Cloth Stories E-Book

Ali Ferguson

• Herausgeber: Batsford
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 112

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

A textile artist's guide to creating exquisite, intimate and nostalgic work inspired by the home. Ali Ferguson's work takes inspiration from domestic life and the objects that surround and comfort us in our homes. Vintage fabric and hand-embroidered text are beautifully paired to create evocative pieces that are imbued with the magic of everyday existence. In this wonderful book Ali reveals the secrets of her work and shares her ingenious methods for finding inspiration at home to create stunning work that uses embroidery, quilting, collage and found objects. Chapter One explains how to create 'threads of thought' that stem from the tiniest details within the rooms of your home, resulting in extensive mind maps you can use to inspire your finished work. Chapter Two shows how to translate these ideas into stitch and select the perfect materials for the mood you want to convey in your work. The rest of the chapters take you through the different rooms in a typical home, from kitchen to bedroom, giving a wealth of ideas for finding inspiration from each of these spaces in your own household, accessing memories, stories and emotions to help you create intensely personal and meaningful textile art pieces. Beautifully illustrated with the author's own work and that of other leading textile artists who draw inspiration from home life, this book revels in cloth and the joy that it brings to every textile artist. It is the ideal book for any artist or embroiderer who wants to explore new sources of inspiration on their very doorstep.

Leseprobe

Ali Ferguson’s beautiful, deeply nostalgic textile work takes inspiration from her home and family life, with vintage fabric, hand-embroidered text and found objects combined to create evocative pieces that are imbued with the magic of everyday existence. In this wonderful book Ali reveals the secrets of her work and shares her ingenious methods for finding inspiration at home.

Chapter One explains how to create ‘threads of thought’ that stem from the tiniest details within the rooms of your home, resulting in extensive mind maps you can use to inspire your finished pieces. Chapter Two shows how to translate these ideas into stitch and select the perfect materials for the mood you want to convey in your work. The rest of the book takes you through the different rooms in a typical home, from kitchen to bedroom, giving a wealth of ideas for finding inspiration from each of these spaces in your own household, accessing memories, stories and emotions to help you create intensely personal and meaningful textile art pieces.

Beautifully illustrated with the author’s own work and that of other leading textile artists who draw inspiration from home life, this book revels in cloth and the joy that it brings to every textile artist. It is the ideal book for any artist or embroiderer who wants to explore new sources of inspiration on their very doorstep.

Contents

Introduction

Visual Thinking

Turning Thoughts into Stitch

Kitchen Stories

Stories from the Scullery

Stories from the Snug

Nursery Tales

Bedroom Stories

Conclusion

Suppliers

Contributing Artists

Acknowledgements

Index

Pages of mind maps on clipboards were at the heart of the planning of this book.

Introduction

For centuries, cloth has been closely connected to our lives at home. Cosy blankets and quilts that provide warmth, curtains that block out light and cold, clothing that keeps us warm, protects our modesty and expresses our identity, towels that dry, cloths that cover and protect and squares of fabric that wipe away dust, dirt and emotions – the list is endless. Of course, we can’t overlook the huge joy that decorative textiles bring to the lives of we cloth lovers as we acknowledge our hunger for creating, collecting and displaying beautiful pieces of cloth embellished with stitch.

This book explores the concept of ‘home’ and uses it as a theme to create personal textile art. Its aim is to encourage you, the reader, to explore your personal thoughts, stories and emotions of home and to show you how to take these explorations forward into stitching your own cloth stories.

Chapter One looks at creating threads of thought – my take on mind mapping. This kick-starts your creative process at the outset of any project. It allows you to dig deeply into a subject, often uncovering the emotions and personal stories that I believe are at the heart of creating meaningful art. I find this a wonderful way of capturing thoughts and ideas on paper. It lies at the heart of my creative practice, and indeed the writing of this book.

Creating personal threads of thought is a useful starting point if you wish to work more conceptually, but don’t know where to start. Chapter Two addresses this by showing you how to convey personal thoughts into stitch using three simple components: meaningful materials, words and motifs. These aspects are fully explored throughout the book as I take you through the home, room by room. We start in the kitchen, where I share my making process – in this instance, for creating small cloth collages. These are the steps I take when making most of my artwork, adjusting things here and there depending on the materials I am using and the mood I am creating.

From the kitchen we’ll move on to the scullery, snug, nursery, and end up in the bedroom, where emotions are exposed and vulnerabilities revealed.

Each chapter starts with suggested threads of thought, in the form of a mind map, and this is simply to trigger your own ideas.

My thoughts mostly take me in a nostalgic direction, with memories from childhood and old family ways of life, for example, and this is reflected within my own artwork. However, there are several ideas offered within each mind map that could take you in completely different directions. Believe me, you will find your own. As with any good map, you may find that you are led far away from the subject of home.

I strongly recommend that you keep a pen and paper on hand as you read through this book to catch the thoughts and memories that surface before they vanish.

Visual Thinking

I don’t know about you, but my thinking doesn’t exist in ordered bullet points. Therefore, when I first discovered Tony Buzan’s book How to Mind Map back in 2002 it resonated with me as a brilliant way to capture my rather scattered thoughts on paper, and I used the process regularly in my work life at the time.

However, it wasn’t until six years later, on the first day of my City & Guilds in Experimental Embroidery, when our tutor told us to create a mind map around our chosen theme, that I thought to use this process in my textile work. What a lightbulb moment! It’s a process that I’ve embraced and used ever since.

I love that my thoughts become visible. What has previously been a vague notion whirling around inside my head becomes an actual thing; something of value that can be explored, organized and remembered.

Over the years, I’ve gradually developed the mind-mapping process into a personal way of working that I now call creating threads of thought.

Why capture your thoughts?

The most immediate answer to this question is to remember them. I’m a thinker; I have lots of random thoughts and ideas popping into my head, and as daily life seems to fill my brain’s storage capacity, I need to write things down to remember them.

But there’s much more to it than that.

I find that creating threads of thought allows one thought to lead easily to another. This takes me in unexpected directions, enabling me to explore a subject from many different angles. If I’m willing to take a bit of time, it will lead me far beyond the obvious ideas, and in so doing often uncovers an underlying emotion. For me, this is the essential part for an interesting and absorbing project: I need to feel an emotional connection to it.

To illustrate what I mean, let’s take the theme of ‘home’ and use ‘the kitchen’ as an example.

One approach would be to think about kitchen-related items. I love old china and beautiful teapots, and my life often revolves around the kettle and the next cup of tea. I could therefore decide to stitch a little kitchen piece featuring a teacup and saucer; perhaps a plate with a slice of cake or a biscuit. This would make a pleasing combination that would work well in appliqué and stitch. I can pretty much picture the end result, and it would look rather lovely.

But what would happen if I ignored this first inspiration in favour of exploring further, digging deeper and setting off on a journey for which I have no idea what the end result will be?

Exploring the threads of thought around my kitchen table soon starts to reveal forgotten stories and emotions.

To create my threads of thought, I’d cast my eye around my kitchen and jot down what I see. To me, this is the equivalent of making quick preliminary sketches. For example, currently on my kitchen table is a jar of cutlery, a vase of flowers and a messy pile of letters and papers.

There’s always a pile of envelopes and mail on my table – which, incidentally, drives me mad. It’s mainly bills and junk these days, but I remember when I first left home to start textile college. Aged seventeen, I kept up to date with all the gossip from my friends by writing and receiving letters. There was always a great sense of anticipation when these arrived on my desk in my flat.

Immediately, I have one, or maybe even two, threads of thought to follow.

