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