In high school I did a little bit of embroidery, grew up, put it aside and then after having children and wanting to start again with some kind of hand sewing, I found my way to tapestry. My mum had done quite a bit of hand sewing when we were growing up, mainly in those years when we were quite small. In my teenage years she taught high school maths and biology and probably spent all her "free time" driving her large brood around to their various commitments (sport, social life, debating). Anyway, by the time we were grown up and left home she never really returned to hand sewing, she went back to the sewing machine but not to the tapestries and crewel work that she'd done as a young mother. But when I was a mother of young children I started with a tapestry kit of a Christmas stocking for my son, who was then a newborn. By the time he was 3, in 2000, I had it finished. Then I did a stocking for my daughter and then I joined the tapestry guild, found a teacher and began this craft somewhat in earnest. In 2009, I finished a creative tapestry, which is a mix of standard continental stitch and embroidery stitches.
How then did I make my way back to embroidery? I guess I found Brown Owls in 2008, joined as a faraway, attended a meeting in Melbourne, got excited when they started a local chapter and did a bit of embroidery in these groups. I began trawling around the internet looking at different styles and techniques. There is so much available and somehow I decided I'd like to try Thread painting as an embroidery technique. I found a Canadian woman who had trained at the Royal School of Needlework and she offered kits that looked sensible. A nice way to start. So in September 2010, I began with a small beginner's kit, Bingo Blue Blotch Pansy, and finished just recently.It wasn't a particularly long project in stitching time and the instructions in the kit were fantastic, page by page very detailed stitching instructions.
I found the self instruction of this kit worked fine but I was also a bit interested in going to a class. The embroidery guild here in the ACT didn't have anything on in 2011 that was along the thread painting line, but a needlework shop in Sydney runs classes and I found a Jenny McWhinney class. The class was held March 12 & 13 and my husband was comfortable enough with taking care of kids, house, cats, sport schedules etc so I got a weekend pass and went to Sydney and learned how to do thread painting with a slightly different slant. I'm using Paterna wool onto a blanket. So rather than light delicate thread, the pansy above uses one strand of DMC and a size 10 embroidery/crewel needle, I'm using a size 22 Chenille needle and one or two strands of wool.
The whole project is an African blanket - Giraffes, Elephant, Cheetah, Zebra, Lion, gazelles and Samburu people. At first I wasn't sure I wanted to take on something this big and thought I might just do the Giraffes as a cushion but then I saw the whole blanket on Jenny's website and thought it looked stunning. I was still a bit reluctant because I know how slow I am at stitching and I have a few big (and some little) projects on the go already. Not to mention the expense of it. I thought about it over a few days and slowly the African thing just seeped into me and I started seeing all these connections, until it felt impossible to ignore. I thought about how I'd travelled to Kenya in my twenties with my best friend and we'd camped at Masai Mara and Tsavo National Parks with four other Australians on a budget safari tour. We saw lions and zebras, wildebeasts, hyenas, giraffes and had elephants walk through our campsite. Then for Christmas 2010 my daughter got a set of "Big Cat Diary" DVDs and one of the baby lions in the show was named Sala and when my son got a kitten on New Year's Eve, he named it Sala. And then I thought about how my father had travelled through Africa working for 3 years as a young man and how I had grown up with his stories. Our house when I had been growing up had been full of African art and artifacts. And how really I had gone to Kenya because of my Dad's stories and how I missed my father because he'd died at 85 years old on 31st of December, 2010. It felt like now was the right time to sew an African blanket.
Some of the ladies in the class had already done their Lion and Cheetah and are now doing the Giraffes. There were a couple of us who were just starting the blanket though. Later in the year, I'll go back up to Sydney and have another class with Jenny and do the Elephants. I've got it draped here over the couch to give a sense of the size of the thing.
You can also see how much I achieved in two days of stitching. I was not exactly the slowest in the class but I was certainly towards the tail end. Some ladies had most of the necks completed. I'm still very new to all of this and don't like to rush things. Besides as I say to myself "its not a race, its a journey".
Jenny traces the pattern onto a piece of Solvie and you stitch through that onto the blanket. Apparently when you are done, you cut away the solvie, wet the remainder of it, it dissolves and then you just have your stitches on the blanket. I do like having a nice clear pattern to follow. Jenny also provides a very detailed booklet of instructions but the best thing is her wonderful teaching style. You come away feeling confident and competant. That's a real teaching skill. And she's just an all round fun and generous person to spend two days with. I had a great weekend and came back to Canberra and someone at work commented "you have a real spring in your step". I was still skipping along days later.
I've included some photos of the range of Paterna wool to give a sense of colours that I'll be using and then a photo of the minx catlet that is Sala.
I left the room for a moment, came back and yup straight to the pile of wool. Why not? Cozy.
Jenny McWhinney was also generous enough to let us photograph her blanket so we could use it to help us over the next few months while we finished our giraffes. Look how beautiful it is....
Jenny McWhinney's giraffes
