My Obsession With Textiles

Detail of an Ayrshire whitework baby gown

Yesterday, I spent a very enjoyable afternoon in the company of the ladies of the Ayrshire Embroiderers' Guild. They'd asked me to speak to them about my collection of Ayrshire whitework - and the history of this astonishing needlework - but it was going to be some time in the future. Since I'm not too far away, I offered to fill in if any of their speakers let them down - and the opportunity arose a lot sooner than we expected. One of their speakers had to cancel so I stepped in.

I'm occasionally asked to speak about this work to various local groups. I take along my own collection, set it out on a couple of tables, talk about the history and then let people handle and examine it. There's nothing quite like being able to see and touch the real thing when it comes to textiles, and since whitework like this is quite surprisingly washable (in spite of its obvious delicacy) I'm happy for people to look more closely - especially embroiderers. I should add that I felt a bit of a fraud because I can't embroider at all, even though I so often write about the textiles I love. My late mum was an embroiderer but I have trouble sewing on buttons!

Somebody in the audience asked me where my interest first started. It was a good question. My mum used to go to the saleroom quite often and in the school holidays, I went with her. She was into pottery and porcelain but even back then, it was the textiles that attracted me: vintage and antique clothes, shawls, baby dresses, linen and lace of all kinds. My first purchase, when I was old enough to bid for myself, was a beautiful but very badly damaged antique whitework baby dress. From then on, I was hooked.

Continental needlework - very beautiful!

Now, I collect textiles, and deal in them from an eBay shop called The Scottish Home, dividing my working life between these and my novel writing. If I have a big writing project on, like now, I will do much less selling online. If times are hard, then I will restock my shop and sell whatever I can bear to part with. But the whitework stays here. That's my own little obsession.

I find that these lovely old embroideries and other textiles find their way into my fiction all the time. Sometimes it's just a matter of getting costume right when I'm working on historical fiction. Sometimes, as with The Curiosity Cabinet and The Physic Garden, the embroidery is more central to the story. I don't know quite why I'm so passionate about these things, but there does seem to be some connection between the interweaving of threads and the weaving of words into stories in my mind!

A little while ago - recognising that a lot of of people out there might be looking for ways to make a bit of extra cash I also wrote a fairly basic eBook guide to buying and selling vintage items online and elsewhere. It's called Precious Vintage and it's available as an eBook on all the popular platforms - for example on Amazon and in the iTunes store and on most other platforms too. So if like me you're obsessed with some particular area of collecting, you could do worse than try to turn your hobby into a source of much needed income.

Detail from a Georgian christening cape that features in
my novel, The Physic Garden

Needlework, Wise Women and Kindles

Ayrshire Whitework in magical detail.

Last night, I went to a neighbouring village to give a talk to a group of ladies from the church 'Guild'. They were all what you might call older ladies, the kind of people easily dismissed by the young and cool. The meeting - in a warm, light church hall - began with a hymn and a prayer and ended with a hymn and a prayer. I've done this talk often before. I take my collection of examples of Ayrshire embroidery - along with a few other bits and pieces of interesting old needlework - some of it dating from 1840, one or two other pieces from 1800 or even earlier, and talk about the history of this magical embroidery, where it came from, how it was made, who did it and why. Even mixed groups of men and women seem to enjoy handling this work. It is, it has to be said, so beautiful, so microscopically fine, that you do find yourself wondering, as this audience so clearly did, just how women working by candlelight or oil lamps in dark little cottages, in the early 1800s, could possibly have created something so amazing. They would gather in a single cottage to share expensive candles, or work outside, sitting on turf or straw covered stones, to take advantage of natural light. Their health suffered, eyes and lungs in particular. The work - as so much 'women's work' - was undervalued. And remains rather undervalued even to this day, locally, although collectors in America will pay high prices for fine examples. Embroidery is on my mind at the moment, because one of the characters in my new novel, The Physic Garden, is a talented needlewoman, and her needlework figures largely in the story.

The ladies of the Guild were, as they always are on these occasions, interested, kind, positive, cheerful and hospitable. They could give lessons in how to treat a visitor to some other groups I've spoken to. The 'Rural' are the same. I always come home feeling inexplicably happy, although slightly worried at the average age of these groups, wondering who will come along to take their places. Mind you, the Rural, in farming areas like this one, seems to have no shortage of new, younger members.

At the end of the evening, when we were chatting over the tea and biscuits, one of the ladies reminded me about a trilogy of radio plays I wrote some years ago. It was called The Peggers and The Creelers and it was set here in the West of Scotland, a series of plays about the fishing families of the coast, the inland boot and shoe makers, and the traditional tensions between these two groups of people. I had done some of the research for my Masters degree and then written a series of plays about it. There was a certain amount of mistrust between the two communities and it fascinated me. When the plays were broadcast, people would stop me in our nearby town, to talk about them. One farmer told me how he had been listening in the cab of his tractor, and realised that he was in the very field where the characters were standing.

Last night, the lady told me she still had the plays on tape and listened to them from time to time, because she had enjoyed them so much. Last year, when I was sorting through all my old manuscripts, I found a big box of flimsy typescript. It was The Peggers and The Creelers, written as a trilogy of novels. I had forgotten all about them. Back then, I still did daft things like that. Thousands and thousands of words, just for love. And I remembered that my agent at the time - we're talking many years ago - hadn't even read them because, so she remarked, 'nobody wants historical fiction at the moment.' Last night I found myself talking about all this with enthusiasm. 'I'd love to read them,' my questioner told me. Oddly enough, she isn't the only person to have reminded me about those plays, those stories, over the past few months. And although back then, I could see that this might have been a niche project and something no traditional publisher would want, I can also see now that with the advent of Kindle, and Print On Demand, things might be different. Because the diaspora of people with Ayrshire roots is a large one.

So, when The Physic Garden is finished, and a few other projects are under way, I may well dig out that box of flimsy typescript and - in the second half of this year - see what I can do with the Peggers and the Creelers as a series of eBooks, for Amazon's Kindle, in the first instance. As I packed up my lovely whitework, last night, and got ready to leave, the lady who liked my radio plays said 'I hope you do publish them as novels. I'll look forward to it.'

Thinking, in that company, that I might well be among people who favoured paper books over eBooks (the smell, the feel, the permanence) I said 'Well, they'll be on Kindle first and maybe as paperbacks after that. )
'Oh no, dear,' she said.'I have a Kindle now. Wouldn't be without it.'