Making Zen - No Rules Hand Stitch 27th - 31st May 2024

I have loved, slowing down and making these mini hand stitch experiments. Changing the scale of my work and creating a wonderful meditative flow.
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I filmed my thought process for the upcoming Making Zen Online Retreat and you can watch the video for free at the end of May.
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For full details and your free ticket to watch the video that I created, click the link below…*

*If you use this link and then upgrade to the VIP package I will get a few pennies as an affiliate. All the lessons will be available for free for 24hrs

An Exhibition at Toast

I adore Toast and much of my wardrobe is made up of pieces from their collections, one or two garments a year are all you need because they last so long and they repair them for free!

So what better place than my local Toast store in Cheltenham to exhibit my work as part of Cheltenham Open Studios. The exhibition runs from the 10-18th June 2023 and I will be in the store, with my sewing machine, on Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday 18th from 11-3 pm.

In case Gloucestershire is just a little too far, I am sharing photographs of the work here. I have also included details about their Fabric Recipes – Ingredients and stories beneath each picture…

I have recently been immersed in my family history and discovered that my great-great-grandmother was a glove maker (gloveress). These geometric shapes were originally damaged, vintage glove cuffs. I have reimagined them as abstract art with an imperfectly machine-embroidered check on top. I love the abstract nature of this piece and the energy of the imperfect stitches, it truly encompasses vintage-made-modern!

Top artwork

It’s rare to find vintage lace in my favourite black-and-cream colour scheme. This lace had been wrapped around a duck egg blue card for as long as I can remember, waiting for it’s time to be used in an artwork. I got really interested in modern interpretations of passementerie and wanted to create my own versions using floating stitches. This paring is simple but so effective, I love the space in the framing and the shadows it creates.

Bottom artwork

Often I find the back of an embroidery far more exciting than the front. Hidden underneath the ‘almost drawn’ lines of threads is a perfectly executed floral hand embroidery with added yellow flowers! I much prefer it sitting in reverse on top of a deconstructed triple cloth that was once a pair of Jaeger trousers. I used magical water-soluble fabric to create floating embroidery stitches that mimic another warp and weft.

I’ve always been fascinated by vintage hexagonal weaves. I read somewhere that soldiers would make them in the trenches to send home to their loved ones. I decided to see how the piece would look if I wove pleated ribbons into it. The constriction and reshaping so interesting, but it needed more. I started dreaming about creating a gelli-print but not daring to cover it in ink! After a day in the studio with some members of the No Rules Textile Society, I felt brave enough. I love the prints ( pictures coming soon) and I love how the ink accentuated the threads in the weave. Framed it reminds me of a beautiful story-filled hay bale!

A few years ago I discovered a roll of bias-cut, twill-woven, scallop-edged silk. The middle of which had a clearly unpicked stitch line, that had originally gathered the silk. I knew it had huge potential and its use would come to me at some point! So it sat on the shelf waiting… until one day I took it and cut it into unexpected strips, a scallop at each end. The geometric patterns that I could then format entirely changed it from its original use, which I discovered was to trim the hems of Victorian dresses.

A nature collage, filled with intricate deconstruction and beauty. Real leaves and ferns combine with deconstructed cotton on velvet. Water-soluble lace traps the leaves and reclaimed print and net add to the complexity of the textures.

Top artwork

I have been so inspired by abstract expressionism and love the idea of taking this idea into textiles. This piece came together completely intuitively- I had left a squiggle of a stripe sitting on top of neutral ground and kept walking past it and admiring the contrast. Eventually, I decided to stitch it in place, but the stitches also became another abstract pattern. I love these layers together and am excited to create more work in this way.

Bottom artwork

This blue-green tweed frays beautifully, simultaneously revealing both its structure and completely changing its original design. In this piece, I was playing with the idea of Seminole patchwork but breaking all the rules. Mixing up an unmade fabric with a usually precise form of patchwork, and then placing it on a reclaimed furnishing sample creates a Fabric Recipe full of movement and rebellion!

*There are clearer pictures of both these artworks over in A Day at Toast

 This frame within a frame is the happy accident result of a ‘let’s see what this looks like’ experiment! I love the mix of deconstructed vintage and the clean white frame. Inside is a cut-out vintage embroidery frame, and vintage ribbon that I have partially pleated on my Princess Pleater. Stories within stories, stitches within stitches and some printed marks that look purposeful but were perhaps mistakes!

I hope you have enjoyed this journey through textiles. If it has inspired you to play do head over to the No Rules Textile Society where there is more inspiration and a wonderful community of like-minded creative rebels.

