quilting and the social sciences

Dragon hide no 1

Posted on January 1, 2016 by Ann Rippin

The theme of my favourite conference, SCOS, this year is The Animal, and my grate frend, Beatriz and I have decided to do some work together. We are going to make a piece each week for twenty-five weeks, (deep breath) based on the dragon. Beatriz mainly works on paper and in mixed media, and so she will paint; I am going to use a lot of cloth. We are working on the dragon because it is the SCOS emblem, and that of many of the cities we have visited with the conference over the years. We thought a mythological beast might bring something extra to the proceedings next year in Uppsala.

So this is my first offering. I made it over Christmas when I had plenty of time to do colonial knots in front of the tv. I decided to do a dragon pelt. It is a variation on clamshell patchwork. When patchwork had its big revival in the 1970s, the how-to books were full of how to do this form of piecing. If you look closely at them, however, the finished items are really pretty small. This is because it is really fiddly and time-consuming and requires the ability to get a smooth curve on every single piece. There is often a reproduction of this piece of antique clamshell, which I think is in the Victoria and Albert’s collection:

That sort of green piping suggests to me that this was made by someone with a great deal of leisure who wanted to show her fine needlework skills to the marriage market. Be that as it may, the examples in the books are usually cushions, spectacle cases, bag flaps and, surprisingly often, owl chests.

I decided to avoid the tricky piecing and gathering that long curved edge by making mine out of felt:

This is very cheap felt from Hobbycraft. I would have liked to have used some of the gorgeous handmade woollen felt that I see at the quilt shows, but just after Christmas a trip to the retail park was pretty much all that was on offer, so I decided to use this pretty nasty acrylic stuff. It has a nasty, almost squeaky texture, and it only comes in pretty garish colours, but it is really forgiving. I stitched the clamshells onto some old curtain interlining:

and stitched it down with what looks like black, but which is actually a very dark brown, embroidery floss, two strands. Both fabrics are springy which meant I could pull the clamshells about to fit as much as I liked. Then I decorated with deliberately free-hand cut contrasting circles and put them on with straight stitch and colonial knots. I always use colonial knots since I had an impromptu tutorial at the Festival of Quilts with Sandie Lush. The are much easier to do than french knots and they hardly ever go wrong.

I wanted a really folkartsy feel to this piece.

I wanted to invoke the embroidery that I had grown up with, but also to make the piece feel like something you might find tucked away in an ethnographic museum somewhere.

I was thinking about the sort of embroidery on the right-hand side of this instruction booklet which I found on the web, the sort of thing my mother did in the seventies in her modern free-embroidery classes. My attempt was the opposite of fine needlework. Overall, I think it worked quite well to give me a dragon pelt:

I can’t help thinking that a dragon pelt is a good thing to have. I am sure that one like this would be protective, which is not a bad thing to have at the beginning of the new year. Dragons as protectors is something that Beatriz and I want to look at because it is the other side of dragons as hoarders and fierce, attacking defenders. So in some ways, this is a (very small) safety blanket.

Fabric pictures of houses

Posted on October 1, 2015October 1, 2015 by Ann Rippin

Quick post today.

Yesterday was the first event on the schedule that I have drawn up with my visiting US quilt scholar academic, Marybeth Stalp. As part of the workshop, I made up some packs for people to do some sewing who weren’t ‘self-identified’ stitchers. I made some samples to show them what they could make with the packs and the extra materials I had provided. The theme was around the domestic and what happens when your hobby turns slightly serious. We had a great afternoon, and here are the samples, pictures of houses or homes, to go with the theme of the day:

House and home

Posted on August 30, 2015 by Ann Rippin

This is a quick post today, to some extent to show I am still alive.

I am planning a series of events with a visiting quilter from the US, Marybeth Stalp, and one of them involves a workshop in which we will invite participants to make something as we are talking. I thought that it would be nice to have a domestic theme, and that we could make houses. Houses have nice simple shapes and are something we can all have a go at making recognisable. So I have been making some samples. This is my first attempt. The house itself has got to be achievable over the course of the workshop, but I know from experience that people are going to ask what they can do with them. So I put this one on a backing fabric and all of a sudden it became a tree house, so I added some leaves and a bird. It’s become a bird tree house. I am really interested in that conversation with the materials, when the picture tells you what it wants. This one wanted to be a bit whimsical, and possibly, and this might be fanciful, it wanted to remind me of the importance of living creatures and their needs for home as well us humans.

