My Dad, my great-great Grandfather, & Blackworked Harper Finials

This project is for my Dad, so I he's banned from looking at my blog until it's finished! Dad has, over the last few years, been researching my great-great and great grandfather's inventions and designs, starting from wire tensioning systems and ending in fantastic suspension bridges, which are scattered over the UK and former colonies. The first example below is the Monymusk bridge in Aberdeenshire, unfortunately no longer there.
Here's another example still standing: the Newquay bridge (1900)


Dad's dedication to researching their history and locations, together with unfailing support and enthusiasm of my stepmother, has led them into battles with undergrowth, and journeys to far corners of the earth, to trace where the bridges were and the stories of the communities they served. In fact, bridges aren't unlike embroidery projects in that way, there are numerous stories of characters, communities and exotic locations to produce a book on the subject, which eventually my Dad hopes to do.
He's well on the way to producing a book on the actual engineering, a tad
complex for my artsy heid, but I'm getting there.
I decided long ago to try and turn the suspension bridge into a project, their flowing beautiful shapes are very inviting, but attempts to reproduce the actual shape of the bridge on counted thread fabric was a bit too challenging for me.
So I decided that a better idea would be to take a detail of the bridge, the thing (to the untrained eye) which defines them as 'Harper Bridges' and turn that into the project instead.
Luckily, my Dad (with the help of a dedicated local friend) gave me a helping hand by retrieving an original finial from the Monymusk bridge and putting it his garden.
The issue that was occupying most of my thinking time on this project was The Sphere Problem. I wasn't convinced of my skills to be able to create a round 3D image. I concentrated on playing with patterns that would make this easier, consulted my favourite blackwork books for guidance, and this was my first failed attempt:

Then a trip home saved the day. I realised that another distinctive, but less obvious feature of the bridges is the tensioning box, used to tension the cables. An example of which Dad had managed to perloin.
I thought that as far as patterns and shapes went, there would surely be enough to work with, and set about trying to see how I could create a pattern from the box, to use in and around the finial as a fill or border pattern. The


This became quite tricky, recreating the actual circle inside the tension box was becoming a bit complex, and although I still think it could work as a one off feature, the bottom right pattern of the image above, which layers a pattern of the basic outline of the tension box works better. Particularly, as it would be easy (I thought anyway!) to increase and decrease the density of the pattern to help with The Sphere Problem.

Next challenge, getting the image onto the fabric, and with a lot of patient scanning and cropping by Jamie, I had a card-board cut out of the finial:
This is cheating I know, but I used a sewing pencil to trace the outline of the finial, and then started to fill with what turned out to be an unbelievably complex pattern which has made me totally cross eyed.

Unfortunately, I got a bit carried away and wasn't confident enough to reduce the pattern before I started, and the bottom quadrant of the sphere is filled to the max, it should be fading out towards the centre. That was quite annoying. However, the stem works a bit better:
Excuse the see-through scan! This piece works better if you half close your eyes, then you can't see the mess, but you can see that it's starting to look a bit more 3d.
Watch this space for the next installment - this has been so far a very challenging project, but I've never questioned it, as I hope in some small way it will reflect and pay tribute to the dedication and effort my Dad has put into generating for his - children and future generations, our family history.

Here is a close up of the stupidly complex pattern (note to self) made from interlocking shapes which echo the tension box.

Crikey. This might break all records for the longest time taken to complete a project!! A few more traumas before I got to this stage. I have moved countries since the picture above - from New Zealand back to Scotland, and there's been a bit of wear and tear on the fabric in the process.

I was concentrating so much on getting the shape and shading right, that I neglected to think about the overall design. I played around with possible border patterns etc., but as usual ended up going back to the horses mouth - i.e. what this would actually look like in all its glory, perched atop its Victorian gothic pillar.

























I've attempted to get the perspective of being at eye level with the "decorative cap piece" as my Dad has described it, with clouds floating by and the odd wee bird. Then it was floating, so I gave it a base to give the impression of being grounded on the structure. It looks better from a distance I think, and whatever you do Dad......don't look at the back!!

Parental love and the sewing frame

When I started doing blackwork in Thailand I didn't use a frame, but when I got to New Zealand it was the first thing I bought - a plastic hoop frame. But I saw a photo of Lesley Wilkins' lap frame.... internet searches ensued, but despite needlework being probably one of the most popular crafty pursuits, there is a real lack of wee designed frames.

Enter my Mum. After explaining to her my dilemma, Mum spotted an advert for a sewing lap frame with a beanie tray (another one of my favourite things!) as a base. My Mum has an uncanny knack of spotting useful things advertised in catalogues, and as a fellow craftsperson she fully understood the value of good equipment.

