Making a needlepoint project ba

This is a really special one to me and as I begin to write this post I find myself just so thrilled with the outcome that it brings happy tears to my eyes. Let’s just say that it’s a story that can now be in my ‘everyday’. I feel like I took something old and made it new, but kept the ‘old’ and embraced the ‘new’ and the result is something both useful and so pretty and worth all the hours spent on it.

To begin at the beginning is … well I am not sure where. My father loved the music of Johann Strauss and the Blue Danube was one of his favourite pieces. I grew up listening to it and always imagining those grand balls in Vienna with swishing crinolines and polished soldier’s boots on inlaid parquet floors in candlelit halls. My dad died when I was just 35 and I know I was grown up and had children of my own, but it still seemed way to young for me to lose him and now, all these years later - I realise how much of my life he didn’t know about and how much I should love to be able to tell him. At his funeral, my Mum chose to the Blue Danube as the final goodbye and I found it incredibly hard to listen to it after that.

Ten years later, we were living in Moscow on an expat posting and my husband had a business trip toVienna. I was lucky enough to be able to go with him and we tagged on a weekend of sight seeing to explore the city. Oh how beautiful it was! After the enormity of Moscow, I found Vienna calm and utterly charming. We got tickets to a Strauss recital and I remember very clearly sitting in this beautiful, ornately decorated hall and hearing the opening bars of the ‘blue danube’ which are just so uplifting. I confess it was a bit emotional, but it was also a reminder of symbolism in life and how we make associations with different sorts of things, whether it be music, food, words…whatever, it is important to hold on to these things because they are part of who you are or where you came from. The next day, we were walking around the old centre of the city and we came across a shop selling needlepoint canvases and threads and kits. It was very lovely and I so wish I could remember it, or had taken a photo of it (we didn’t do that so much back then). I bought a kit as a souvenir of the Vienna - a violin and some Edelweiss. At this point in time, I was just beginning my sewing journey really, although I had done some needlepoint before. We returned to Moscow and resumed our busy lives. I did start the kit, but somehow it got put on the back burner, with Russian embroidery classes starting to take over my spare time.

As is all too common amongst us crafty people, the infamous ‘UFO’s’ can almost disappear and while it is honestly not really like me (I normally finish things) - this one somehow got really lost along the way. We moved from Moscow to Paris, from Paris to Stockholm and from Stockholm back to England many years later. The kit moved too, buried in a box somewhere and it pretty much stayed there for our ten years in Yorkshire. I did know it was lurking in a wicker basket, but honestly on the odd occasion I did look at it - I was not entirely sure what to do with it - it seemed a bit dull and old fashioned looking and as I am not musical at all, somehow not relevant anywhere. Over recent years, I have done some needlepoint projects and I will be forever grateful to Anna Maria Horner for showing me that tapestry can be modern and colourful. I started with a pincushion -you can read about it here -and made a couple of really pretty freestyle projects that you can read about here and here.

Last year we moved down to the south coast to begin our retirement and it was a big downsizing project. It has been months of reckoning for me and my sewing room and the realisation that I had an overwhelming amount of fabric and a huge collection of … well….just about everything to do with sewing. So, over this year, I am working through things that have been waiting in the wings… that special piece of fabric earmarked for a particular project….the patterns that you hoarded and didn’t get around too, knitting projects, embroidery designs.. all of it. Earlier this year, I finished up another needlepoint project (here) that had been ongoing for a couple of years and as always, I marvelled at the tough, carpet like feel of tapestry and the hardwearing element of tightly woven wool stitches.

Then out of the blue, I started to see on instagram some beautiful needlepoint bags that very talented crafters were making out of old needlepoint canvases from thrift shops. I especially like the project bags idea as I am quite a knitter now in the winter months and this seemed like a useful and practical idea. It has that old fashioned Victorian vibe too, which is always a winner with me and as I saw more and more of these ideas, I remembered the Vienna kit. One afternoon, about two months ago, I dug it out and had a proper look at it. This was how it looked when I got it all out. I had previously done a small amount of work on it, but really not much at all.

