A Sewn Sea

Since we moved to live in Trieste, the sea has been flowing its way more and more into my personal projects. At times when I’m playing freely, purely for the fun of creating or simply to enjoy the materials or the process, I find patterns of waves and the rich blues of deep water washing into my drawings, my stories, my knitting and even my doll-making. For a while I was happy to let this happen and see what came of it, but then the thoughts crystallised into a picture book project and it felt like time to pay more attention to what I was doing. I thought that writing about it here might help me to understand my ideas better, and that you might enjoy reading about my inspirations, seeing my sea-coloured creations and learning how they all fed into my new picture book project.

Trieste is a city right on the sea and we’re fortunate enough to have a WWF marine nature reserve on our doorstep. As well as glorious water to swim in and relax by, we have sea-related festivals, initiatives and competitions (the Barcolana held here is the biggest sailing regatta in the world). All of this is food for creative thought and my sketchbooks are full of the sea and its life.

Yarns and threads are amongst my favourite materials and I really enjoy free-form hand-stitching on flat or 3D objects. Doll-making gives me the opportunity to play with textiles in many ways and I especially enjoy making doll hair. One of my recent doll projects was having to wait for her hair to be made as I was busy knitting a blue winter hat for my daughter. The blue yarn for the hat went so well with the chocolate brown of the doll’s skin that I began stitching blue hair for the doll. The locks of hair formed waves seemingly of their own accord as I subconsciously sewed the sea into my work.

I regularly read old favourite picture books for enjoyment and inspiration, but lately I’ve especially pulled out books about the sea. ‘The Mousehole Cat’ written by Antonia Barber and illustrated by Nicola Bayley is a huge favourite of mine, and perhaps Bayley’s beautifully rich, swirling sea scenes were in the back of my mind somewhere when I was stitching the blue doll hair. 

Now I’m working on a picture book idea about the sea; a plastic bath duck’s journey across the oceans, pushed and pulled by the ocean currents. The sea is such an important part of the story that it is has become a character in itself, influencing the course of events in the story more than anything else. Looking at different ways to represent the sea led me to Hokusai’s wave, and then to the beautiful Japanese Sashiki stitching technique. All of those deep indigo blues and repeating waves of pattern were just what I was looking for. I still felt the need for more play to decide how to use stitching for the sea, so I made a little folding book of fabric and collage and thread to help work out my ideas. 

I found that painting fabric rather than painting paper gave a stronger colour to the background ocean and allowed me to work threads across the surface of the fabric without leaving the visible stitching holes you see on paper. I had great fun painting old sheets with dye-pigment watercolours the hanging them to dry ready to cut out waves of blue.

Here’s one of the images from the story, when the duck is pulled from the ocean deep up to the surface by a family of whales. I glued down the painted and cut fabric waves, machine-stitched the wave details on top then finally hand-sewed the yellow yarn showing the duck’s journey. The whales and the duck are made from mixed paper and textile collage. I hope that one day this project will become a book ending up in homes, libraries and schools; telling a story of the oceans and showing the sea in delicate hand-sewn threads flowing across the page. But for today I’m just enjoying the colours and textures and repetitive action of stitching, and feeling privileged that I can call this my job.