Making my siblings into a door sign

We bought our house just in the nick of time for Mum's visit to Wellington, she travelled half the globe, was delayed in Auckland and somehow still managed to skip up the 43 steps to our front door. We weren't particularly organised for her visit, I had planned to put together an itinerary for her stay, but I got waylaid by an idea for a project which I hoped would make her feel at home.
I decided to make a door sign for her room. I had planned on block capitals of 'mum's room' with different fill patterns in each letter. I thought I might play around with shading from dark to light vertically through the letters.
I thought about it a lot in my head - which is actually where the majority of my sewing has been done so far - and started to play around with some ideas.
I was constricted by time, house moving and a job had squeezed the letter sizes down a bit, and the patterns weren't behaving themselves - the fill patterns I'd thought of were far now far too big.
Then I stumbled upon an idea - to make the fill patterns a bit more meaningful - I thought I could use the first letter of each of my siblings names (Caroline, Lorraine and Ross) to make up different letters.
Making this idea work drove me mad. I wasn't sure that the world needed someone who could make a 'U' out of C's, or a M out of L's, but that still didn't stop me feeling immense satisfaction once I'd worked it out.
The issue was the size of each letter, which had to be roughly equal. No graph paper was used, largely down to the time factor, I just counted out the length of each letter to make sure they weren't going to look odd side by side. As you can see in the sign this didn't work the S just had to be bigger. If I'd had more time I would have scrapped it and started again.


Laying them diagonally also helped the density of the patter, which had to be roughly the same in each letter. The U for example, and S were quite bare once I'd figured out how to place the Cs, so I went back over and filled in some more Cs to give it a bit more oomph.
My favourite letter is the U and I really liked how the R's worked out to make the O. They were like spinning wheels before I joined up the circle - I did consider leaving them as spinning wheels but it would have looked unfinished, I thought giving the O's a boundary would be a bit of an anchor in the design. I'm not sure about that now I see it again, but the important thing is they looked like the letters. I considered 'outlining' the others as well, but I think it probably would have made the whole thing too busy. The other idea for the R's which you can see here would have made a good O, but were too big.
The angle of the middle of the M was tricky, creating the diagonal from the vertical using the same pattern but trying to make sure it didn't look like a completely different size - laying the L's diagonally through the letter helped.

The L's made the M and either end - which gave it the same beginning and end - like writing a essays we wrote at school, the C made the U and the S and H's for the other M and the R. The backwards R made a wee apostrophe.
I made Jamie guess the letter after I'd done it, to make sure they were recognisable to someone else.
This project was really satisfying because I did worked out one letter each night, and sewing the first letter of Lorraine, or Caroline or Ross over and over again meant I was thinking constantly about each of them as I did it. I'm not sure that there is another hobby that holds your mind in concentration on the person you are creating for, or drawing from to create, and I do think that the rhythm of stitching is a bit like breathing - the thread going back and forth from front to back, like inhaling and exhaling - and together with the focus on a person or place, it can be quite a meditative practice. When I did the 'H' I thought about when I first wrote an 'H' in nursery school, we were supposed to be doing patterns: | - | - | and I joined them up. The nursery teacher told me not to - she'd be shocked if she could see what I'd done now.
It seemed very fitting to make a Mum's Room sign out of her children's letters, she brought Jamie and I an incredible quilt which will keep us warm in the winter, this sign wasn't quite on the same scale, but I do like to think the same amount of love went into the making of each.

Shetland Sampler of Pattern Inspirations

This collection is from Sandness, Shetland Isles, Scotland.

Indian Sampler of Pattern Inspirations

We spent a month in India during our travels, no sewing on this trip, only collecting. Which wasn't hard.

This is taken from the Baby Taj, precurser to the Taj Mahal both in Agra, India. Both buildings were clad head to toe in patterns, made with precious stones inlaid into the marble. A backbreaking and laborious technique, which produces incredible results - hang on, what does that remind me of?!

This was a pattern on the roof which I loved, slightly worn, but somehow that adds to it...


Sand dunes near Jaisalmer, I'd just got off a camel when I took this, the sun was setting making it easier to distinguish the sandy ripples.
Baby Taj again....








Baby Taj's younger, but much bigger brother, the Taj Mahal. Has to be seen in person to be believed, and even then it's difficult to take it all in.



This is Jodhpur, Rajistan, India, taken from the fort looking down on the city.


Pastry shop, McLoed Ganj - home to the Dali Lama (not this house though! He's got a much nicer one up the road).
Shimla, another hill town in Northern India - I have no idea what these silver boxes were for, but there were a lot of them and they were the brightest things for miles around.


Jodhpur again - if you had fifty photos like this you wouldn't have got it all in, humungous.