At the start of the Covid-19 lockdown I had some personal news which made me consider what I had inherited from my Mom. She passed away 3 years ago due to breast cancer. As a result I made this piece in response, sparked by a community stitch challenge set by Cas Holmes.
All the fabrics in this piece are inherited from my Mom's stash. She made her own clothes in the sixties, often from furnishing fabrics as she found those more interesting. This is the case with the main brown/blue piece of fabric in this piece, which is from a shift dress she made and I had already cut into for a previous project. This piece is using the reverse of the fabric and the horizontal band at the top is the hem of the dress. For some reason she used white thread to sew the dress and pale blue to hand-stitch the hem! I love the fact that you can see her stitches in this piece.
I laid all this down on the reverse side of a piece of Sanderson curtain fabric - these were the bathroom curtains I grew up with! The edge of this is folded over on the right. These 2 pieces of fabric set the colour pallet so I went through my inherited pieces and found other fabrics to use.
I knew I wanted to incorporate this photograph of my Gran, Mom and me. I had never seen this photograph until we were gathering together photos to show at her wake but I knew exactly where it had been taken and it is one of the only photos with the 3 generations. I manipulated it with a sepia wash, printed it out onto ordinary printer paper and then used the momigami technique to distress it and make it easier to stitch into. I used a small amount of oil the first time but didn't like the effect so re-did it without any oil. Before laying it down I ripped into it so that I could use the motif from the dress behind, which looked to me a bit like the double helix of genes.
Finally I chose a corner of an embroidered handkerchief I found in her drawer and a strip of a shirt-dress she had made, again out of furnishing fabric. I fixed this all down with bondaweb and then started stitching. It seemed obvious to machine black lines to echo those on the brown fabric. I set the machine to a very slight zigzag to mimic the quality of the lines on the dress fabric. I finished off the ends within the photo but chose to leave them free at the bottom. I mixed 2 colours of blue floss to stitch a running stitch around the outline of the 3 generations in the photo to represent the family bond.
I wanted to add some free-machine flowers 'ala Cas Holmes' so chose the Marguerite daisy as my Gran's name was Marguerite. I drew it out free hand on thin white tissue paper copying a source image from the internet and then pinned it in place, with some small scraps of organza underneath the flower heads to make them stand out on the white background. After free-machining over the top I pulled off the tissue (tweezers essential) and added french knots in the daisy centres. Free-machining terrifies me as my machine doesn't really like it - the stiff cotton backing kept pulling the needle out, but I love the end result.
I then turned to the top and sides - I needed to soften them and bring them into the piece. After much playing around with tiny cut out pieces of fabric I settled on a re-interpreted floral design from some more Sanderson curtain fabric at the top and free extension of the floral and leaf motifs on the right hand side. Because the motifs were already cut out and I couldn't imagine sewing them all on ironed them all down onto bondaweb and cut them out again - good job I don't mind fiddly!
Whilst I was doing this the idea come to me to make a daisy chain across the piece to symbolise the link down through the generations. I made a sample of various ways of doing this and settled on using the cut-out daisy motif and backstitch stems.
On the left hand strip of orange I had the idea to use some buttons out of the vast button tin inherited from Mom. I chose some very seventies style wooden buttons with painted flowers that I can remember seeing in the tin when I was a child.
Finally, I decided to add french knots in the top band around the yellow leaves and flowers to echo the original Sanderson fabric. I also added them to the centres of the flowers. They look a bit like pollen, which is key to plant propagation.
I found that it was easy to make a complex work when it had so much meaning behind it.