Interestingly, I could see that it wasn’t a printed canvas, but had these sort of tranche lines to guide your colours - I remembered it was that kind of shop, mahogany counters, old style everything. I was puzzled as to how they could do that, but it was very clever and helpful too.

Somehow, as soon as I saw it, I thought of the piece of ‘Rifle Paper Co.’ canvas fabric that I had been hoarding for about 5 years…I pulled that out too and there it was…. I saw the whole project before me. The Rifle Paper Co. print has a modern floral look with some metallic motifs and the colours matched beautifully with the needlepoint as well as lifting it out of ‘grandma’s parlour’ and making it come alive as an image. I looked in my ‘Anna Maria Horner’ fabric box and found the perfect accompanying fabric for the lining - ‘Dowry’ has these beautiful deer on it and it sort went with the idea of the Austrian hunting lodge in the days of ‘Mayerling’ and the Hapsburg dynasty. I began to work the needlepoint.

With the colour work finished, the background looked … sigh, sigh… a test of endurance!

It took some time and thank goodness for audible at times like these. It is boring doing large areas of background but, you just have to grab the bull by horns and suck it up. I must say, that it was more than just needlepoint…as I stitched I started to remember lots of things about our trip to Vienna that were probably long since forgotten. I thought about my Dad a lot too and it was actually a cathartic experience. I have lived a long time without him and yet he is still there in my heart and my mind and I enjoyed revisiting memories while I quietly stitched.

When it was done though, it was so exciting. I knew that I needed a label and went a little to town with metallic threads on black aida and some pretty seed beads to cross match some of the colours. I just felt, at this point, that it was going to be incredibly pretty.

The bag is just a simple drawstring affair with both ‘woven iron-on interfacing’ to support the sides and ‘Decovil’ iron-on interfacings and some vertical quilting lines to support the back. The back of bag actually looks really pretty as the Rifle Paper Co. fabric glints in the light and somehow makes it feel more of a modern bag.

For the bottom, I decided to use a piece of strong black denim to give it a solid base to stand on. I didn’t bother with any inside pockets as I have just enough of the Rifle Paper fabric to make a little zip pouch for all my notions to keep in there and I used leather cord for the strings with small wooden toggles on. I also put a key chain tab on for a bag charm as I rather like this idea on project bags. I am completely in love with this little bag. It is large enough to hold a bigger knitting project (I am planning to progress to a sweater this winter) and it just looks beautiful sitting about the place.

What I mean to say though is, that this now has a life and a meaning all of its own after decades in a stuffy box and it brings a smile to my face every time I see it. It has brought back memories and now will help to make new ones - the sweater idea is a little intimidating for me.

In a final twist to this story, it so happened that earlier this week it was my Dad’s birthday. He would have been 107 years old, which just seems astonishing. For some reason I suddenly remembered a necklace that he had given me when I was a teenager. In those days there were offers in the Sunday Paper supplements and my Dad ordered this for me and kept teasing me about a ‘surprise’ that was coming in the post. It was very unusual - in those days you only got extra stuff on your birthday or Christmas and the whole ‘mail order’ idea was unknown to me at 16. The mystery went on for a couple of weeks. When it finally arrived it was a green onyx pendant with a little gold horse in the middle (it wasn’t really gold, but you know what I mean). I was not a horsey girl at all, but we lived opposite the racecourse in Doncaster and my father was a huge fan of horse racing. He often walked around the course (in those days you could) for an evening stroll and sometimes I accompanied him too. The pendant has lain buried at the bottom of my jewellery box for quite a long time and I rarely wore it, I suppose because it wasn’t really my style as I got older. But there it was and I knew it had finally found its place all these years later as the bag charm. It couldn’t be more perfect - colour wise or story wise.

This was quite an epic project for me and now that it is finished I am going to just wallow in it for a while.

In the end, all I can say is that there is a time and place for everything. This is made up of elements that belonged in one time and place, linked with personal memories, family, music, history and travel and yet 20 years later, it has all come together and found its real time and place and for me, it is something special.

See you soon, Ruby x