“I always knew embroidery would get her into trouble.”

I continue to stitch on my Cromwell Narrative Cloth, and it continues to make slow but steady progress. While it develops, I will be posting some reflections about my earlier Cromwell Trilogy stitchery. This is the first in a series of posts about my first Wolf Hall Quilt, made between 2020 and 2021. It’s a textile piece that comes with a very strong sense of time and place, and the restrictive circumstances in which it was made had a significant impact on the finished work, which only became apparent after it was complete. This post follows on from last week’s introduction to the Stitching Cromwell project.

On a very hot August day in London in 2020, I sat at home and started to sew something new. We were (in England in any case) five months into the COVID-19 pandemic and its related restrictions. We were asked by the Government to stay at home, with various rules in place about travel, face-to-face interaction, and going out and about. By August the rules were starting to (temporarily) relax, but I was still wary of face-to-face contact.

It seemed to be a complete contrast to the Before Times. Back in March 2020, just before the first lockdown came into effect, I queued in Waterstone’s Piccadilly to get my copy of The Mirror and the Light signed by the author; and later that week I attended an event at the Southbank Centre to hear Hilary Mantel talk about the Cromwell Trilogy. London was strange that week. It rained a lot, and there was a sense of something frightening about to happen, but what?

With Hilary Mantel, 4 March 2020

During those first pandemic months I read The Mirror and the Light and then I re-read the whole Cromwell trilogy. Words relating to the sweating sickness took on a whole new significance:

The rule is for the household to hang a bunch of straw outside the door as sign of infection, and then restrict entry for forty days, and go abroad as little as possible. Mercy comes in and says, a fever, it could be any fever, we don’t have to admit to the sweat … If we all stayed at home, London would come to a standstill. ‘No,’ he says. ‘We must do it. My lord cardinal made these rules and it would not be proper for me to scant them.’ (Wolf Hall: An Occult History of Britain)

I felt that Cromwell definitely had the right of it, and I cannot have been the only person who wished for the example he would certainly have set, and the clarity of rules he would have implemented. In that spirit I went ‘abroad as little as possible’, and restricted much of my focus to an immersive reading of Mantel’s novels.

It was something that had been on my mind for some years: last week I mentioned that my first Cromwell-related piece was made in 2014, and I had long wanted to expand on my love for the novels. But it wasn’t until 2020 that I felt ready to do so. And it started by accident.

August 9 2020 fell during a heatwave. I couldn’t face working on the quilt I was then engaged upon: a series of lyrics from sea songs and shanties, ordered so as to tell the story of a voyage with outward bound, out at sea, and homeward bound sections. It was far too hot to sit under the three layers that make up a quilt. I needed something to keep my hands occupied, however, and I idly picked up some white cotton fabric that was lying around.

Austin Friars, 9 September 2020

That was how I started sewing the Cromwell Trilogy. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that I picked up a needle and started playing around with chapter titles with no long-term project in mind. I began by stitching the word Light. The following day, I sewed the word Mirror. Then I joined the two words together with a Drunkard’s Path block between them to see what they looked like. It was just a bit of casual sewing. I took that bit of sewing to Austin Friars on my one trip into the city of London that pandemic summer, then I walked along to the Tower of London and thought about the distance between Thomas Cromwell’s city house and his end.

The next day, I started sewing the remaining chapter titles from The Mirror and the Light. When I finished those, I stitched the titles for Bring Up the Bodies and by that point thought I should stitch the Wolf Hall titles too. Four months later and I had a whole set. But what on earth was I going to do with them?

In 2021, I started to illustrate these chapter titles. And I made a quilt that still puzzles me today.

In my studio

Lots of colour this week. I’ve been refining techniques around adding colour to the Cromwell Narrative Cloth - which has given me a couple of sleepless nights.

There’s always a risk when painting on fabric: bleed - when colour seeps beyond its boundaries and isn’t removable. A few weeks ago, I had a bad bleed onto an image of Anne’s first appearance at court - already all stitched - and had to discard it. This week I had a bleed onto an image of poor Prince Arthur, but that hasn’t ruined the overall image, and can be worked into the design.

I’ve tried various painting variations - painting onto unquilted layers; quilting first then painting afterwards; painting with ink, with watercolour, with acrylic. I have reached the conclusion that painting onto one single layer of fabric is the least nerve-wracking and most successful method - working very slowly, keeping brushes almost dry; then layering and quilting afterwards. It’s fiddly and time consuming and some detail gets rubbed off with the stitching that follows. Faces will need to be touched up more than once. But perhaps that will result in an additional layer of meaning - some of the figures are starting to look like faded paintings on a church wall.

The fact is that some of the techniques I am using for the Cromwell Narrative Cloth are pretty unforgiving. It’s all-absorbing, and frequently brings about feelings of intense joy, like the work that inspires it.

What caught my eye?

I went to Hampton Court Palace last Thursday. It was a damp day, raining on and off, and a good time to capture some of the alleyways of the Tudor buildings, and look at the brickwork, the moss, the diamond windows. Can you imagine a flash of red fabric disappearing round a corner, just out of reach?

And look! Down in the kitchens, is that a memory machine? It’s how I imagine one would look.