A morning in the Blythe House archive spent frantically documenting T.82-1924 – a pillow cover with an embroidered boarder

The photographs were not great quality but will do for reference. I also got some microscope images – these will have to be put together, but I’m rather keen on he idea piecing together fragments. There are many areas of the embroideries which are fragmentary – the whole basis of this project is the reconstruction of fragments.
Collaging together images is a method I use in my drawing practice and find my fingers itching to get to my drawing board and begin to draft these motifs out. I have a notion that I would like to make a drawing on a monumental scale – these stitches are so tiny, I have an instinctive desire to enlarge them to massive proportions…

I had requested the backing fabric be removed so I could see the back of the embroidery but the linen of the pillow cover has become extremely brittle, so instead the textiles conservator cut a number of small rectangular holes in the backing fabric – creating little windows onto sections of the embroidery.
This pragmatic conservation compromise is unintentionally brilliant – creating frames of abstract compositions. I’m going to have some fun with this!