How and why do I want to draw with a machine needle?

I am still excited discovering the wonderful creativity this brings me.

I clearly love being creative.

As a child, I was always busy doing things with my hands. School holidays were fabulous times, Mum never had to worry about keeping me occupied….just make sure that her haberdashery box was full of collected bits and pieces, buttons, zips, thread etc and she would remind me to oil the sewing machine before starting anything.

With a pattern and some fabric I would soon be taking over the sitting room floor, cutting out my project and I really enjoyed sewing and having something finished and fit to use, or hopefully wear! Which was just as well, as Mum’s mantra was… ‘if you want something, you will have to make it…..’

My Dad was very creative, always planning projects with sketches on the back of old envelopes and I loved to watch him work, whether it was outside laying bricks for a garden feature or standing ankle deep in heaps of fragrant coils of wood shavings that floated down around us as I stood next to him in his workshop, doing my best not to be in the way of his long arms and elbows as he was planing a piece of wood at the bench. It seems that I inherited Dad’s creativity and my Mum’s hoarding character for anything that might come in useful ……. and ……. both my Mum and Dad’s very long arms…

I graduated from Loughborough College of Art & Design, in Ceramics and Three Dimensional Design. My Dad had been a student there before being called up during the war and I met my future husband Paul, studying there too. We set up the business together in 1989. We are often seen together supporting each others work, at shows and events.

Discovering the spontaneity of free machining.

So I found myself lowering the feed teeth, and removing the foot on my Janome sewing machine, putting some cotton fabric stretched tight into a wooden embroidery hoop and sort of just ‘scribbling’ with the machine needle and thread creating a single line that was anything but straight. It was very liberating and quite amazingly spontaneous. I loved it. The now exposed bare sharp needle, needed some serious respect, these days a special darning foot is available with most machines making it much safer to use when free machining with this technique.

Needless to say, (sorry) I broke plenty of needles in those early stages, mainly because I forgot to lower the needle bar to create the tension on the thread because the foot was no longer there to remind me to lower it……… Then there were the birds nests created underneath, when I failed to start properly, finding out the hard way that it is best to bring the bobbin thread up to the top and hang on to both threads when starting, then also not running the machine fast enough to keep up with the movements of my hands on the hoop so the poor needle was being stressed to bend away from the hole in the needle plate and then shattered with a bang. So one needed to run the machine much faster and more confidently. Enter my basic model of Bernina, that I still use today.

Unlike drawing with a pencil and using a rubber for correction when necessary, I found that unpicking this now quite dense and stitched thread was pretty impossible, so I soon learnt to make the best of mistakes and do better next time. I found putting Ivy on a tree trunk covered up a multitude of sins….. and each landscape was kept small. All my early works were never more than 2 inches across, and we sold them mounted in lovely little turned wooden frames and boxes that Paul had made, from fragrant Cedar of Lebanon planks and on the Coronet lathe from my Father’s workshop.

Repetition and practice were key to improvement, just like throwing a clay pot at the wheel, as I had done at Art college, don’t make it too ambitious, precious or too big and try and try again and then one hopefully improves with time.

Practice and production techniques make good places to learn and improve, not just sewing technique but also my use of colour, building up confidence to move away from monochrome pencil sketches and create perspective and distance in my landscapes, firstly with pictorial design and horizons, then with fine texture and colour, building a layered effect with each hedge line and fence, increasing the sizes of stitches and thickness of thread as one came into the foreground and the last stages of working the picture.

My Thread Paintings sold well, at Craft Fairs, Galleries and Exhibitions and I was invited to give talks and displays, did some teaching, wrote a few magazine articles but never a book, I liked being creative far more.

Visiting a London Ski show in 1985, I saw an industrial embroidery machine just personalising some skiwear, I was totally mesmerized, for here was a machine doing what I was doing, moving the hoop around underneath to a static needle….albeit remotely…. so now another phase began of my embroidery journey, that of sewing with CAD CAM machines stitching up to what was then an amazing 600 stitches a minute and having to learn to digitise…….with ‘Hedgethorn’ as the proud result of creating my own path with new technology and being the first person to create a ‘Thread Painting’ on hand painted silk as an ‘unlimited edition,’ in this way. Much as an artist would print from an etching plate, each one being slightly different due to the inking up of colours each time.

I am an artist and designer, who loves to embellish.

The next phase of my embroidery journey, was shaped by necessity, the economy, aches and pain, opportunity, technological changes, market changes and personal interests and of course the arrival of a full computer screen as we know it now. The newer machines ran ever faster at over 1000 stitches per minute. No time to stand still.

Now I do not just draw with thread, I colour it in too, with pattern, layers, highlights and form, so decorating things with my designs was the next phase. The Hare became my mascot, featuring again and again, in my designs and popping up everywhere, almost as my stitched signature.

GOLD too, metallic threads like those made by Madeira and Ackermann became a big part of my new work. Creatures with an eye for attitude, flora and fauna all became part of my new landscapes.

Then out of the blue, some one asked me to do a very ornate heraldic company crest as large as possible, for some conference table runners, also some livery companies crests and ecclesiastical projects and so began a more commercial phase of regular commissioned work which I have enjoyed doing for the last thirty years.

My skills with using and designing with gold thread for enriched emblems now grace many of the blazers seen on the river banks of Henley, also sponsorship rugs on horses, on someone’s settee as a cushion, or embellished tee shirts and leisurewear or as special and unique gifts you can buy from my online shops, that is if you can bear to give them away.