As usual, this is made entirely from scrap fabric which would otherwise go into landfill, including the thread which came from surplus floss for embroidery kits. The bead for the eye and the button for the doorknob came from a tin my mother found at the back of a shelf.

Alison Moger at Bristol Quilters

Posted on June 5, 2015 by Ann Rippin

This post is about lovely Alison Moger’s visit to Bristol Quilters last night, but it is also about synchronicity and that feeling that the whole world is coming together to help you in your work, which is a bit delusional, but most definitely seems to happen to people when they are in ‘flow’ with a project.

Alison Moger is textile artist who is interested in community narratives, specifically the narratives of families and place. She makes pieces about women’s lives and concerns, working on recycled domestic textiles such as tablecloths, tea towels, tray cloths and shawls. She then prints and embroiders and burns and bleaches and patches them into textiles which capture the story she wants to tell. The stories are about women’s lives and how they have changed over the past couple of decades. She has done commissioned work on hospital wards for people with Alzheimers making wallpaper from blown up stitched pieces which allowed the patients to navigate the space through pictures but also to remember how they used to do embroidery themselves. She did what sounds like fascinating work in South Wales with families from the area affected by the recent wave of young people’s suicides to celebrate what was good about the community and to commemorate the dead.

She is Welsh herself, and makes pieces to preserve Welsh culture. So there were pieces about the ‘Fair People’ who had, like herself, blond hair and were mistrusted in a community of the dark-haired, and stories from the Mabinogion with its attendant seasonal customs such as the skeleton horse who seems to have been some sort of trick or treat character. She also talked about going on holiday to Porthcawl on the coal lorry when the holiday-makers took their own furniture on the truck to camp with. The posh person with the caravan became the leader of the field kitchen. Then they all waited for the lorry to return home. I liked her idea of working into and onto tea towels because women often work out their problems while doing the washing up, and her invaluable advice, ‘Don’t go out with a man from Bridgend Road, especially if he keeps greyhounds.’

So, it was a fascinating talk, and the work was really lovely. But over and above that, I was intrigued to see just how closely our interests overlapped. I am interested in textiles and their connections to women’s lives and identities. I am increasingly interested in memory and aging. And I am getting involved in working on community pieces which will have some connection to changing the world around me. I had had a great conversation with a colleague about this at the university earlier in the day. It felt like the universe telling me I was on the right path and to keep going as there are allies and helpers out there. That is a bit Californian wacky-woo-woo New Age for me, but it was a good feeling.

Under lock and key

Posted on May 24, 2015 by Ann Rippin

(Please note: this is one of my slightly more academic posts – continue reading at your own risk of terminal boredom!)

One of the reasons that I like using textiles as part of my academic work is that it slows things down. We are under tremendous pressure to produce published articles and this cuts down the time we have to consider what we are doing. Reflection is a bit of a thing of the past. This is fine for research which deals in quantitative data where analysis is largely mechanical and carried out by computers crunching numbers, but work which deals with ideas and the complexity of lived experience often needs a bit more time to ‘cook’. The textile pieces provide this space and allow all sorts of things to emerge.

I had a case in point last week. I am becoming very interested in what historians call the ‘long eighteenth century’, that is a period roughly from The Glorious Revolution (1688) to the Battle of Waterloo (1815). I became interested in this through my work on Laura Ashley and the second phase of her design aesthetic which draws on this period, but, as I have done my research, I have become fascinated by the period as a consumer revolution, when shopping became a real element of social life. All of this is a preamble to talking about keys.

