Love the Questions
(Love the Answers)
“A room of one’s own, £500, a year, and the freedom to think of things in themselves.”
Tablecloth — Love the Questions
Design: The goal of this design was to support a daily reflection and stitching practice. I wanted a simple design that could be reproduced each day without much prep or forethought. I also wanted to get started quickly, when I realized how much I needed the soothing practice at the end of the day but also needed to have a sense of momentum, or perhaps more accurately, a retrospective. I wanted to see that I was making progress towards the whole, while only needing to focus on the small space in my embroidery hoop. The dimensions and proportions of the square gave me the creative constraint for the lettering style and size. It limited the number of words I could fit into the space, and the need for speed limited the stitch choice to one: running stitch.
Materials: The obvious choice of ‘ground’ for the daily stitching was a linen tablecloth. A ready-made version from IKEA was a cost-effective place to start. It felt like the perfect blank page on which to write the questions. It was already hemmed, so it was easy to get started. A range of bright, high contrast colours were selected for the stitching thread as I didn’t want to be slowed down by needing to process the colour choice decisions.
Folding Book — Love the Answers
Design: Once I had started listening for the daily question that held my focus into the evening, I also started thinking about my response to it. As a way of capturing this mulling-over of the topic while I was stitching, I wrote some thoughts on a blank index card (portrait orientation, like the tablecloth design) each evening when I was finished stitching. This collection of 77 cards was not intended to be embodied in an object for the exhibition, but in a parallel “project” I was sorting through my own financial agency and wellness in the aftermath of a divorce. I felt I needed to honour and celebrate that personal development process, and at the time I was a bit obsessed with the idea of folding books as a container for the “unfolding” process I was going through. One of the cornerstone phrases for women’s financial agency is Virginia Woolf’s observation in 1928 that all women needed “a room of one’s one, 500 pounds a year and a lock on the door”. This phrase seemed perfect for the “banner” shape of the unfolded cover.
Materials: I often choose cotton organdie (when I can get it) for forms and ideas that I haven’t tried before. It has a firm but translucent weave that holds its shape. On a long black piece, I hand-wrote and then machine-embroidered the Virginia Woolf quote. I wanted the “pages” of the book to also retain their handwritten quality. The fastest way to do this was to use a printed t-shirt transfer sheet onto a plain white cotton backing.
