Energy from the day’s workshop lingered in the room. As I began to tidy the work table, the off-cuts of fabrics chosen by the participants started doing a little dance. Next thing I was gathering discarded cut-out flowers and trimming new ones and arranging them into a posey.

It was a good way to end a fabulous day.

Advertised as a tea party collage workshop, it was indeed a merry gathering. It was the first time I had offered this particular workshop and I spent much of the previous week preparing a class sample and thinking about how best to give the class. The results were delightful.

The materials to make these A4 sized collages were provided. It was hard to decide on what to include and how much “stuff” to put out. In the end the materials included stamped tea cups and jugs, some beautiful floral decor fabric (thank you Asta), lace, fabric scraps, beads, buttons, doilies, the pre-cut backing fabric and, of course, thread and needles. Everyone had a good rummage and chose a set of materials to work with. The bowl of buttons was a big hit.

My astute reader previously pointed out that a collage usually includes paper and other materials (thank you Laura). So the workshop title is a a bit misleading. I purposely did not include paper objects because they do not wear in the same way as fabric and are difficult to stitch if they are not prepared with a coating of PVA glue. (I am not courageous enough to venture into wet media in a class situation and so prepared the stamps of the crockery items beforehand.)

According to Julia Triston and Rachel Lombard, a collage is a montage of different things (fabric, text, prints, photographs) that are stuck down to create a cohesive, themed composition. (p.66, How to be Creative in Textile Art). I like the OED‘s figurative definition “a jumbled collection of impressions, events, styles”. I am also tickled by the many synonyms for the word collage : assemblage, mosaic, bricolage, medley, potpourri, hodgepodge, pastiche, miscellany.

The tea party collage was stitched down and designed to be coverted into a book cover for an A5 spiral notebook.

This is the first in the series of tea parties that has been made entirely by hand. I usualy overstitch the whole assemblage by machine. Because this is a sample for a hand stitch workshop I instead overstitched sections with running stitch, seed stitch and kantha bricking stitch.

Almost a decade has passed since doing a 275 kilometre hike through the Eastern Cape bush. It was an-impossible-to-describe grinding and exhilarating experience. The effects of this no-frills event linger. To capture something of the memory I have mapped the journey in stitch.

Offered as a South African Camino, the first leg of the Indlela yoBuntu pilgrimage began at Grahamstown and ended at Patensie, two small Eastern Cape towns. It lasted for 12 days and took us through rugged and breathtaking terrain, along farm and back roads [indlela]. We slept in varied accommodation — from camping to luxury guest houses, and much inbetween. The floor between the pews of a country church, being one example.

Eleven of us signed up for it, including The Woodworker. We got to know one another really well during our 12 days together. It was good to form new friendships, to laugh together and also to watch our kind and skilled leader solve a dispute.

Of course I have photographs of that remarkable experience, but I wanted to capture the feel of that time in the bush, even though it is not possible to record the smells and the sounds and the mindlessness of just following the road — the experience of ‘blissfull blisters’. And so I decided to stitch it.

It took a long time to work out how to stitch it. A big help was seeing a commercial fabric that realistically depicts the Eastern Cape flora. It is from Da Gama, a local textile factory. My recent experimentation with collage sparked the idea of cutting out the flora and appliqueing the images onto a map of the route. The next step was to transfer the route of the walk from the paper map onto the fabric. A tip from my mentor and it was easy as pie to lay the map on top of the fabric and to ‘punch’ a dotted stitch line onto the cloth, using an awl. The Woodworker helped with how to represent the contour lines of the terrain we walked through — just follow the lines of the road, he said. And so I shadow quilted, or used lines of running stitch to echo the curves of the road. A final design problem of fitting the mapping onto the narrow band of cloth was resolved by simply ‘breaking’ the flow of the road when it veered south.

The title of the walk, Crossing Over, has a geological provenance. We walked across the core of the Cape Fold Belt. The evidence of this ancient geological action was buckled and folded strata in the rock formations from day three of the route. A retired professor of geology drove our support vehicle (this is not a fiction). He told us that it all began about 500 million years ago, when Africa was still part of Gondwana.

Before doing the walk, I looked up the opening lines of Dante’s 14th century poem The Divine Comedy and came across Seamus Heaney’s translation:

In the middle of the journey of our life
I found myself astray in a dark wood
Where the straight road had been lost sight of.
How hard it is to say what it was like
in the thick of thickets, in a wood so dense and gnarled
the very thought of it renews my panic.
It is bitter almost as death itself is bitter.
But to rehearse the good it also brought me
I will speak about other things I saw there.

When I copied these lines into my journal I did not realise quite how prophetic they would be.

To end, here is a photograph that shows something of the stitching process.

The figure of a person walking is stamped onto the cloth. I made the stamp myself.

Soon after finishing a new, densely layered work called Ebb-Tide, the following sentence jumped off the page of the intensely written novel I was reading:

She only fell apart once she’d descended fifty metres of the track and saw the world’s most mournful sight, the wide expanse of wind-whipped beach and sea, the inter-tide.

p.157  Being Dead by Jim Crace

Offering an image of Ebb-Tide seemed to best way to start writing about how and why I made it. First I must credit South African poet, Douglas Livingstone (1932-1996), for the lines of verse that are stitched into the work. They come from a poem* titled “Libation to the Geoid, Station 23” from the collection A Littoral Zone.

The littoral zone is the area of land that becomes exposed when the sea retreats at low or ebb-tide. This liminal space is also called the intertidal zone. To quote Google, it can be described as “the coastal area between high and low tide marks, characterised by extreme, daily fluctuations in temperature, moisture, and wave action.”

Of course the intertidal zone is rich, shifting, metaphoric ground for the intangibles of impermanence, transition, liminal space, change, uncertainty. What, you may well ask, prompted me to venture into these murky waters and make a work that reflects the littoral or intertidal zone?

Two things. The group, Fibreworks, is mounting an exhibition called Intertidal at the forthcoming South African National Quilt Festival, Sew Awareness. As a member of the group I took up the invitation to make a work for the exhibition because the subject is close to my heart. In the early 2000s I wrote a thesis on Livingstone’s A Littoral Zone.

The idea for the quilt I wanted to make immediately sprang to mind, as did the lines of verse that have been stitched into the fabric strip that represents the intertidal zone.

To make the work, I unpicked the appliqued panels from an old quilt and used the machine quilted, plain background as a blank canvas. To depict the sand dunes I machine stitched close lines of straight stitch and added some medical gauze, also securely stitched down, for texture. For the wettish sand below the high level mark, I used part of hemp sheet that was the perfect colour. The stitch was changed to a serpentine zig zag, again stitched in close rows. This time I added some torn strips and tea-dyed medical gauze for extra texture.

Luckily there was a perfect piece of Kaffe Fasset fabric in my stash for the wetter sand of the littoral zone. It is a shot cotton cloth, where the warp and weft of blue-turquoise and a russet-red give a beautiful, shimmering, sandy effect. This explains the lines of these colours in the work. I tore strips and overlaid some of the pieces as I machine stitched this section, also with a serpentine zig zag stitch, set at full width.

Finally, for the sea I used a stretchy piece of hand dyed fabric that fell out of the cupboard and more medical gauze, this time dyed with a weak solution of acrylic blue ink. And again, the trusty serpentine zig zag did a good job of stitching it all down firmly. It goes without saying that I kept changing the colour of the thread.

Sew Awareness 2026 is the 23rd South African National Quilt Festival and will run in Gqeberha from 7 to 11 July. I am proud to be one of the teachers at the festival.

The quilt festival, with its environmental theme, will offer a feast of visual delights, with halls of quilts on display. One of the highlights will surely be the Intertidal satellite exhibition mounted by Fibreworks, a group of South African fibre and textile artists. I will write more about this closer to the time.

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*Libation to the Geoid, Station 23

With solitude, the furnaced brain's
all self-consuming fission;
the crowd provides: providing, drains
the self into confusion.

You cannot quite remake the world
-- its clamour, cant and chatter;
the self, of course, more dense, more knurled
is quite another matter.

Here's to the sea in its restive quest
intent on drowning land;
even the saddest poem's a jest
writ on the ebb-tide's sand.

Note:- Station 23 refers to a sampling station on the Natal coast, for the testing of pollution in the sea water

GREETINGS from Hogsback (aka The Mountain). While here for the weekend I decided to spruce up our Work+Shop Gallery. The pop-up opening of this beautiful space was nearly a year ago.

Some of the works that were on display at the opening are still hanging happily in the space. The Woodworker has added a tableful of his finely turned woodware items. Once we are living here, the Work+Shop Gallery will be open regularly.

I am looking forward using the space more fully. Won’t it be lovely to be able to hang new work in a bespoke gallery (instead of having to store it).

Take a floating idea, a physical artefact, a newly laundered cross stitch vintage table cloth. Add a thought that would not go away and this was the result:

This piece was assembled one morning this week because I woke up with a strong urge to make it. Earlier I had taken apart a previous work (Vase of Flowers) because it looked tired and dusty. In my dreams I saw the vintage cross stitch table cloth as a background for the rather strange underpants I had found at a house sale.

According to Google lens, a pair of similar underpants are housed in the Metropolitan Museum, are American in origin and date to 1916. They are made of a fine cotton and contain no elastic. Instead there are three button holes on the front band and two on the back waistband. The seams of finely machine stitched, with plackets on both side openings. It is also possible that they are a pair of baby bloomers.

The underpants were part of a consignment of beautifully preserved vintage napery that I stumbled across by happy accident at a house sale in Hogsback. (The Woodworker wanted to look at the tools and I went along with him.) I used one of the table cloths to back the work. It happened to be the perfect size and was also embroidered with cross stitch.

This means that I have not made much progress with the works on my wish list for the year. Nevertheless, making this was a delight.

Connection is an enormous subject and concept. It is said that everything is connected, from the smallest molecule and microbe to the largest life form on the Earth (and perhaps further into the unimaginable universe). I am writing mostly off the seat of my pants, from various things I have read and the underlying and ungrasped awareness upon which Buddhism sits.

Hope I haven’t lost any readers after that convoluted opening paragraph. Here’s a quilt that explores the idea of connectedness.

This work has been a long time in the making and is one of the two heavily machined works in progress mentioned in last week’s blog. And now it is finished. Yay.

Some of you may recognise the fabric and colours. It is one of three works that have been cut from the same ‘cloth’. The cloth being an experimental quilt top that never got quilted but was instead cut up to make round shapes.

I am relieved that most of that original quilt top has now been used up. The remains went into the rag bag so that I can’t be tempted to make a mini orb.

The latest work, Connnections, began life as nine separate orbs. In its second iteration I stitched the nine orbs onto a machine quilted plain background. It never did feel quite finished, hence the addition of the connecting and criss crossing strips. First only black and white strips (cut from the original quilt top) were added. It seemed to need more, so I went a little crazy and added many coloured strips. When that was done, the back looked like a proverbial dog’s breakfast, with tucks and different coloured threads, some of them snarled. I cut off the hanging threads but this didn’t neaten things up. The only way was to cover the mess with another backing cloth and to attach it by quilting through all the layers. I used big stitches and thick thread (and a big strong needle).

A look at the different stages :

After all those hours behind the sewing machine, I have returned to the couch with some new hand stitching.

As this post started on a meandering note, so it will end. Of course I don’t really know where my ideas for quilts come from and why they evolve in the ways that they sometimes do. As I was working on Connections the thought came that it was partly inspired by a tree in our garden (Rhus (now Searsia) chirendensis) under which I sit to drink my morning coffee. It is full of bird life and so I often look up into its entangled and intertwined branches.

