I continue to stitch on my Cromwell Narrative Cloth, and it continues to make slow but steady progress. Indeed, I am coming to the end of stitching what Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell describes as his second life, which covers 1500 - 29 December 1503. It’s ridiculously heavy and is now approximately 15 feet long. And I have gathered 26 pages of typed notes about the overall chronology that underpins this work. While the Cloth develops, I am posting reflections about my earlier Cromwell Trilogy stitchery. This is the fifth 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 piece follows on from the previous post which focused on the record keeping that sits behind the stitching.
There are many excellent quilters who firmly believe that you can’t start to make a quilt until you have worked out what quilt design you will use and decided upon every aspect of colour, fabric, and thread. The process I am describing in this series, indicates very strongly that this is not how I approached the first Wolf Hall Quilt. The development was incremental - and I had to decide how to deal with colour. I had embroidered the chapter titles in fairly bold colours. How to manage the surrounding quilting designs?
To begin with I thought that I would treat the piece like a North Country wholecloth, where a quilting motif is clearly visible but is stitched in the same colour as the fabric. But this didn’t feel entirely satisfactory. Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell Trilogy is full of colour and I didn’t want to be restricted.
In December 2020, I was out on my daily pandemic walk round the streets near home when I had a flash of inspiration. It was a cold, sunny, bright day and there was an abundance of berries and colour on bushes in neighbouring suburban gardens: 2020 was a mast year. I took photographs that day of the passionflower that thrives on neglect by my front door (note to self: right now it needs pruning hard), cotoneaster, and holly, and recalled the song ‘Green grows the holly’ as sung in Wolf Hall. I was listening to The Mirror and the Light while I walked and, as I looked at the berries, I heard the words
“Where’s my orange coat? I used to have an orange coat”.
And it came to me. Could I somehow code colours into the quilt by including a few stitches in each chapter section that recorded the colours used?
The first quilting I did was, of course, on Across the Narrow Sea. When I started, I was still fixed on the idea of North Country quilting. I started with cobbles and eels, quilted in the same colour threads as the fabric, to form all-over background patterns. But it didn’t look right. The eels were insufficiently defined. The cobbles weren’t the right shape. The texture was too puffy - and after a week’s work I had to rip all the stitching out. I decided the cobbles wouldn’t work as I had first thought (and they would have taken far too long to sew - although they found their way back through my subconscious when I decided to use the waves of the Narrow Sea as inspiration instead, and they became increasingly square and cobble-like). And I’m afraid of eels, so studying endless pictures of their writhing wasn’t ideal. I restitched one in dark grey thread and forgot the rest. After all, Walter asks his son ‘What are you, an eel?’ Eel. Singular.
That was better. I was off. But I still hadn’t decided quite how to code in the colour. If I carried on with the picture motifs using colour - like the lone eel - and then added in coded stitches referencing the colours, the quilt would become too overloaded very quickly. But I kept hearing Cromwell asking ‘Where’s my orange coat?’ The solution was, in the end, fairly simple.
I had already used colour referencing when stitching the chapter titles; and I coded it in further on the edges of each chapter section. I chose not to bind the piece - where you fold fabric over and stitch a secure edge; a process absolutely essential for a bed quilt, but not essential for a piece that isn’t going to be subject to a lot of handling. Instead, the edges, all 92 feet (46 feet top and bottom), are joined with a row of stitching, shaped like the deckle edge of paper. And that row of stitching references colours used in the text of each chapter, as in the examples below:
Chapter title: Across the Narrow Sea
Title colour: Blue-green (the sea)
Edge colours: Light brown (Walter’s boot); Red (blood on the cobbles); Black (the black tide); Dark grey (the grey sea)
Chapter title: Paternity
Title colour: Russet (Katherine’s beautiful red hair)
Edge colour: Very pale grey (Wolsey’s fine white lace); Black (Gardiner’s robes like feathers; dried blood)
Chapter Title: Anna Regina
Title colour: Purple (Anne’s coronation)
Edge colours: Black (“Is that crimson? It’s a very black crimson.”); Purple (Anne is mantled in purple velvet); Blue-green (hot blue skies delineated…. Malachite); Silver (Katherine’s silver thimble); Red (“Red”, the elder child cries. “She knows colours,” Helen says.)
