Patchwork Object

Items

• Patch by Helen
  Women on both sides of my family have been involved in textiles, either as professional pattern designers and cutters, or in the home, tailoring, quilting, mending and crafting. I inherited all of my grandma’s sewing notions and haberdashery a few years ago. Thousands of pins and packets of needles, lovely thick Sylko threads, lace trims, plastic buttons, remnants of fringing from fancy dress costumes she made for us children, some beautiful and ancient passementerie. Some of it still smells like her sewing room, a sacred space, and I find touching traces of her neatness and practicality in the way she has wound spare threads back on to reels and pinned leftover bias binding around pieces of card. As a child I would pore over her copies of Women’s Weekly magazine and the craft projects inside, pausing to read the personal advice columns, naturally. Grandma was always creating something, and a few unfinished projects remain: a cathedral window patchwork linen cushion cover, hundreds of floral cotton hexagons for English paper piecing, some rather large and bright checkerboard patchwork blocks. I’ll get around to them all. My improv-pieced ‘wildflower meadow’ patch is inspired by all the textile-working women of my family and in particular their domestic sewing and creativity in resourcefulness. I coloured most of the pieces myself by fermentation-dyeing strips of an old bed sheet with kitchen cupboard ingredients: turmeric, onion skins, a few different types of tea. The central rectangle is a piece of used curtain lining with free motion embroidery, and the bugs are taken from an old machine-embroidered Zara shirt. I included blanket stitch as it is the most comforting and satisfying of all the stitches, and gives me a feeling of home.