I have long used keys on my textiles, such as this really early piece which has a band of tiny keys on the right hand side:

This is from a suite of five small quilts, several of which featured keys:

The piece was about confession and secrets. For me the most obvious symbol for secrets is a key. I also like the duality of them – they lock and unlock. They can be symbols of dead ends – the locked door, or opportunities as the door unlocks. Keys are a significant metaphor in our language. In my first job, in the dark ages, we talked about keyman insurance. In my current occupation we have keynote speakers, and talk about the key work on the subject. In the case studies we use to teach strategy there is often a key fact which unlocks the case. In education in general, our children go through key stages. I have some problem with this. When I was a very little girl I thought you learned languages instantly by being given the translation key which transformed English into French and so on, and we see what a mess that can lead to with the translation programmes available to us now which lead to garbled approximations of a text. I dislike this notion that education is an event – passing a keystone – rather than a unpredictable process. Information, I suspect can be acquired to order – how to strip down an engine, for example, but wisdom and knowledge take a bit longer to acquire. But this notion that there is a key which will unlock the world for us if we just look long and hard enough for it, is deeply engrained in our thinking about education. George Elliot satirised it in Middlemarch with Casaubon’s fruitless, lifelong search for the Key to all Mythologies, a search for arcane knowledge. He died suffering from this delusion. Douglas Adams subsequently satirised this in his ‘Casaubon Delusion’ in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The delusion is that we can overcome uncertainty by finding the key to all knowledge. Keys and knowledge, then, are closely linked – locked into each other, perhaps.

So, I was a bit surprised when I was reading Amanda Vickery’s excellent book on Georgian life: Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England to read her comments on keys and their importance in Georgian homes. She argues that keys became almost synonymous with women.

The association of keys with women is archaeological. Anglo-saxon women were buried with keys. A collection of keys hanging from the waist was a female ornament from at least the Renaissance. Eighteenth-century pickpocketing trials reveal that keys were commonly found along with money, teaspoons, thimbles and scissors, pieces of jewellery and handkerchiefs in women’s tie on pockets. Small padlocks can be found amongst the tokens vouchsafed by desperate mothers (probably servants) when they surrendered their infants to the London Foundling Hospital in the mid-eighteenth century. In paintings, the bundle of keys was the attribute of Martha, the patroness of housewives. Trial responsibility for the keys was part of female training. (Vickery, 2009: 45)

And giving up the keys was a ceremonial passing over of power either from a sacked and disgraced housekeeper or a mother handing over her son’s inheritance. Vickery is led to this consideration of keys through her examination of privacy in the eighteenth-century home. Essentially there was none. The only private space anyone, other than the very pinnacle of the elite classes, had was their locked box, to which they alone held the key.

I was struck when I was making the early pink quilt at the top of this post by all the keys on it, which I don’t really remember consciously putting there. This led me to thinking about the most important key bearer of them all in my upbringing: St Peter. Peter holds the keys to the kingdom, and this is a very interesting dynamic. He decides who gets into heaven and who is refused admission. Here he is on the Vatican, overlooking (I think) his cathedral in Rome, clutching his key:

For me, then, St Peter is a symbol of patriarchy, the keeper of the rulebook which keeps social order in place, and that social order has man at the head of the faith and the family. His word is absolute; there is no getting round him.

But, I think that Vickery also gives us a timely reminder of the connection between keys and women. People frequently ask me where I get all the stuff for my quilts:

I am given a lot of stuff (for which I am very grateful), but I also scour bead shops wherever I go. I like using pieces which remind me of good trips, and some of the keys in these photos were bought in Denmark and Brighton. What is fascinating about this is that the key is a very popular charm, as they are known, in bead shops which largely cater for young women who make jewellery. The prevalence of key charms, which are also on sale in the big out of town box stores such as HobbyCraft, suggests that there is a ready market for them. Young women – and longer in the tooth ones like me, must connect at some level with keys. They appear to have a universal appeal, along with hearts and flowers and birds. Clearly they are a supplied choice: we can only buy what we are offered for sale, but, their prevalence suggests that they are popular and have meaning of some description for the women who buy them. It is as if, and that is a phrase that a proper academic would never use, they belong to a shared unconscious repertoire of images, and one with a complex set of gendered associations: inclusion and exclusion, public and private, hope and denial.

