Jump

 This morning I had a bit of a 'leap of faith' moment.

As so many of you have mentioned - crafting or creating seems to have slipped out of our fingers and there are unfinished wips, half done sketches, uncompleted knits or waiting to be frogged items sitting shamefacedly in cupboards or in bags hoping to see the light of day.

At work we are building up towards .... (I can't believe I am even discussing this seasonal event which shall remain nameless) .... so I have been ordering ribbons, bells, dried fruit, cones and coloured twine for the many workshops we will be holding.  We will also be hosting a small festive (oh bugger that word slipped through the filter grrrr) fayre which means I have been making stuff.

Herein lies my leap of faith.  

I was unsure if I could actually make my gardening brain and hands turn back to an art-head and fingers and after a bit of hesitation and a bucket of coffee - I have been busy. 

I am hoping that this small step will be what breaks that mojo wall.

And you?

How are you doing?

Have you managed to get some crafting done? - I hope so, because, if you are anything like me - there has been a crafting shaped hole inside of me and I need to fill that ache it is leaving.

Have a good week xxxx

One stitch at a time

Yesterday, for the first time in quite a few days, the sky was not filled with high flying dense grey cloud. Precious patches of blue moved and evolved into expanding shapes as they were squeezed and surrounded by mounds of grey and white. To our far right and behind us, the horizon was curtained by dense snow showers, hiding hills and removing views. Fortunately we were in a narrow corridor of clear weather which lasted for an hour or two. 

So we made the most of it and walked.

The air was so cutting that it tore at bare skin. My face burned with the cold - despite wearing two hats and a hood, a scarf and shawl under my coat. We were all wrapped in several layers, making walking less fluid, more 'stumpy' as joints did not bend easily and turning your head meant turning your whole body.

And Moss? she ran around with a silly grin, charging through ice puddles and leaping into the river ... That dog has no sense! 

After about three miles we knew we would be running out of clear weather and returned home, which felt warm and calm after the brittle buffeting wind we'd walked through. So after stripping off the multiple layers and putting the kettle on, I resorted to some slow sewing by the fire.

A small chameleon clinging to the stitching on my work trousers, he will soon be surrounded by leaves (thank you lovely lady for the suggestion) and have a gecko or two for company.  

Any hoo - today is another bitterly cold day - we awoke to -4°C with yesterday's snow now frozen to dagger sharp shards. I think there will be more chameleon slow sowing - I'd like to finish him today, do a bit of baking (fruit cake and chocolate brownies) and catching up with emails and blogs. 

And if Moss 'plays her cards right' she will have a 'shampoo and set' - poor thing, of all the watery things she loves - bathing is most definitely NOT one of them🐾🐕

Have a gentle and kind Tuesday xxxx

That s'no storm!

 Wow! What a wonderful response to Friday's link up - Decorations - I am delighted so many festive folk joined in ! thank you so much :) and if you are wondering what on earth I am talking about have a look HERE - there are 12 lovely blogs to have a look at all sharing their favourite decoration stories - really worth visiting :D

If you remember, a couple of months ago our village adapted the usual Halloween shenanigans so to make social distancing possible while still allowing the mini monsters to be out and about all dressed up and excited. It was soon followed (you may recall me grinding my back teeth) by 'Spot the Poppie's'. It seems that the village as a whole rather like having a reason to 'play' and dress their homes ... so now we have 'Follow the Tinsel Trail' with a theme of snowflakes.

Cue lots of snipping and cutting and in some cases cussing when snipping too close and 'altering' the desired shape!

There was such a flurry of little snipperty bits, despite trying to keep them under control.

It is such a long time since I make paper snowflakes, I remember doing them with the boys whilst they were still at junior school - they are a wonderful mix of frustration and fun - that anticipation when I unfolded them was something I'd forgotten (and enjoyed!)

The silvery lines and streaks behind the paper snowflakes is the light on the wet rowan tree in the garden and the eagle-eyed of you will spot where I over enthusiastically snipped the snowflakes - oops. 

Well they kept me relatively quiet (bar the cussing) 

and certainly entertained for a little while on Sunday evening. 

A gentle reminder that this Friday will be our second Chrimbly count down and the festive theme is Baking - here is to some yummy posts - hope you can join in with the fun :D

Good Luck Millie ❤

Continuing with the theme of very little being wasted by the poor when it came to their clothing, Himself reminded me that his grandmother had been a Millie ( I only knew her as a very old lady who'd worked since she was about 13) and that she had saved scraps of fabric all her life, turning them in to quilts and rag-rugs.

Hidden deep in our airing cupboard I have three of her quilts. Thin, soft, gentle aged fabrics with many many repairs. Decades of stitches adding patches or reattaching the quilt to it's backing fabric.

The vast majority of the stitching has been done by an old treadle powered sewing machine however it appears that most of the repairs have been done by hand. 