 If you have any enquiries about purchasing or commissioning work do feel free to call me on 07809 142088 or email me at Jayne@jayneemerson.co.uk

An Interview with Elizabeth Ashdown

I so enjoy talking about textile processes and inspirations and over in No Rules Textile Society I often interview other textile artists. My recent chat, all about passementerie, with Elizabeth Ashdown was no exception.
Her work is vibrant, experimental and bold, I love that she is really pushing the boundaries of this heritage technique…

I was so inspired by our chat that I created my own take on the art of passementerie. Mine involved unweaving a piece of silk and reweaving it with garden twine! I then put it on top of a gelli plate print :)

I also realised that I had inadvertently been playing with the ‘idea of’ technique in this piece…

Do pop over and watch the interview and see how Elizabeth inspires you!

A day at Toast

On Friday 8th April 2022 I was invited, along with my sewing machine, to show my work at Toast in Cheltenham. I adore Toast and have followed the brand’s journey ever since their first catalogue of simple PJ’s dropped through my letterbox. At first I just packed my samples into an old suitcase as I always do, but at the last minute mounted them all onto boards. I wasn't sure how they would look in a different environment but, Nicola and her team were amazing and so welcoming. The store was soon adorned with my textiles and I was stitching in the window. It was all very dream like and I spent the day chatting to customers and capturing images….

It was such a gorgeous and inspiring day, I think my face says it all!

We have more event’s planned, including a workshop, make sure that you are subscribed to my mailing list for all the details…

Fabric Recipes

Back in mid January I was pondering whether or not to do a hashtag challenge over on Instagram. I had loved the idea of word prompts ever since my time at Central St Martins when we were given a brief by the International Wool Secretariat that entirely consisted of adjectives! I was surprised at how inspired I was and how these descriptions gave my, highly experimental work, a boundary and a focus.

So in mid January 2021 I put out a post on Instagram and committed to leading a month long challenge called February Fabric Recipes. It was pretty terrifying, I was so worried that no one would join in, but the response was wonderful. It involved a lot of work, responding to everyone and sharing their work in my stories, but it was so rewarding. I learnt a lot, the feedback was invaluable and it helped me realise how much I love teaching and sharing my processes. The prompts encouraged play and the use of new textile techniques, it was lovely to see everyone trying new things. #fabricrecipes is now established as a hashtag and i will definitely be running the challenge again next year with a whole new set of prompts.

The whole experience gave me the confidence to launch a small membership group called The No Rules Textile Society. I had been thinking about this for a while, and in the last week of the challenge, I decided to launch it. We pick a textile prompt a month, allowing us plenty of time to experiment, chat and dream. If you would like to find out more click here

Creative Collaboration with The Small Home

Earlier this year I collaborated with The Small Home to create new embroidery ideas for their beautiful slippers and slides. We spent a day in my studio playing with thread, researching vintage imagery and brainstorming ideas. You can read all about our collaboration here

Stitchery Stories Podcast

Back in 2018 I recorded my first ever podcast. I had emailed the lovely Susan Weeks from Stitchery Stories after listening to her wonderful interviews with textile artists. She said that she would love to interview me and this episode was born. Click on the image of me below to listen!

You can listen to the episode here

Textile commission for RHS Malvern

In 2019, my partner Gary Bristow designed a show garden for RHS Malvern Spring Show. I was helping him create this beautiful vision when he announced that a seat cover would really complete the project - 10 days before the show opened!

I went back to my studio and tipped out my ‘green box’ of vintage and up-cycled fabric and started creating one of my biggest projects to date.

Laying down strips and playing with a layout foe the seat cover

I tore up the fabrics and laid them onto a rough pattern that I had made of the seating area. It was a sea of green with a base cloth made of snooker baze, found at Gloucestershire Resource Centre. Below you can see the design in the initial design stages, I took the piece to the garden build and decided the strips needed to be chopped again.

So I grabbed my scissors and started chopping up the piece, on site, until I had the patchwork proportions just right and in keeping with the garden design. I didn’t measure anything and worked purely on instinct, it felt quite exhilarating and the only option!

I consulted with Gary and we decided to add purple elements in the form of circles to echo the plants. We used scraps of vintage silk and pinned them in place to get a feel for the finished look.

Then it was back to the studio to stitch the strips together and work out how to engineer the textiles so that the cover not only stayed in place but laid flat in windy conditions. I ended up hand stitching lead curtain weights to the underside of curved edge, I also threaded a net curtain wire through the bottom hem and hooked it to either end of the bench to hold the cover taught underneath the seat.

The finished patchwork