At the start of the year I made a list of works waiting to be made to motivate myself to get going. Well, it had the opposite effect. I lost my mojo. It was the repetititve, unthinking act of making French knots that magically helped me to get it back.

I have long been puzzled about the term mojo and thought it might be a contraction of motivation. Now that I have looked it up, I see that there is magic involved.

Mojo commonly refers to a magical charm, personal charisma, or a special, confident energy (‘getting your mojo back’). It originates from African American conjure traditions, often involving protective amulets (mojo bags). (from Google’s AI overview)

The Oxford English Dictionary also defines it as magic or a charm and notes associations with witchcraft and voodoo. I do not mean to enter deep waters here. But, the simple action of pulling the needle up through the cloth, winding the thread around it three time and then inserting the needle back into the cloth and carefully pulling the thread through did rejig something. I am now tackling two large machine stitched works and enjoying being back at my sewing machine.

As you might know, I often claim that running stitch is my favourite. So why the French knots? In making my latest tea party collage I needed to ‘colour in’ some white fabric behind the blue flowers so that the white would blend in with the pale blue background. Once that was done, I decided to extend the fun by stitching dark blue knots amongst the flowers to fill out the arrangement.

The items in this third in a series of cosy tea parties are mostly appliqued from new fabric. I was kindly given some Liberty offcuts and this delicately patterned fabric lends itself to dainty teacups and jugs. The spark for the piece was the bright blue embroidered flowers. They are from a vintage teapot covering (an unpadded tea cosy in a half circle shape) that I found during my last visit to the local charity shop. The idea of these distinctive, bold flowers arranged in a vase came to mind and would not leave.

Here is a collaged photograph to show the process of the making the collage. This is the first time I have used the blue backing cloth as part of the composition. It seemed to me that the jug of flowers needed a horizon line.

It was good to have a group of enthusiastic stitchers around my dining room table again. It feels as if my stitching year has now truly begun after sharing ideas and fabrics at a patch-patch workshop, kawandi style, last Saturday.

There was much laughter and chat as the participants stitched. This is not the first time I have given a class on how to construct a patched cloth using the kawandi method — an ancient running stitch practice devised by the Siddi people of India. Their method involves selecting and cutting patches, turning under the edges of the patches and then stitching them onto a backing cloth, in rows of running stitch from the perimeter towards the centre, in a square spiral pattern.

This all takes a while and in previous workshops students did not have enough time to finish their kawandi-style cloths. What if, I thought, one makes a very small cloth at the workshop? And so the idea to make a mug rug sized, mini kawandi (6 inches square) came about. It worked well. It was also easier to teach the method on a smaller piece. The tricky bits come up when one has to jiggle the arrangement of the patches in the inner rows. Everyone reached this point during the class and could be shown how to negotiate the tricky corners and nooks.

In the past I have made kits. The result was that everyone’s pieces looked similar. This time I provided a range of fabrics from which they could choose. Everyone’s work is equally delightful, but startlingly different. Every time I give a running stitch workshop I am amazed at how varied the stitching is and how the individual styles come through.

The day ended with my feeling proud and happy. But there was more to come. During the week photographs of finished work was posted on the WhatsApp stitch group. A teacher could not wish for more. And I didn’t tell them they had to do their homework!

Because it is the beginning of the year I have a new word to earmark my intentions and hopes for MMXXvi. My word is explore. When I stitched the class sample I decided to embed my word in the belly of the kawandi rug mug. So I wrote it on a strip of cloth and buried it under the final, central patch (the belly). See the bottom right photograph in the collage I used to advertise the workshop.

I told the students I had done this to remind myself of my intention for the year each time I use the rug mug and drink a cup of tea or coffee. Then I invited them to think of their own word for the year as they stitched. This added some fun and laughter to the day.

In a previous post, about My Big Kawandi, I wrote of m Jen Strausser‘s idea of burying a message in the quilt. She makes beautiful kawandi quilts and once told of how she had adapted the Siddi tradition of burying grains of rice in the belly of the kawandi to suit a more western approach, where she adds a note of goodwill under the central square.