Textiles Transformed E-Book

Mandy Pattullo

• Herausgeber: Batsford
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Seitenzahl: 131

Beschreibung

A guide to transforming found and cherished textiles.Textile artist Mandy Pattullo shows how to source, refashion and repurpose vintage textiles to create beautiful collages and other unique textile objects. There are ideas for embellishment, stitch and appliqué as well as tips for transforming material into impressive quilts, bags, books, tablecloths, tapestry panels and wall hangings and much more.Following the make-do-and-mend and folk art traditions of previous generations, Mandy provides simple instructions for working with a variety of vintage textiles and precious fragments. There are projects for working with quilts, patchworks, linen, lace, wool and even deconstructing pre-loved garments.Each project beautifully demonstrates how fabrics and textiles can find a new and repurposed life and will inspire textile artists to incorporate these past beauties into their own work.

Leseprobe

TextilesTransformed

TextilesTransformed

Thread and Thrift withReclaimed Textiles

Mandy Pattullo

Contents

Introduction

The Basics

CHAPTER ONE: Quilt Love

About Quilts

Quilts as a Base for Textile Collage

Turning Over

Garden Birds

Deconstruction

Book Forms

Patchwork

Take from a Tradition

Quilt Words

Appliqué

Bags

Stitching on Quilts

CHAPTER TWO: Wool Work

Crewel Work

Blankets

Sailors’ Wool Work

Yllebroderier

Canvas Works

Using Needlepoint

Useful and Beautiful

The Back

Darning

Felt

CHAPTER THREE: Linen and Lace

Vintage Embroidery

Handkerchief Art

Cross Stitch

Lace

Lace Books

French Finds

CHAPTER FOUR: Wardrobe

The Little Dress

Suit Yourself

The Shirt

The Headscarf

Ties

Buckles and Belts

Worn by

Conclusion

Artists

Further Reading

Suppliers

Index

Acknowledgements

Introduction

I rent a studio in a converted manse (clergyman’s house) in a pretty village in Northumberland in the north of England. Having worked hard all my life as a teacher, surface pattern designer and mother, I feel I have earned this room of my own where I can surround myself with beautiful fabrics and threads, plug in my headphones and lose myself in constructing textile collages and hand stitching. I seem to have been collaging my whole life, whether that be in the scrapbooks I have been making since I was a young child, creating mood boards for clients and students, curating the mantlepiece in my home or sorting my fabrics into bundles of interesting combinations.

Work in progress at my studio in Northumberland.

I work by hand because I choose to, and I have a deep need to employ my hands to some practical purpose. I garden, cook, sew and play the piano, but making a stitch and patching together pieces of cloth is absolutely integral to who I am. I was probably sewing when I met my husband more than forty years ago and my children would think it odd not to see me combining stitching with having a conversation, watching the TV or relaxing on holiday. I love the whole process: gathering and searching out lovely things, creating colour stories and moods, deciding on the composition and surface decoration and then creating something new. It is not just the slowness of stitching by hand and being ‘in the zone’ when doing it that I love, but also about the power of transforming something by making my own mark on it.

I use a carefully selected collection of old and worn textiles that have been gifted to me or have been sourced at antique textile fairs and flea markets. These are beautiful textiles that hold within them their own story and you might ask why I feel the need to decorate them, cut them up and reassemble them into new pieces. I often wonder why myself, but I think it is about changing the textile surface, taking ownership of it and then re-presenting it so it transforms from something someone once made or wore into a new piece of my own. If I just kept the textiles folded and stored I would probably not look at them very often, but by interacting with them over a period of time I build up a relationship with the cloth and the previous maker as I unpick their stitches, deconstruct their garment or embroidery and use it for myself. The resolved textile piece is then shared and talked about with those who come into my studio, shared to a wider audience across the world through social media and then might act as an inspirational sample to those I teach. Is this not a better thing than the original being seen and owned by only me?