I am not sure what, if anything, to do with this. One thing might be to look at old quilts and see if they have this imagery in amongst the freemasonry and the flora and fauna, to see if this is a recent resurgence in use of key imagery. Another might be to do some empirical research – perish the thought – and ask women why they are attracted to keys as design motifs. Perhaps they will talk about the five year diaries with tiny locks and keys that most women of my age were presented with at some point. I don’t really know, and I don’t know if it’s worth pursuing. Any ideas would be welcome.

Finally, I couldn’t find a way to fit this in, but one of the images I remember from reading books at school was this one from E. Nesbit’s Five Children and It, published in 1902, in which It speaks ‘in a harsh, grating voice like large rusty keys being turned in locks’. Which is a great image to end on.

Reference

Amanda Vickery (2009) Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

Quilt chic

Posted on February 23, 2015 by Ann Rippin

For my birthday I asked for a copy of the The Decemberists’ new album. I am not a big fan, but I really wanted the CD for the cover, which looked to me like one of the wonderful nineteenth-century applique quilts which I have recently been studying. It turns out not to have been a quilt, but a painting. According to the website plans are in hand to make the two paintings into quilts and there is a competition to win them. I would just like the pattern:

I think it gives a good indication of what these quilts would have looked like when they were new. We are used to seeing the faded and worn versions, but they would probably have sparkled when the fabric was new.

On the subject of the old and romantically faded and worn, this is also taken from ‘popular music’. I saw this poster last year and have been meaning to post it ever since:

Never mind Mr Mayer, let’s see more of the quilt!

I am fascinated by the way quilts are used to reference Americana, rootsiness and home. If you want to suggest heritage, even if you are going to subvert it, get a quilt.

What I learned about identity from Jan Hassard

Posted on February 9, 2015 by Ann Rippin

The speaker at Bristol Quilters last week was the lovely and very talented Jan Hassard. She has been a member of Bristol Quilters for years, and so it was nice to see her body of work as it developed; it was something of a retrospective, as they call it in the fine art world.

Jan’s work couldn’t be more different from mine. Her work is totally precise, planned, ordered, structured and disciplined. Mine is slapdash and improvised. But even so, it is glorious because it has so much beautiful colour and vivacity.

I am not posting many photos, because a. I didn’t take a camera – even my phone, and b. she was talking about the increasing phenomena of work on the net being stolen and copied, or just used without permission.

The riot of colour which was a tonic for the soul aside, I enjoyed Jan’s talk for its insistence on craft, standards, high levels of finish and presentation, many concerns which I would like Craftivists to take into account. I loved it even more because it seemed to me to be the perfect riposte to the anti-nostalgia rally that I seem to keep running into recently. It is like there is something deficient in people who want to hold the past with affection. They should be letting go and moving on. They should be facing up to the realities of the present and not seeking solace in the imaginary golden past of tea and crumpets and church picnics. Nostalgia is the new opium of the people, according to this analysis, and women are particularly susceptible. At the same time we hear lots of stuff about identity (see, for example, Grayson Perry’s wonderful recent series on British television). Most of the identity theory at the moment is about our fugitive, unstable, protean identities, constructed only in relation to others (I am different as a daughter, wife, friend, university academic, driver, customer, quilter and so on). Jan’s talk, however, included her experience of being a very small child in the war and being bombed out of her home. Her parents knew how to count between hearing the bomb and its exploding. So they managed to get her to safety but the house was destroyed: everything gone in an instant. Later on, as dispossessed person she got a Canadian Red Cross quilt. These were utility quilts made by Canadian women to aid British allies who had lost everything.

Jan talked about sleeping under hers until she was about eleven. One day her mother just threw the quilts away. To a collector like Jan in later years, this was devastating, but to her mother it made perfect sense. She did not want to be reminded of the horrible period in her life when she lost everything. Jan now acquires these Red Cross quilts. I don’t think that this is fuzzy nostalgia of the sort that fuels our delight in Downtown Abbey. I think this is a serious identity project. Our identities might be shifting and relational and contextual and contingent, but they are built on experience that matters to us. We cannot just throw off that quilt and become post-modern, or worse yet post-human. And, once again, cloth plays a major part on our view of ourselves as people in the world.

Public engagement – Thinking Futures Workshop and Glamorgan Quilters

Posted on November 10, 2014November 10, 2014 by Ann Rippin

It has been one of the busiest two weeks of my life, which is why I haven’t posted anything recently. First my lovely PhD student, Zara, had her viva. Although this is her oral exam on her thesis, I was quietly nervous as there is no way of predicting what questions will come up. I had prepared her as well as I could with my colleague, Mary, but there is still unpredictability involved. In the event she sailed through it and the examiners loved her work. I am delighted for her.

Then, the following day, I went and gave a talk to the Glamorgan Quilters. They are a lovely group and a delight to talk to. One of them gave me some tiny scraps of Laura Ashley fabric which I don’t have in my collection and which I intend to do something with. Another member brought this lovely bag to show me:

I love everything about this bag. The piece is like a time capsule of what we were doing in the 70s and 80s and the handles are just delightful as is the quilter who brought it along.

After the talk I went into Cowbridge with one of my colleagues, Sheena, who had come along to support me. She took me to a sort of indoor antiques/vintage market with a tea room on the side. I got a packet of Laura Ashley prints, and somehow managed to spend £17 without blinking. We had a great time. Cowbridge is the place to go for swanky dress and shoe shops, by the way. I got off lightly in retrospect with my £17.

Wednesday was my Thinking Futures Day. This is part of a ten-day-long programme of events put on by the Faculty of Social Sciences and Law in which we try to reach people who wouldn’t normally come into the University to hear about our research. I did a workshop on patchwork and quilting and the contribution that quilters make to the fabric of our culture and society. I held it at the Friends Meeting House where Bristol Quilters meets, and we had two wonderful speakers, Harriet Shortt from UWE, and Jenny Hall from Bournemouth University. They were both great, speaking very passionately about their work. I talked a bit about the academic study of patchwork and quilting, and gave an update on my Laura Ashley research. I notice there are a lot of ‘I’s and ‘me’s’ in that paragraph, but really it was a communal day.

I really wanted it to be a bit of a party for Bristol Quilters, to celebrate their contribution to society, as well as to my research. So, we, my Grate Frend Ceri, and I tried to add some little touches to make it feel like a series of small treats as well as an educational day. Ceri made these wonderful biscuits:

The stamp set comes from Lakeland. These were a great hit. I made parkin, which I always associate with Bonfire Night which is when we held the workshop. Alison, Stephanie and Ceri contributed homemade cakes and biscuits and traybakes for afternoon tea. Ceri and I had already had an afternoon making posies for the table, and in the process realising that a second career as florists was probably not for us:

This is the pile of things I had to take in for the day:

We were aiming for amplitude and generosity:

As well as cake and sandwiches, there were notebooks for taking notes in the morning, and cards with vintage fabric and needles ready-threaded in the afternoon. I’ll post some pictures of those separately. There was also fabric very kindly donated by Flo-Jo in Bristol in the afternoon for our sewing bee:

People worked on a variety of things, but the most popular were the little coverlets for the premature babies unit in Southmead Hospital in Bristol. These are 16″x20″ unwadded patchworks which we donate to the unit. The mothers get to keep the quilts no matter what the outcome, and there is always a demand for a steady stream of replacement quilts. They are exactly the right size for a group project like this. Although I think only one top was finished completely, Ruth Case, one of the Bristol Quilters, very generously volunteered for finishing duty.

Here are some more images from the day:

And here is my friend Beatriz talking to Eva, the organiser:

I didn’t take as many photos as I would have liked of the speakers because I was too busy listening, but here is the marvellous Jenny and her quilt:

And I didn’t have my camera when Harriet was speaking so this is a photograph of a doll that her mother made of her in her wedding dress that she brought to show us:

Finally, I spend a lot of time trying to find writers who have something sensible and useful to say about leadership. There isn’t much out there, I think, that isn’t about people desperate to justify wanting to be in charge. They should hang their heads in shame and come and look at the self-managing teams which effortlessly formed, performed and disbanded throughout the day, without my having to ask, to make sure that everything went smoothly. Not least of these were the tea and coffee makers and the washers-up, real unsung heroic examples of distributed leadership. Thanks to all of them: