Last year I made several layered textile works featuring a knotted surface. One of them, “Caribbean Crush” will go on show for the first time soon, at The Visions Museum of Textile Art, San Diego CA, from October 13th until December 30th.

I’m pretty sure there will be ‘do not touch’ instructions everywhere, yet for my piece I almost think touching it should be allowed – the surface is so inviting, and surprisingly soft to the touch.

I’m currently gathering materials and ideas for a small project, to meet a call for entries combining textile and glass in some way, 2D or 3D, <20cm any direction. I have sourced glass fabricated in various ways without having had to take a crash course on glass blowing 🙂 In Egypt we visited a glass blowing artist and I simply had to gather up a ridiculously heavy bag of huge glass beads without any idea what I wanted to do with them… I once made a necklace which was a lovely idea, and I wore it once for several hours, but it was impossibly heavy to wear for that afternoon, let alone all day!! So here I am, 15 years later, and there’s a chance several of them might actually be included in this little piece…

Decades ago I fairly heavily beaded an entire wall quilt “Tidal Shallows 1” with tiny watery blue/green toned glass beads –

About a decade ago I went to a beading class for a few months, so I have plenty of glass beads around, but I’m thinking I need to do some knots for texture to marry the glass and textile elements.

So when I looked on Pinterest for knotted stitches, I found some really interesting images, one of which led me to a blog article on 9 Important Knot Stitches in Embroidery , and I was struck by several I didn’t know – namely Danish knots, 4-legged knot stitch, colonial knots and Turk’s head knot (which you make with the thread/yarn/cord and then attach to the work.) I was pleased to see French knots there, and what the writer called pistil stitch which I’ve always called stemmed french knots – always one of my favourites.

I’m also thinking about a Stitch Club workshop I enjoyed in 2020 from Clarissa Callesen. Stuffed forms weren’t new to me, but the workshop was a fun and lively reminder of their sculptural potential. There’s always one of those constructions from that week kicking round my sewing room… and I see myself using something of that technique here: