And now for something completely inspiring – went to the Van Abbe Museum in Eindhoven on the extra day February offered us this year to participate in a workshop by Mounira Al Solh. Mrs Al Solh uses (amongst other things) embroidery to make work – very inspiring stuff!  With a niece who has inherited the same genes that I have  – for embroidery and all kinds of needlework –  I hastened to enroll.

In my case a predilection for needlework has skipped a generation –  it came to me straight from my paternal grandmother – my mum never used a needle if she could avoid it. Fortunately for me, my family used to share a house with grandma and granddad, and grandma taught me to knit, to sew, to embroider and to use the hand-powered sewing machine she herself treasured.  She designed and made her own dresses,  huge big ones as she was a stately lady. I used to think this was magic, being able to create something three dimensional from a flat piece of cloth….

Anyways, at the van Abbe workshop we spent a super inspiring couple of hours, not so much learning embroidery stitches but delving into a list of words about love in Arabic, French, English and Dutch. We were asked to adopt one word and visualise it using embroidery and paint. I took the word for ‘painful affection’ and made a small work (finished at home) showing me and my twin sister who died at our birth. Used embroidery yarn and also acryllic paint, a combination I would not have made if left to my own devices, but it works fine. 

So see below two works by mrs Al Solh, and a small one by me inspired on her work. 

The fourth picture is of a work a am presently engaged on – for I was very much inspired by the workshop and it kicked my working-with-fabric genes into gear. I went back to my roots, sorted the fabrics I have so faithfully saved up over the years, and start on a tapestry-with-embroidery – it is to be Adam and Eve in Paradise part of a ‘biblical images’  exhibition in my home town’s main church. Its size will be way bigger than mrs Al Solh’s works, the tapestry is to be 2.80 m x 2.60 featuring almost life-size figures. Another difference: backside and front side are of equal importance for it will be shown stretched between two pillars of the church so visible from both sides. Nice and complicated to design and execute … will blog more about this new endeavour at a later time.