I hesitate to use the words upcycling or recycling in relation to what I do as I do not really make anything that is useful or serves a purpose. I prefer to apply the word reworking as I am using what I have found, items that have had a previous life and, in the end, what I make doesn’t have to be useful if it feeds my soul and is a sustainable craft technique. In this book I hope to convey some of the excitement I feel at the transformative process of changing a textile piece, and encourage you to do the same. You will not be able to re-create what I do as everything I source and make is unique, but I hope I can give you the confidence to have a go and inspire you to rework things you own, to find in them the tender details and add a few of your own.

The Basics

Fabrics

You will see that I mostly work with beautiful old fabrics and pieces of quilt. Some of the fabrics are inherited or gifted, many are charity-shop garments or family clothing, such as my husband’s worn-out shirts, that have been taken apart. I try to work using only what I already have. Look in charity shops for blankets, domestic embroidered items, headscarves and quality vintage garments. For truly vintage and antique textiles, including quilts, I make special trips to vintage textile fairs, auctions, flea markets and brocantes. I do not expect to get something for nothing and am always willing to pay a reasonable amount for a quilt or exquisite piece of embroidery that I know both my students and I can make the most of. There are lots of people selling vintage textiles through Ebay, Etsy and Instagram now, so if you are committed to having a go at making work like that illustrated in this book, search it out and start to assemble a collection. You can also ‘age’ new fabric if you knock back the colour by dipping it in a tea solution or overdyeing using natural dyes that are not damaging to the environment. You might like to mix in some more contemporary fabrics such as patchwork cottons; companies like French General (See here) have quilting fabrics inspired by beautiful antique French designs that I find mix well with my genuinely antique pieces.

The sort of fabrics I collect include recycled clothing scraps, wool and quilt pieces.

Textile Collage

Nearly everything I make is patched or collaged together onto a foundation fabric. I wrote about this extensively in Textile Collage (Batsford, 2016) but I would encourage you to have a colour story for all projects; have a piece of fabric or embroidery to incorporate that really makes your heart sing, and work instinctively rather than over-planning. Let your fabrics tumble together – they will find their partners more easily if they are not regimented into boxes containing all the same colour.

Foundations and Attaching

I do not like to embroider within a hoop so everything I work with has to have a foundation fabric firm enough that the stitching will not pull the fabric collage out of shape. I increasingly use a bonded curtain lining, which is fabric on one side with a wadding bonded on to it, and I place the collage materials on the fuzzy wadding side. I find as I stitch together and embroider on to this sort of backing it quilts it as the stitches sink into the two layers underneath. I also use wool felt, old blanket and pieces of thin quilt as foundations for patchworking on to. If you are working with a garment you do not need to consider a background, though if the fabric of the garment is thin or woollen you might need to stretch it into a frame while you work on it.

Everything I make is hand stitched and, unless I have chosen to turn the edges, everything is sewn on to the foundation or garment with either a stab stitch just within the edge of the cloth, or an overcast stitch over the edge of the cloth. You could also attach with buttonhole stitch, cross stitch or herringbone stitch. In the diagrams, the attaching stitches are very obvious, but in reality I use the same colour thread as the fabric to make the stitches as invisible as possible. If I have chosen to turn the edge of the fabric I am appliquéing I use slipstitch in the traditional way.

The embroidered flowers have been attached with overcast stitch.

Stab stitch just inside the border.

Overcast stitch over the border.

Cross stitch and herringbone stitch.

Slipstitch for finger-turned appliqué.

Needles and Pins

I use good-quality sewing needles and change them frequently, particularly if I am sewing into a piece of old quilt, as I find they are blunted by the wadding. I also use fine pins and like to use those without coloured heads as I find the colour distracting when I am composing a piece.

Threads

My threads, unlike my fabrics, are arranged by colour and I use all types of threads apart from very slippery and shiny rayons. I mostly use stranded embroidery thread (floss), coton à broder and coton perle no. 8. I supplement these with some old silk threads I have sourced from French markets and the internet. When I am working on to wool I nearly always use wool threads, particularly crewel and tapestry wools. For fine stitching I might use ordinary sewing thread, the type you would use on a sewing machine.

The stems on these appliquéd flowers have been couched on using a contrasting colour of thread.

