Irish Embroidery with a story to tell

Yorkshire wool cape designed and made for the Secret Garden

I constructed and embellished this wool cape for the character of Mary Lennox in The Secret Garden. I fell in love with the story as a child and couldn’t wait to create the costumes for the setting of outdoor theatre in my final year. Carefully choosing cloth produced in Huddersfield meant the costumes were embedded within the landscape of the narrative. Experiencing the hills and moors first hand on my travels to Yorkshire each day gave me a deeper understanding of Mary’s need for warm clothing, but I also wanted it to reflect her inner world and the grief and anger she felt as an unwanted orphan. I was fortunate to have access to an Irish embroidery machine which I used to ‘draw’ freehand lines of varying widths illustrating both the tangled undergrowth of the garden, and Mary’s prickly personality. This process aligns so well with my drawing technique that since graduating I have bought my own machine, incorporating it into my hand stitch practice and developing my own personal style.