually whole, so that I can enjoy them at their best.

The five-pound quilt also benefitted from this injection of fervour and it is only a few strips short of completion now.

But the main benficiary of this explosion of enthusiasm was my blanket.

My blanket. I don’t know how it began, or why, but it’s been a couple of years in the making and is now so heavy and slow-going that I am liable to fall asleep under its warmth while I struggle on with it. This blanket epitomises self-indulgence. It’s a meadering project with no discernible end yet. Its only rule is that I have to stick to Aran weight yarn, although now and again I have to concoct my own out of other weights. It is a rare foray these days into intarsia, though not of Fassett proportions. A while back I took it to Craft Club to catch up a little and one of my co-crafters (she’ll forgive me for calling her perhaps the least keen), asked when I would be ready with my “cloak”.

Now as much as I love hand-knits and the unique appearance they create, even I would draw the line at striding around adorned in this:

 And here it is again, just to press home my point:

I didn’t forget the fact that I needed to flog a few things as well and so the left-over pieces from the Most Beautiful Quilt in the World became a cushion and some tiny scraps of Liberty tana lawn lined themselves up for a dog (pictured at the top of the post). Most of the pieces came from a bag of Liberty scraps sent in the post by Lissa.

At the risk of going on again about inspirational, clever, admirable people, I’ll just hover a little longer over the name Lissa. We have a bit in common, in that both our mothers were professional seamstresses and we both learnt from them, rather than from courses. We both came from a journalistic background and both spent some time in media relations work for politicians. Oh and we are both chided by our mothers for wasting our education on sewing.  Here’s where we part: Lissa has made a huge success out of her original idea to supply affordable, up-market children’s clothes made exclusively out of Liberty fabric. Leaving a thriving career at the BBC behind (and  I know it was thriving – R was in awe of her production skills and I never heard the end of it)  she moved back up North and made a business out of a whim. There are plenty of people who have good ideas; few who see them through successfully. Her company, Peak Princess (www.peakprincess.co.uk) is featured regularly in national magazines and her blog makes a mockery out of this amateurish nonsense.

I don’t sew for a living, just for pocket money, but I know from the quality of Lissa’s work and her dedication and hard graft that I’d be buggered if I did.