The Stitch Safari Podcast

In this episode, I’ll be focussing on the final four of the eight styles that impacted on Medieval Art.  I like to call them The Influencers.  In Part 1 I covered Romanesque, Viking, Byzantine and Gothic Art.  Now in Part 2, I’m featuring Islamic, Celtic, Carolingian and Ottonian Art.  Together these eight styles synthesised into that sometimes ambiguous term ‘Medieval Art, Art of the Middle Ages or Dark Age Art.’  

Medieval Art - a period when embroidery was King.  It’s time, fellow followers of needlework and stitch to embrace the stunning aesthetic of Medieval art and embroidery. 

Believed to bring good luck, the rare byssus cloth is extremely light and warm and is made from fibres harvested from giant molluscs.  One of its remarkable properties is the way it shines when exposed to sunlight - it glows with an unbelievable richness.  

Do you remember that feeling of comfort and warmth from a favourite hand-knitted woollen jumper?  Each interlinked stitch enveloped us with hand-made love and utilized one of the world’s most used natural fibres.  Wool.

Cotton, that soft, fluffy, staple plant fibre, was well known and used from ancient times.  It grew wild, it travelled the globe naturally, via its salt-resistant seeds, finally becoming a domesticated crop when societies recognized they could live and stay in one place, year in and year out.  

In this episode, I explore some of the figurative illustrations of the word stitch and its component family that have enriched our daily lives and literature. 

The word silk conjures the exotic romanticism of The Far East and The Silk Road, with a history replete with the secrets of sericulture, caravan trade routes, and the expansion of silk production throughout the ancient world.

Meander through history and pre-history and delve into the wonderful world of fibre.  This episode sheds some light on one of the big four natural plant fibres, flax, which like the needle, opened endless possibilities for commerce and craft.  It’s a tantalizing story.

In this episode, I’m going to start our trek with a connection between Leonardo da Vinci, The Ceremony of the Broken Needle, and The Needle and Thread Gaudy, plus a few other interesting stitch-related legends.

The hand sewing needle was a precious resource, of global importance, but at some point in time, it’s utilitarian use for garment construction also embraced surface decoration and embellishment or, in other words, embroidery – and gave birth to the art of the needle.