Practical

My mother was a highly skilled needlewoman, she seemed to be able to make anything. As I was delving into some old stuff today I found some folders full of notes and patterns and I realised that it was assessment work from when she did ‘City & Guilds’ in the early1960s. She was drafting her own patterns, I never learnt how to do that.

I learnt to sew from my mother and remember using her Singer sewing machine (with a treadle) from a very young age. I made dolls’ clothes and my own clothes and then later clothes for my daughters. All very practical. And that’s how my stitching life was - I was always making ‘something’.

I was taught to embroider by my grandma but we didn’t see much of her and she died when I was nine and that was really the end of embroidery as far as I was concerned. My mother never did embroidery - she was a very practical person, she couldn’t see the point to embroidery.

Even when I was myself doing ‘City & Guilds: Patchwork and Quilting’, although we played around and experimented, there was always an end in view, a purpose, ‘something’.

It’s only in the last few years that I have discovered stitching for enjoying stitching, messing about with fabrics and stitches just for the joy of doing it - value in the process rather than the result. Yes I complete small pieces, and even bigger pieces, but they are not ‘for’ anything - they are for me and themselves.

My mother would not have understood. Or maybe she was never given the chance.