In some places, the piecing has been machined but the seams have then been turned over to tuck in the frayed edges and sewn by hand.

Two of the quilts have been hand stitched to sheets. One of them is made up of a random pattern - pieces of fabric are sewn together with no planning and it appears the only aim was to end up with a finished item large enough to fit a small double bed (which incidentally is over 100 years old and the one we use).

However, the soft pink version, in a log cabin pattern has been made with better quality fabrics, machine stitched and is a vastly superior quilt. The underside is also quilted but in a simple large block pattern.

Why am I mentioning this? Well Grandmother-Millie used to work in a weaving mill making dress material and we think that any snippets of fabric that could be brought home would have gone into making these quilts. Which would explain why there is such a gently random layout. 

Himself also reminded me about our proddy-hook - a hand held hook used to pull long ribbon like strips of waste fabric through hessian in a looping action. These were then 'crocheted', knotted or stitched at the back to prevent from disintegrating, making out of necessity, warm and soft rugs.

I sat here this afternoon with a brew and gave it a try - using snippets of fabric and some hessian - it is not as easy as it sounds. My hat's off to those hard working women that laboured at the mills for 12 hours a day for six days a week and still had the energy to make the home comfortable and warm.

And my Millie ? - well, she is finished now, ready to go down to the post office, I just have to email the organisers to confirm she is on her way and then send photos to their webpage. I shall be sad to see her go however - she have given me such pleasure.

There was one last addition - a genuine reel of linen thread from a mill, now long gone, from our village,  gifted to me by a friend who used to work there years ago. So, it seemed very fitting to send it away with Millie.

Good Luck Millie, we've both been through a journey to get to this point - thank you :)

Millie gets a move on

During Victorian times, woman - and not just mill working woman - took to wearing a long slender shawl called the Sontag, named after the German singer called Henrietta Sontag who brought it to the attention at that time. It wrapped around the shoulders and the back of the neck, crossed over at the front and was either tied or tucked into a belt at the back. The earliest written pattern found for the Sontag was in the 1860s.

It felt fitting that Millie should have one as it would allow me to incorporate elements of Himself's work in textiles. The hessian itself originated from India, transported to Forfar in Scotland and then down to the textile mills in the northern England. The wools are 100% British wools from mills in Huddersfield in West Yorkshire. So a rough and hardworking Sontag was made for Millie, to keep from being cold in the linen mills during chilly early starts.

Her skirt was given a patch - using a snip of linen left from cutting out the pattern, it felt right to use every last scrap, then simple boro mending was applied - to allow it to be both functional and decorative.

The original fabric doll had printed hair ribbons holding her plaits back. However, once the body was sewn and stuffed, these once prominent ribbons seemed to flatten out - so strips of red fabric were retrieved from the snippety-bits-basket and attached. Ribbons were very expensive and so would have been precious and worn with pride and love.

The working mill woman would have had a simple working style of chatelaine belt, not decorative but a purely functional version where all the tools of the trade were hung and in this case a whistle which would have been used to be able to be heard above the clatter of the weaving machines. Most mills were several stories high and the noise would have been almost unbearable. Millies learnt to lip read so they could communicate during the long working day which usually started at 6am, finishing at 6pm with an hour for lunch. 

Aprons were not just the domain of the working class, nearly everyone had some form of pinafore or apron to protect their clothing. With needing to protect the few items of clothing they had not just from wear and tear but from general dirt, a protective pinny or apron was worn by both women and men, rich and poor alike.

Time marches on, Millie has a date to keep and I have to make sure she keeps it ... 💙
 

What Millie did next

Having painted what I could, Millie lay out on my work-desk overnight to allow the paint to fully dry.

As I mentioned yesterday, with reference to the lack of poor or working class clothes in museums, it made me think on my favourite form of slow-sew stitching -  Japanese Boro ( ぼろ) mending. It is derived from the word boroboro meaning tattered or repaired. The mended cloth then, over years, develops a wonderful beauty and history - each one having a unique story with patches being added and reinforced by simple stitches.

I have been using boro mending on work jeans for Himself and decorate my clothing as well as fabric journal covers. So, I decided to gently include boro into Millie's skirt. Linking mending with embellishment to create an object of 'impermanence and imperfection' yet functional and beautiful leads to another traditional Japanese aesthetic - Wabi sabi' - which is used to describe the appreciation the beauty of the imperfect and incomplete.

One of the many hazards (and there were many) of working in a textile mill before present day health and safety legislation, was the exposure of mill workers to cotton dust which to respiratory disorders with some progressing on to some fatal lung diseases.

Himself is a modern day textile worker and despite wearing a mask with filters is still is affected by cotton dust although thankfully no way near the extent of the unprotected woman who laboured at the linen weaving machines.

So - stitching this doll is also my way of not just acknowledging the hardship and and hard working Millies, but also present day textile workers here and around the world.