“It’s useful to have the evidence stitched together.”

I continue to stitch on my Cromwell Narrative Cloth, and it continues to make slow but steady progress. On Thursday last, I finished 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. Now I need to decide whether to join the third life to the second life - or leave them as separate pieces. Decisions, decisions. So far, I have gathered 26 pages of typed notes about the overall chronology that underpins this work, so if it is to be one piece, it will end up being very long and extremely heavy. While the Cloth develops, I am posting reflections about my earlier Cromwell Trilogy stitchery. This is the sixth 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 last post which focused on the use of colour.

To Wolf Hall! Getting the final panel into shape on 1 July 2021

After five months of embroidering chapter titles and eight months of quilting my impressions of (among other things) comets, birds, feathers, horseshoes, jewels, and that single eel, I finished the Wolf Hall quilt at three minutes past one on 19 August 2021.

It was an odd day. I was tired, and my hands and wrists hurt from manipulating 46 feet of quilt. I had joined each section with a placefinder bar, quilting in the book title and part on each, and it had taken five days to join all the sections together. On the last day of stitching, I started early and sewed for hours. As the piece got longer and longer and heavier and heavier, I found I was grappling with something that twisted and writhed like the infamous snake that bit Cromwell in Italy. I became afraid to move in case I twisted it further. After a few hours, my legs and feet were stiff and I didn’t think I would be able to get up.

The last stitch goes in - 19 August 2021

Although I was alone, I wanted a witness to the last stitch going in, so I phoned my husband and he was on the line as I pulled the needle through the layers for the last time. I was exhausted but also exhilarated as I rolled it up as one piece, and then I went and walked in the nearby streets in the sunshine. Later that afternoon, my husband helped me to record the day it was completed. I put some of the resulting photographs of me holding the quilt on social media.

Among the congratulatory messages - that it was finally finished - from people who had watched its development online, there were some people who were clearly comfortable to tell me that the project was ‘insane’ and that this quilt was ‘taking me over’. Someone felt obliged to point out that ‘Your Cromwell quilt isn’t going to keep anyone warm is it?’ As the amazing textile artist Sarah Impey says:

The lengthy and painstaking process of stitching can lend itself to invite ridicule. Non-stitchers often struggle to understand why anyone is prepared to spend so much time making textile objects, particularly when they have no practical function.

(Sarah Impey, Text in Textile Art (London: Batsford Books, 2013), p.42.)

The question ‘What’s it for?’ was posed a number of times. My answer - ‘It’s for itself’ - was clearly unsatisfactory to those questioners, but made perfect sense to me: it was made solely for the sheer joy of sewing and the intense pleasure in reading and listening to the novels that had inspired me. It had also provided a sense of having something tangible to show for my time during the pandemic. That was more than enough for me.

Could the encryption be more tricky?:

Because of lockdown restrictions, no-one saw any part of the Wolf Hall quilt until it was almost complete. For various reasons, I was on my own for very long stretches - months at a time - and I couldn’t show the work to anyone; it didn’t show to good effect over Zoom, and I had nowhere spacious enough to take it to see what it looked like for myself. So I had no idea what I had made, but I didn’t realise the impact that this would have while I was working on it. I just happily stitched sections incrementally, only pausing to make sure I was at the right place in the audiobook.

And so I didn’t see the quilt in its entirety until I had it photographed professionally. The marvellous photographer I commissioned, Michael Wicks, told me that this is often the case with large scale textile works. Before we met, we communicated about the shape of the project and its length; I drew him a map of each section on a series of index cards so he could match them against the photographs I wanted. At his studio, we tried to lay the whole piece out flat but it was too long to do so, being longer than the width of the building, and so it ended up being folded back on itself. But within 24 hours, I had an image of how my quilt looked thanks to Michael’s photographic magic.*

To begin with, I couldn’t “see” what I had stitched, and I had difficulty interpreting the piece as a whole. It didn’t look like I anticipated. And I didn’t like it. After all that work, I didn’t like it. I showed the full image to just three other people, one of whom said it reminded her of a piece of code. The significance was in the detail. And after a couple of weeks, when I looked at the full image again, I realised she was right.

I started to view it as a piece of code that represented my personal response to Wolf Hall. I have detailed notes, sketchbook diagrams, and a key that unlocks each reference on the quilt, but without these, can the whole code be read? And, indeed, should it be? You can’t see the content of a book all at once, and I realised that you shouldn’t be able to see the whole Wolf Hall quilt all at once. It’s meant to be rolled - in a nod to Cromwell being Master of the Rolls – so that only part of the code is revealed at any one time.

Since then, I have only seen the first Wolf Hall quilt unrolled in its 46 feet entirely only twice - once in 2022, and once this past Saturday, when I took some work to present to the London Region of the Quilters’ Guild of the British Isles. Most of the time, it lives rolled in my studio and I don’t look at it. I’m not terribly keen on showing it because I have such a complex relationship with it. And, as you have probably noticed, I haven’t included Michael’s picture in this post, which illustrates that complex relationship. The images I have shared to date have been close ups of detail. To me, the first Wolf Hall quilt doesn’t work as a piece of textile art in its own right, but it does work as a studio piece, a jumping off point, a methodology for future work.

I think about 20 quilters ended up holding up the 26 feet of the Wolf Hall quilt - it stretched around the hall.

The whole first Wolf Hall quilt is strange. It can’t be anything but. It was made in a restricted space, at a time of restricted social contact. I made it solely for myself for the pleasure of having some very intensive stitching time with Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell Trilogy.

In my studio

I have been up to my neck in intense stitchery on the Cromwell Narrative Cloth and finished a significant section on Thursday last. Working that out, if I started it on 11 November 2023 and finished on 11 April 2024, that’s 5 months’ work. Three months longer than I anticipated… but never mind, it will take as long as it takes.

On Saturday morning early, I packed up that section of the Cloth, the first Wolf Hall Quilt, Cromwell’s Book of Queens, and The Weepers, along with some smaller pieces, into a suitcase and made my way to Wimbledon to give a talk at the Regional Day (London) of the Quilters’ Guild. As Cromwell was made Baron Cromwell of Wimbledon in 1536, it felt like an appropriate place to be.

Talking about The Weepers was hard. It is the piece I made to honour Hilary after her death in 2022.

It was a lovely event - a very welcoming and attentive audience, great questions, and a desire to see the work up close and touch it. Quilters know how to touch quilts - so I was happy to see them engaging with the project with such enthusiasm. And it was a real honour to be invited to speak.

This week I need to rest a bit, and then get the work back to the studio - and tidy up in there. Both studio and home have a very “end of project” feel. It’s not the end of course - the Cromwell Narrative Cloth is very near the beginning. But the first milestone has been reached. And, no, I still haven’t worked out how to photograph it.

What caught my eye?

To be honest, I have been so busy with stitchery, that I have hardly looked up from my needle. So all I can say is that I have a Very Interesting Book to share with you next time. I’ve been trying to get my own copy for a couple of years and I finally have one. And that’s all I am saying for now. Watch this space…

*Michael did further photography for me last year and told me he had read the Trilogy after photographing the first Wolf Hall quilt. I couldn’t have been more delighted and I am looking forward to working with him again in future with the Cromwell Narrative Cloth.