tiny happy

It's blackberry season, which means summer won't be staying for much longer. There are blackberry vines that grow along the side of our road by the bus stop and I've been watching the berries ripen every afternoon on my walk up the hill. No-one seemed interested in harvesting them. But the other day I 'helped' Tom by holding the ladder steady while he climbed up and picked enough for a pie. It was delicious, as once-a-year type of food always is.

= = = = = = 

Another special thing this week was the arrival of a skein of yarn from Lindsay of A Wooden Nest. Lindsay creates beautiful natural-dyed yarns and I've been admiring her work for a while. If you like podcasts, she has one here you can follow. I happened to be perusing Instagram when I saw she had put some yarn in her shop, so I popped over and managed to secure what i think was the last skein! It's a gorgeous deep/brownish pink cashmere-merino-nylon sock yarn coloured with cochineal (hence the beetles mentioned in the title of this post). Looking forward to knitting some good winter socks with it. Or maybe something for a new baby in the family. 

+ + + + + + + 

In the other pictures above you can see the panel I made as part of the recent Suffrage in Stitches project. This is a NZ-wide project that celebrates the 125th anniversary of NZ women getting the vote. The panels made by a range of New Zealanders will be exhibited together at Wellington Museum in August.

To take part in the project, each maker chose (or was allocated) a name from the original signed petition and made a textile panel to honour that woman. We were given the dimensions (quite a long and narrow rectangle on a larger white rectangle) and requirements (that the panels should try to re-use textiles in our possession, and include 46 stitches somewhere to represent the other women on the same piece of petition.)

I confess I chose the name Emily Wastney because we shared a surname, but I didn't know anything about her, nor did I realise she had once lived in the house I grew up in.

Through the experience of making this panel I've learned a lot about Emily, thanks in particular to our national library and museum's digital resources. It took me a while to realise (and perhaps, accept) I needed to look for her under her husband's name, 'Mrs G Wastney', but once I did, it opened up a world of interesting insights into her life.

Born in Nelson as Emily Alborough in 1863, she married into the Wastney family who farmed at North Nelson. In 1915 she helped establish the first 'Daffodil Day' with the aim of raising money to send to NZ soldiers (among them, her son Edward Fox) on the Western Front at Christmas, and was in charge of supplying bulbs for this purpose.

She had five children and a special fondness for arum lilies (those she probably planted are still growing abundantly where she lived) and made displays of them for community and church events. She was known for propagating different types of daffodil bulbs and won prizes for these as well as her fruit cake, sweet peas and lemon cheesecake. She also played hockey and tennis. I think she might have been competitive! That's why I included a prize ribbon and bulb on the panel.

I've used mostly free-form embroidery for this panel, but also a bit of patchwork to honour Emily's 'make do and mend' skills, crosses for the 46 other women who signed the sheet, and applique for the lilies. I'm grateful to the organisers of this project! I loved making this panel for my ancestor.

= = = = = = =