A gentle art for gentle women.

Sewing, the art for gentle women, or so I thought. I have had my share of frustrations these last few months, what with dropping the iron, sewing wonky seams, unpicking until the fabric is frayed, then pricking my finger and bleeding on to the material – it has all been very cathartic. But all that paled into insignificance on Tuesday when I put the needle right through my left index finger and was running around with my hand above my head, swathed in tissues to try and stop the bleeding… It wasn’t actually all that sore, though the sound it made was sickening. I think I was in shock! Anyway I covered it in Betadine and put on 3 plasters and took a Paracetamol and survived. The needle had broken and I couldn’t find the point, maybe it’s still in my finger!

Anyway I have finished the crazy quilt, and it really is quite nice, and now I am embarking on a brand new topic… of creating a linear landscape quilt. I watch the lessons on the computer and then I am supposed to go and ‘do’. So far I have just ‘watched’ but I have collected some fabric together that I can possibly use. I may start next week.

After the trauma of the needle incident, I thought of how often my thoughts have gone to the grave as I sew. The sampler quilt was going to be my shroud, the others were heirlooms, and this new fancy one is like a coat of many colours… they all seem to be a vehicle for memory, for lasting after I have gone, and it is all rather macabre.

I read about some pioneer ladies in America, and of how they sewed their quilts from sugar bags and scraps, and created some wonderful patterns. They were mainly serviceable items, and I had to smile, as Mrs Patton no longer used quilts on her bed. Instead, she had used an electric blanket for the last ten or fifteen years!

‘I make quilts for the beauty, and not for the service,’ Mrs. Stanley said. ‘I just appreciate beautiful quilts, I do, really. When you appreciate something, you want to possess some of it… Possession is a whole lot, isn’t it, in life? Possessing things? I believe it is with me.’

(Me too, I find it very hard to give my quilts away!)

So they sewed to commemorate an occasion, a birth, a marriage or a festival, and they got together and shared the experience. Others sewed to adorn their houses, with quilts full of symbols rather like the altar pieces of Italy. I remember learning about the analogy of flowers in religious paintings, and the representation of saints by their significant signs: Saint Peter had the keys, Saint Catherine the wheel, Saint Sebastian the arrows etc. The American quilts show pineapples for hospitality, and pomegranates for fruitfulness.

Stories have always been depicted in thread, there was of course the Bayeux Tapestry that has survived through the centuries ,

and in Scotland we have another great masterpiece that has been made by the collective needles of ladies of Scotland, it is The Great Tapestry of Scotland and is due to go on show in the autumn. My friend Dilly has proudly been part of that endeavour. The finished work will be hung in the Scottish Parliament.

Then I got to thinking about the two famous Scottish needlewomen who left their marks with their needles. Mary Queen of Scots used embroidery as a form of therapy and communication. Most of the motifs she depicted were copied from the wood-cut illustrations of emblem books and natural histories. She sewed during her time of imprisonment by Elizabeth and she left the most amazing piece of work called the Marian Hanging which comprised 37 blocks of her most famous pieces.

The other famous Scottish lady was Phoebe Traquair (1852-1936).

Phoebe’s work adorns many churches and other buildings in Edinburgh, and she is known to be one of the leading Scottish artists of her day. I particularly love her tapestries that hang in the Art Gallery on Princes Street. She made her name internationally after painting the ceiling of the Catholic Apostolic Church in Broughton Street which has been called ‘Edinburgh’s Sistine Chapel’.

Anyway, it is the ‘Progress of the Soul’ that captivated me.

The human soul is represented by an ideal young man dressed in an animal skin, in harmony with the rich pattern of the luxuriant natural world around him. She was inspired by the earlier work of John Donne. Now that man had a mighty problem of separating the soul from the body. He saw the body and soul more as equals, inter-dependent on one another and both reluctant to leave the other. Throughout his poetry and prose, Donne wrestles with defining the relationship between body and soul, but it was not until he became part of the clergy in 1615 that he ‘officially endorsed the view that the soul separated from the body at death’.

His poem ‘Of the Progress of the Soul’ (that later inspired Phoebe) discusses a man who has been beheaded.

By force of that force which before, it wonne, Or as sometimes in a beheaded man, Though at those two Red seas, which freely ran, One from the Trunke, another from the Head, His soule be saild, to her eternall bed, His eies will twinckle, and his tongue will roll, As though he beckned, and cal’d backe his Soul, He graspes his hands, and he puls up his feet, And seemes to reach, and to step forth to meet His soule […]

Donne’s beheaded man is reluctant to part with his soul. In the next few lines of the poem, he compares this wrenching of soul from body both with the jolting sounds of the crack of ice and of a string breaking on a lute.

Right, I got off on a tangent there… but Phoebe’s tapestries are really worth seeing, her work is beautiful, full of luscious colour and texture. She has left a wonderful collection of treasures to see and admire. She led a well-documented life, for she was no shrinking violet.  I do hope she and her soul are at peace and I hope John Donne is too, for he spent his life wrestling with the impossible, trying to make sense of things we cannot know.  To keep to the theme of today, I found it significant that Phoebe designed her own gravestone, and Donne wrote his own elegy.

All this soul-searching came from stabbing my finger! Life, death, heirlooms and shrouds. Oh dearie me, I shall end with Shakespeare…

What is love? ‘Tis not hereafter, Present mirth hath present laughter. What’s to come is still unsure. In delay there lies no plenty, Then come kiss me, sweet and twenty. Youth’s a stuff will not endure.

 And I am surrounded by colour and joy and achievement…