Bricks and Batik

The all day batik workshop/play day we had at Scunthorpe Embroiderers’ Guild for our February meeting seems a lifetime ago now but I’ve been working on one of the pieces I created during the session.

With the Tattershall bricks in mind I used a tiny Polish kitska, usually used for creating fine wax resist designs on eggs, to draw a little brick design which I then overdyed with silk paints. 

 Not too many blobs, but I had plans for them anyway. Covered with masses of french knots, they become patches of moss.  Rough back stitch and odd straight stitches neaten up the batiked lines of mortar. 

But then it occurred to me that if I covered over all the batik lines there was really no point in the batik. It might as well be embroidery on hand dyed fabric.

So I decided to embroider part of it but let it fade off at the edges. Ripping the fabric helps too.

Second piece finished, but I’ve not finished with the bricks quite yet…

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Starting the Tattershall Memory Journal

The next memory journal combines two trips I made to Tattershall Castle last summer – the first a bit of quality time with my youngest in July after the end of term and the second to a fabulous tourney and medieval reenactment event in August.

The first thing that hits you about this unusual castle is the fact it’s made out of warm chestnut coloured brick instead of stone and that extends to features inside like roof vaulting and some of the window surrounds.

So bricks were the inspiration for this memory journal and canvaswork seemed a good place to start. Although the pattern is simple, as is the tent stitch I used, I put a lot of thought into choosing a range of threads that echoed the different shades in the bricks.

 

However there was one thing I bottled out on – the brick bond. My design is a simple Stretcher Bond where you only see the stretchers, or the long faces of the bricks. Tattershall is built using English Bond as you can see below.

The advantage of that is that instead of getting a wall that is one brick width deep (fine for a modern house), the row of headers give you a wall that is the whole length of the brick deep – much better for a castle.

However, although it may be better for a castle, it was challenging to get it to look in proportion on a canvas grid, so after two attempts I gave up trying to align the ‘bricks’ and concentrated on a simpler pattern instead!

I keep reminding myself that it’s a creative response to the visit, not a slavish reconstruction, but the perfectionist in me keeps muttering that perhaps I just need to try that English Bond one more time…

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