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.