I love having a bunch of flowers on my table. Now these mainly come from my garden, but I can’t help thinking about when I was newly married with our first baby at the age of twenty-three. My ex-husband and I were very hard up. I used to go around the supermarket mentally adding up the cost of every item as I put it in my basket. If I bought crisps, I couldn’t buy chocolate biscuits, and if I had to buy washing powder then I couldn’t buy any biscuits or treats at all. But one day, several years on, I threw a bunch of tulips into the basket. I actually spent a couple of pounds on flowers – a luxury at the time. We’d made it through the very worst of times financially, marking a significant period in my family life. I remember this story simply by looking at a vase of flowers. To this day, when there are flowers on my table, I have a huge sense of wellbeing. There’s so much personal emotion around that thread of thought.

Hand-stitching on a vintage postcard. Your threads of thought can inspire you to be adventurous in your choice of materials.

Paint sample cards always remind me of planning our future and creating a family home.

Cost of Living, 30 × 30cm (12 × 12in). Using materials to tell a story. While some dress the table with crisp linen napkins, others struggle to put food on it.

However, I can take it further. Thinking back to this time, when we were struggling and counting every penny, makes me think about the many families currently living below the poverty line within the UK and around the world, and the huge increase in dependence on food banks. By following my threads of thought, I’ve found myself thinking socially and politically. This could take me in several completely different directions, far from my original cosy domestic thoughts. This provides me with many strands of inspiration that I may, or may not, choose to pursue.

I could keep going with an endless stream of stories as I allow my thoughts to wander. A glance at the fridge takes me once more to food, and not only the sense of appreciation of having enough, but also to growing, sourcing, allotments versus air miles, countries of origin, animal welfare, favourite recipes, different cultures, family traditions. I could carry on, and I ’ve not even left the vegetable drawer!

You’ll find that by working on your own threads of thought you’ll access memories, stories and emotions that lead you through each stage of making. If you find the curiosity and willingness to take time to see where your initial idea takes you, you’ll create art that is personal and heartfelt. For me, this is deeply satisfying.

Tools and materials

Paper

I like every part of my making process to be stimulating, so my choice of paper is important to me. I gravitate towards old and discarded paper, and have a particular love of brown parcel paper cut or torn into manageable-sized sheets. I clip these together on a clipboard for working.

Finished pages can be glued, taped or stitched into a sketchbook to organize them, or machine-stitched together into a makeshift book.

Of course, you can work straight into a sketchbook if you wish, or use pristine white or coloured paper – whatever sets your heart fluttering.

For many years I created my threads of thought on the backs of used envelopes. I found that if I worked straight into a sketchbook page, I could easily get side-tracked. I fretted that my writing wasn’t ‘pretty’ enough, or that my layout wasn’t ‘arty’ enough, and I’d find myself editing my thoughts before capturing them on paper. This didn’t happen with an old envelope.

But use whatever works for you – some people draw their mind maps on their tablet or computer.

Threads of thought jotted down on an old envelope went on to inspire Not Just Blue on page 120.

Pens

I like to have two or three colours of pen, including a highlighter in a colour that will stand out from my main writing.

Additional items

Additional pieces of scrap paper or luggage labels are useful for adding notes. I collect offcuts from other projects – lined papers, vellum, graph paper – and keep these to hand in a tin. I like to use these to add extra information and notes, particularly if I am collating everything into a sketchbook.

Gather pens and papers that you love using to create your own threads of thought.

Getting Started

The process of mind mapping or creating threads of thought is simple. Try not to overthink or censor your thoughts, and write quickly without steering them in any particular direction. The key is to allow words to flow until they feel forced, and then stop.

Let’s start our journey around the house by going back to the kitchen: the hub of the household for many.

• Start by writing the word ‘kitchen’ in the centre of your page. Take yourself to your kitchen, or imagine yourself there looking around.

• Quickly jot down the things that immediately catch your eye until you have five or six headings – perhaps items like table, fridge, sink, washing machine, cooker and shelves. Write all around your central title, leaving space in between. Each time you write something, draw a line from the word kitchen to connect it.

• Next, look at everything you have written and choose one title that attracts your attention. Highlight it in some way, perhaps with a different-coloured pen.

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