Twitter is an interesting and remarkably random thing.  As part of my artist in residence project at Burton Constable Hall I had some social media targets and so I had returned to my long dormant Twitter account.  I needed to work out how to use it and specifically to best promote my somewhat niche art practice.  (If you are reading this in isolation I’d better explain.  I make print and textile art inspired by Moby Dick and British Historic Arctic Whaling and informed by my travel and research.  Hence my residency at Burton Constable Hall, near Hull, which has a sperm whale Skelton mentioned in Moby Dick).

So I started tweeting and liking (though it was favouriting back then), retweeting and following, and being followed.  It’s been hugely useful for plugging in to all sorts of networks and particularly the more traditional textile heritage that I’d not really engaged with before.  And I saw some intriguing tweets about something called #StitchOff with some interesting embroidery patterns from around the time of Jane Austen from The Lady Magazine.  There was a call out for anyone who was interested to use one of the patterns as inspiration with the chance that it would be put on display as part of the Emma at 200 exhibition at Chawton House in the spring.  I had my show opening at Easter, hardly had any pieces made for that so I thought this should interesting I’ll give it a go!

A little knot of people were posting images of their work in progress, all of which looked fabulous and rather intimidating but if mine didn’t work no one need ever know… I chose the waistcoat pattern because none of the samples I’d see seemed to be using that one and it had a linear design which appealed to me.   I made a sample on grey polycotton which I quite liked and learned quite a bit about how the pattern worked. I had decided on a piece of blue and white striped shirt of my husband’s that was ready for recycling when I had one of those ‘slap head, duh’ moments – found maps that I print on fabric are a big part of my practice so off to the Internet to see if I could find a map of the right period area around where the exhibition would be.

And I did.  It was a two part strip map with a road running down either side and a line done the middle which echoed the central line in the waistcoat pattern.  I printed the map out on my inkjet printer onto A4 sized cotton.   Using fabric marker pens I had traced the design onto a scrap of white crystal sheer fabric and had gone round my collection of fabrics testing it against them.  I tried it against the map and liked it.  I tweeted a photo of it and got a surprisingly positive response.

And then had the dilemma of what piece of sheer to use?  I rifled through my extensive collection looking at two tone pieces but found one changed colour from green to purple down a well defined line which was perfect.  I then chose the threads based on how the samples had worked in  greens, reds and pink/purples.  A rather nice variable thread would make a good backbone to the pattern.

To be honest after the thinking, planning and printing the sewing felt like the quickest bit.  Freehand machine embroidery is a bit like that.  It’s like drawing with thread, except the drawing tool (needle and thread) stays still and you move the fabric around.  I mostly sorted a bit of an issue with puckering (I hate using hoops) by inking in a slightly wider border with a black fabric marker.  I had mounted the map on some medium weight vilene for stability before sewing and I sewed some pale grey felt as backing (which also hid the back!). I ran round the hemmed sheer with a soldering iron to stop it fraying.  This gives the edge an interesting texture and can also be useful for breaking up/hiding any small inconsistencies in the sewing.

My tweet of a photo of my finished piece is at time of writing it is my most viewed tweet!  I was suitably thrilled to see photos of it in the display with all of the other works and will travel down to see the exhibition and maybe even meet up its some of the other makers (I think we are mostly following each other on Twitter so hopefully may keep in touch).

So from seeing some tweets all sorts of things have cascaded and I suspect will continue to.

And I got the new work for my exhibition all done in time, and it opens Easter Saturday!

You can read about the project (including my piece) here