Additional colour: Section banded in purple fabric (Anne’s coronation)
Chapter Title: ‘Alas, What Shall I do for Love?’
Title colour: Turquoise (Wolsey’s turquoise ring)
Edge colour: Black (Marlinspike; Cromwell’s black clothes, not a whit above his gentleman’s station); Yellow (Richard Riche, a golden-haired young man; Thomas Wyatt’s mane of golden hair, thinning now); Scarlet (George Boleyn’s flame coloured satin sleeves; Wolsey as the scarlet beast)
Coding colour into the quilt did lead me to make one slight anticipation. When I was working on Paternity, I enjoyed the likening of Gardiner’s robes to black feathers. I stitched Wolsey’s Cornish choughs as a motif, as a reference to those feathers, forgetting that the choughs don’t actually appear for another two chapters, in Visitation. I know that the choughs are doing double duty and that I was thinking of Gardiner’s furs. But it could - maybe does - look like an error. If it is an error, it results from familiarity with the text…
In my studio
I’ve been stitching from home mostly over the past couple of weeks - I can rest 15 feet of Cromwell more easily on a sofa than in a proper upright stitching chair, and it’s slightly easier to handle with that support.
I’m finishing up various little details from the Second Life section of the Narrative Cloth. I am adding a “how this piece was made” strip of text across the bottom; which is a response to seeing many fabric pieces and wondering “Who made that? And why? And when?”
Alas - I have had a slight setback resulting from an attempt to paint on some armour: I successfully painted some gold onto Prince Arthur’s wedding clothes a few weeks ago and was happy with how it looks. So I decided to use metallic paint on Cromwell’s armour for Garigliano. That hasn’t quite worked; the stitch definition has been overwhelmed and frankly he looks as though he’s wearing a jumper. One of those mohair jumpers that punks wore in the late 1970s. I don’t think there is anything in the historical record that would support this sartorial choice so I need to fix it. That is a major problem with paint on fabric. Once it’s on, it’s on. But there’s always a solution somewhere.
Overall, however, I am pleased with progress and can feel the work becoming itself.
What caught my eye?
I was going through a summary of state papers from 1516, and - as usual - making lots of notes. My eye was caught by the christening of Lady Frances Brandon in July 1516. Lady Frances was the daughter of Charles Brandon and Mary Tudor, Henry’s sister - and later the mother of Lady Jane Grey.
I’ve always had a great soft spot for Brandon (I read a romantic novel about him as a young teenager) and although Hilary Mantel’s representation of him isn’t anywhere near as dashing as the Charles of my teenage daydreams, I like him very much in the Cromwell Trilogy. And I adored Nicholas Boulton’s portrayal of him on stage, especially the “I would rob a house with you, Charles” scene in The Mirror and the Light. So I still get a little thrill when I come across his name - or even better his signature - in documents.
Anyway, enough digression about Charles Brandon, and back to the historical record. The report of Lady Frances’ christening was interesting to me as it included descriptions of the fabrics with which the church at Bishop’s Hatfield was hung. As was protocol at the time, the King and Queen did not attend, but were represented by deputies. The person who deputised for Queen Katherine was one Lady Boleyn.
That’s Lady Elizabeth Boleyn, mother of Anne. Who had not yet made an appearance at the English court, but who would, within a few years, turn the court, church and state on its head. But on the occasion of the christening of Lady Frances Brandon in January 1516, no-one could have foreseen what was to come.
Your sewing is beautifully and skilfully done. And I love how the sewing and history weave together. Thank you for sharing.
Thank you Kate.