Good patterns this weekend

place + pattern = enchantment

Embroidery collages

Finland, munsala folkdrakt and Marimekko

Here is my beautiful friend Karin in the foldrakt of her village Munsala in Northern Finland.

Folkdraft means people's dress. The blue wool of Karin's skirt and waistcoat were handwoven by a neighbour in the village, Aira Mommo and the blouse and embroidery made by her mother Birgit.



Karin wore this costume to local dance competitions, where different villagers can be told apart by the colour of their weave or the embroidery on their shirt. These dances must be a wonderful sight - Karin says the costume is very hot to wear but makes you feel really special. People also wear their folkdraft to weddings and other special social occasions

On my map, I've embroidered some of Birgit's poppy flowers onto a piece of her open work and onto the deep blue Airo's cloth. The rest of Finland (and some of Denmark) is made from the famous and rather ubiquitous Marimekko pattern Unikko or poppy.



It was only as I was sewing that I realised how the flat colouring and bold outline of Maija Isola's design is so obviously inspired by the kind of folkdraft made by Birgit and Airo: they are not infact different patterns but part of one and the same design.

Many thanks to Mikki for giving me her Marimekko bag to cut up.

Map of patterns - Palestine and the impossibility of edges

Here is a picture of me in the West Bank town of Ramallah in 1993. I still have fond memories of my time there and the friends I made.

I've used a piece of indigo-dyed fabric to cover Palestine and Israel and I've embroidered it with a cross stitch pattern copied from a Palestian dress given to me for my 18th birthday.

Palestinian embroiders have a very illustrious history and culture: every region has it's own particular stitches and patterns. The women of Bethlehem area learned the couching stitch from the Crusaders while the women in Jaffa, working in the fields and orchards, used patterns inspired by nature, like the cypress tree. The 'Cypress Tree' occurs in many guises - with or without branches, with different shaped branches, even up side down. (I think you can see this upside down 'Cypress Tree' pattern on my dress)

The women of the villages that remain inside Israel tend to no longer embroider their costumes; but many of the women of the West Bank and Gaza living in refugee camps, especially those of village origin - still embroider their dresses, now as a way of earning an income more than for their own personal use.

The women in Ramallah use a remarkable stitch that is precisely the same when looked at from the front and from the back. You can see from my dress that the work looks very beautiful - even on the wrongside.

I have a great interest in wrongside sewing and am nearly always more interested in 'the back' than in 'the front.' This is because I feel the 'the back' or 'the wrongside' tells me so much more than 'the front' or 'the rightside.'

For example - how the makers fingers travelled, how her mind moved - consciously or unconsciously, where the hidden joins or mends were made...the wrongside gives me clues about how a whole piece of cloth has been divided and then fitted together again and most importantly for me - how the edges have been joined together and made sense of.

This special Ramallah stitch gives nothing away and that is its particular magic.

Map of patterns - Gunta Stozl and Ethel Mairet

I am collecting patterns from around the world and sewing them into a big Map of thte World. My map started when I discovered that my favourite skirt (Liberty Furnishing fabric c.1970ish) was infact based on the weavings of Gunta Stozl, the famous Bauhaus weaver, in 1930's Germany.

Most people know this pattern as a waxed fabric as a waxed cloth which they ate their dinners off in the 1970's, but it began as a weaving in 1930's in Weimar. You can see it on my map aroundabout where Germany should be.

I found out more about Gunta. How she came to visit Ethel Mairet, the woman who revivived English handweaving in the 1930's at her South Downs workshop, The Gospels. And how they experimented together - weaving wool from the local South Downs sheep together with plastic and cellophane.

I don't know how long they spent together, the pioneering Modernist and the more severe grand-dame of the Arts and Crafts movement - but you can still see the results of their labour in the myseum at Ditchling, fabrics which are a fascinating forerunner of todays textiles, combining the natural and the synthetic. Here is one of Ethel's handwoven jackets.

Ethel is fascinating for many other reasons. Before moving to Ditchling, she lived in Ceylon with her husband Ananda Coomaraswamy documenting the dissapearing arts and crafts of the island. To them, the Ceylon of the early 1900's, seemed like an ancient medieval society of priests and craftsmen, united in spiritual life and practice - untainted by the superficiality of modern industry and commerce. For them it was like a vision out of William Morris's 'News from Nowhere.'

Ethel was most inspired by the embroidery she discovered: she undertook rigorous technical research, took thousands of photos and persuaded the local British-run technical schools to abandon Berlin work and Victorian samplers and instead revive local embroidery skills.

On my map, I've covered Sri Lanka with the kinds of stiches and colours that Ethel so loved. You can find them in 'Medieval Sinhalese Arts', the book her husband wrote and handprinted at their Arts and Crafts home in the Cotswolds, using one of the original Kelmscott presses.