Textiles in Focus

Well here we are, already the middle day of Textiles in Focus.  Before you know it, blink and it will be gone.  And for this weekend only I have work in three exhibitions at the same time - for The Material Girls, our work touring Canada, currently in Saskatchwen, our display at Textiles in Focus, and via the Eastern Region Textile Forum at Bishop's Stortford.    So if you fancy a tour???

OK let's share Textiles in Focus with you, up until now, its been just glimpses of what.   The title 'Tales and Textiles' - we each choose a culture to explore the textiles, alongside a myth, legend, poem which related.  So my textile choice English Samplers and I choose the rhyme Monday's Child to go with it.  The criteria set by Chris, our Mentor, was to make a book with impact, plus other items for display.  What or how many other pieces was my choice but a poem about days of the week, kinda meant I needed seven!!!
My passion is stitching on paper, and I decided to make up pieces which comprised of 'borders'.  Each panel was divided into blocks, one large for the entire rhyme, significant words from the poem for the day in other blocks and patterns in the remaining.  They all have the same patterns, but worked differently - I found in my research that a similar pattern would appear over and over spanning quite a time period.   Colour choices were a nod to other research, where days of the week are attributed certain colours.

My book with impact.  Well to me Samplers record a person, a moment in time, with names, dates, ages often listed.  So I decided to make a book for the year I was born... a page for every day, and yes it was a Leap Year!  So I marked the months with a cross stitch number, a page for every day, and my birthday page is gold leaf.  I choose cream and red for the pages referencing old sampler colours and set about coptic stitching. 379 pages x  4 stitches each = 1516 stitches later, you have one of these....  a book which is approx 65cms wide, and wiggles into all sorts of display shapes.

Its called Thursday's Child, because that's the day I was born, (this is obviously why I'm a purple person) you will find a gold page, I haven't made you count Feb pages, but there are 29.  Is that enough clues to look at the book and work out when I was born????

The Material Girls already have the next project in hand... we've had a site meeting, have a brief, it involves the National Trust.  Just need some ideas.... ever hopeful at Textiles in Focus, I bought a shiny  new sketchbook.