JOLLIETEXTILES

These nine little patches began as a project that I have been thinking about for a long while. Some years ago, at the Knitting and Stitching Show, I had admired a collection of mini textile pieces, each individually framed on a large wall space. There must have been between fifty and a hundred small pieces, but each linked with the others. I’ve always wanted to do something similar and four or five years ago bought nine frames with a similar project in mind, working on the notion that I would never have enough wall space for anything on a grander scale.

Whilst walking the SW Coastal Path I tried to pick up a small found object every day. I did forgot on a couple of occasions, but as we were walking for seventy four separate days, I had amassed quite a collection by the end of the walk. Using the frames to inform the colour of the patches, I picked some eco dyed fabric as the base and added little bits of painted and printed cotton, plus some little pieces of commercial fabric and some odd scraps. I stitched them very simply with straight stitches mainly, adding various found objects that suited the backgrounds. If you look carefully you can see that there is some green stitching on each patch – straight stitches with a little rhombus every so often – and this is to replicate the coastal path route as it is marked on the Ordnance Survey maps that we have used so much.

When the patches were finished I was laying them out to photograph them, still intending to mount them in the nine individual frames. After all, the whole idea was to use them! Seeing the nine patches altogether though made me realise that they needed to be put together as a set. I am going to recycle an old exhibition frame, a piece that has sat under the bed since it was displayed! It’s a really nice box frame so I think the patches will look good, but I still have to make use of the nine little frames. Hope it doesn’t take another four of five years to come up with an idea!