Stitch

I love hand stitching but use a limited repertoire of stitches. I find that the stitches listed below give me all the marks I need to make. There are plenty of embroidery instruction books on the market and tutorials online, but before you start a project, if you do not know the stitches, practise first before stitching into your cloth.

I use the stitches to decorate the surface, to blend boundaries by working the stitches across patchworks and I also often heavily repeat stitches, scattering them liberally across a surface. The ones I most frequently use fall into different groups.

Straight stitches: running stitch, backstitch, stem stitch, satin stitch, fern stitch, seed stitch, long stitch, short stitch.

Crossed stitches: cross stitch, St George’s cross stitch, herringbone stitch.

Chained stitches: chain stitch, lazy-daisy stitch, wheatear stitch.

Looped stitches: feather stitch, buttonhole stitch, fly stitch.

Knotted stitches: French knots, bullion knots.

Couching: In couching, a long stitch is laid across the fabric and small stitches are worked over the top of the thread to fasten it in place. Traditionally, the long stitch is made with a thick or precious thread (metallic) and the small stitches worked with a thinner or standard thread but you can use the same thread for both.

CHAPTER ONE

Quilt Love

Antique and vintage patchwork quilts can be lovely displayed on a bed but many that I source to use are very worn, dirty, unfinished or not to my taste. I transform them by cutting them up and using pieces within my collage work, stitching into them, using them as a base for appliqué and deconstructing them to create new fabrics. Using old quilts has been at the heart of my practice for a very long time and I am as in love with quilts now as I was in 1977 when I first started to make my own. Over the years I have shared many pieces of patchwork and quilting with students, and I like to think I have encouraged them to appreciate the workmanship of the original quilt but then to change its use and place their own marks on to the surface. This chapter encourages you to do the same.

Detail from a scroll-style fabric book (see here).

About Quilts

There is some confusion as to the difference between a quilt and a coverlet so I think it is worth defining this more clearly. A quilt is a sandwich of three layers: fabric, wadding, fabric. The top and bottom cloth and wadding are held together with either stitches or tying. A quilt can be:

Wholecloth: the top fabric is one big piece of cloth.

Strippy: patchwork strips run down the length of the quilt. This type of quilt was common in the North East of England where I work.

Patchwork: little pieces of fabric sewn together to form a whole. Patchwork can be made using a single shape such as a hexagon or diamond repeated, or can be made in blocks, or assembled in a ‘crazy’ fashion. A frame quilt has a central design surrounded by a border, but is still patchwork.

A coverlet, on the other hand, is made of two layers with no wadding. It can still be patchwork and the front and back can still be sewn together with familiar quilting patterns. Coverlets are thinner so are much easier to embroider on to.

It is not easy to source antique quilts, but there are many people now selling small pieces online and these are suitable for experimenting with and having a go at projects similar to those I am going to describe. I use my quilts in a number of ways, depending on the overall colour, what sort of state they are in and how thick the wadding is.

• A piece of quilt can act as a foundation on which to build up a textile collage or appliqué.

• The quilt can be deconstructed through unpicking or cutting away printed fabrics for other uses. This is particularly helpful if you are using a quilt with a very thick wadding as that can be discarded and the patchwork top retained.

• A piece of quilt, and especially coverlets, are a great surface on which to embroider.

• Turn the quilt over. The back might be more interesting than the front.

• Quilts can be upcycled into other products such as bags, brooches, fabric books or cushions.

From left: tailors’ samples quilt, Durham wholecloth quilt, log-cabin quilt, strippy quilt and patchwork coverlet.

Quilts as a Base for Textile Collage

I demonstrated approaches to textile collage in my first book (Textile Collage, Batsford, 2016). It is perhaps enough just to remind you that collage is a word we associate with paper, meaning an assemblage of different elements usually glued to a background. Textile collage is about using a variety of fabrics and textures and applying them to a fabric background. In collaging with paper, text might play an important part and with textiles this could be translated into using perhaps pieces with print or embroidery on them to give surface interest against plainer fabrics. Like paper collage, edges can be torn or cut. In traditional collage the artist may add a further layer of marks through drawing or painting, and with my version, the marks are made with stitches.