The sewing shepherd
MY ROOTS ARE IN THE LAND...
Working outdoors in all weathers, covered in mud (and often worse!), soaking wet and freezing cold, it is easy to wonder why on earth anyone would want to be a farmer. Then there is the emotional roller coaster of lambing time with life, death and 20 hour days.
But on a good day when the spring flowers are just starting to emerge from the grass, the sun is shining and the skylarks are singing overhead, there is nothing else I would want to do and nowhere else I would want to live. It is this landscape that feeds me the inspiration for my needlework; the textures, colours and "feel" that I try to put into my work.
MY WORKSPACE...
I work on my kitchen table, surrounded by farming newspapers and magazines, piles of sheep records and biros that don't work and dogs, always lots of dogs. The phone is always ringing, people pop in an out (including me) and I have to sweep everything off when it comes to mealtimes. It's mad, chaotic even. The view from the window is either glorious and includes my 4 horses, or the fog is so thick I don't even know there is a view. At nearly 1000 above sea level, I am on top of the world in fresh air and space.
MY INSPIRATION TO CRAFT...
As a child, I had done a few simple tapestry kits and a bit of knitting with huge wooden needles that usually ended up in the creation of something that looked more like a fishing net than a piece of wearable clothing. But I had never attempted anything you could really call embroidery and I never did any serious sewing until I was in my early 40's.
One day I was looking through a cupboard and found a half-finished tapestry that I had started about 15 years previously. It had got bundled away when I ran out of the right colour wool so I got onto the internet to see if I could find a match, ended up on a wonderful sewing supplies website and was completely lost looking through hand-embroidery kits.
When I rediscovered my tapestry, I also found a beautifully hand-embroidered table cloth, sewn by my grandmother about 60 years ago in a design of beehives, holly hocks and other cottage garden flowers. I decided to get some thread, learn some basic stitches and see if I could copy it.
As usual, my Mum came up trumps and dug out a vast bag of vintage embroidery silk she had bought in the 1960’s when her godmother sold up her haberdashery shop in Bristol, so I found a piece of old linen and started sewing. Luckily, I found some part-used skeins of thread that were an exact match for the design on the table cloth, but it took about an hour of stitching for light to suddenly dawn…I was using the same skeins of thread that my Gran had used to sew the original cloth. As I stitched, a gap of over 60 years closed gently, reuniting me with my grandmother in spirit at least, through a love of needlework.
With the help of some internet resources, I gradually built up my repertoire of stitches before being diverted into other media such as needle felting, cross stitch and felt toy making just for variety. I am not good at sitting doing nothing so I like to have a project on the go on the rare occasions when I’m watching TV. In 2012 when the whole of the UK seemed to be glued to Bradley Wiggins winning the Tour de France and then the Olympics, I needed something a bit more substantial to get my teeth in to. I started work on a still life of wild flowers picked from one of our cornfields and found I could translate the three dimensional living plant I was looking at into stitches on fabric. Our farm is certified organic and so there are plenty of flowers in the field edges and by the time the Olympics was over, I had completed my project.
OUR FARM IN MY WORK...
I shifted back to needle felting for a while but with all the sheep I was making, it wasn’t long before I ran out of wool roving but it occurred to me that I had an ideal resource under my nose….350 of them in fact.
I am shepherd to a flock of commercial breeding ewes on our farm in the Gloucestershire Cotswold Hills in South West England. We are Soil Association certified Organic and produce our own beef as well as lamb (find out more about the farm at www.overtownfarm.co.uk ) so at shearing time, I saved three fleeces. One came from a little black ewe, one from a Herdwick, (the iconic sheep of the Cumbrian Lake District) and one from a white sheep called Friendly. She was one of my bottle reared lambs from 4 years ago and lives up to her name by always coming up for a scratch behind the ear when we gather the sheep. I washed the wool in batches and started felting and on, the place was full of needle felted sheep.
Friends loved them so I booked a table at the village craft fayre and sold out. Before I knew it, I had orders coming in, started my business “Sheep in Stitches” and opened up my shop on Etsy… and now you have found me. Welcome!
