Following my visit to the exhibition ‘Frayed: Textiles on the Edge’ at the Time & Tide Museum in Great Yarmouth I was inspired (as I wrote in my previous post) to use words as part of a silk scarf design.
Lorina Bulwer’s work was embroidery wool on cotton. But I work with silk, and paint work that will be worn. I chose to use chiffon as the lightweight, translucent quality allows the words to be partially glimpsed as the scarf moves and slides across the different coloured backgrounds of the clothing underneath.
You can see when the chiffon is pulled flat over either a black background or a white background just how different the colours can appear and how the words stand out more or less.
I used bold, capital letters in the manner of Lorina Bulwer’s embroidered work and painted naive, simplistic figures similar to those punctuating the original long samplers. The words are places in East Anglia and lines of text from the poetry of William Blake. Of course, gathered up and worn the text becomes even more fragmented and less obvious.
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Agnes Ashe 
I love what you did here. The appearance of it is lovely, and the meaning and thought put into it is really impressive. A beautiful and touching work, and I like that you paid tribute to your inspiration, too. We do live on, that is what this says to me!
Thank you for such a kind comment. Yes, there is definitely a little essence of the maker in some intensely made pieces. I think it is particularly strong in hand embroidered work that has been sewn with such detail and over a longish time. Perhaps that is why so many personal and family samplers are popular with us today as intimate and tangible connections to people from the past.