Journal
What Remains: Looking at the Things People Actually Used
Last Sunday, I sat in an archive room with a 16th-century nightshirt spread in front of me. Twenty minutes, just looking. The archive assistant had shown me how to wash my hands properly, how to handle the fabric, and then left me alone with this thing that had clothed someone’s body hundreds of years ago.
It wasn’t pristine. That’s why I’d chosen it.
Most museum collections preserve the best of things - the ceremonial robes, the unworn wedding dress, the sampler framed and protected by seven generations of careful daughters. These objects tell us about aspiration, about wealth, about what people thought worthy of keeping. But they rarely tell us about Tuesday afternoons or mending by candlelight or the third time you patched something because cloth was too precious to discard.
This shirt told a different story.
What We Don’t Usually Get to See
The V&A’s new storehouse in east London has done something quietly revolutionary. Instead of keeping their vast collections locked away - the usual museum problem where 95% of holdings never see daylight - they’ve opened the stores to anyone who wants to book an appointment. No academic credentials required. No research proposal. Just curiosity.
I went online, scrolled through their catalogue like a particularly sophisticated version of window shopping, and selected five objects. Four were early embroidered bags for research - we’re making bags in The Studio this month, and I wanted to see what real medieval and Renaissance pouches actually looked like, not the romanticised Pinterest versions. The fifth was this shirt.
The V&A catalogue described it simply: linen, silver thread embroidery, handmade lace inserts, probably late 16th century. What the catalogue didn’t say - what catalogues never quite capture - was that someone had loved this thing enough to keep mending it long after it stopped being beautiful. Patching, altering, reusing
The Evidence of Use
Both cuffs had been patched, where the wearer’s wrists had worn through the original embroidery. The patches used similar silver thread but in slightly different patterns - perhaps done years apart, perhaps by different hands. The underarm gussets had been replaced entirely, more than once. There was a hole at the front that had never been mended, and a dark stain on one sleeve that might have been blood.
This was a high-status garment. The quality of the original work, the silver thread, the fine linen - this belonged to someone with means. But it had been worn, properly worn, the kind of wearing that requires maintenance and repair. And someone - we don’t know who - cared enough to keep mending it.
I kept thinking: what would it take for something like this to survive 400 years? Someone had to decide it was worth keeping even after it was too damaged to wear. Someone else had to store it carefully. Multiple someones had to choose not to discard it, cut it up for cleaning rags, or let it moulder in a damp chest. And eventually, someone had to give or sell it to a museum.
Most things don’t survive. Most of what people made and used and wore out is simply gone. What remains is either the too-precious-to-use or, more rarely, something like this - precious enough to keep but used enough to show us what real life looked like.
Maureen’s Exercise Book, 1947
When I got home, I pulled out something I’d bought on Vinted last month: a sewing exercise book from a finishing school, dated 1947. The young woman who made it - Maureen Bushell - had filled it with samples. Hemming, darning, inserting gussets, making buttonholes, patching knees, all the skills that would have been considered essential for a woman of her time.
1947 is an interesting year to be learning these skills. The war had been over for two years, but Britain’s economy was in tatters. Clothing rationing, which had begun in 1941, had actually intensified. Each person got 66 coupons a year, and a dress cost 11 coupons, a blouse 5, a pair of stockings 2. Women’s magazines ran endless features on making do and mending, turning old coats into skirts, unpicking jumpers to reknit them in fashionable styles.
So Maureen, at finishing school (which suggests her family had some means), was learning skills that had suddenly become relevant again across all social classes. The ability to darn invisibly, to patch neatly, to alter and remake - these weren’t genteel accomplishments anymore. They were survival skills.
What strikes me about her samples is their skill. This is work that would have been considered merely adequate at the time - I’ve been told she regarded herself as a mediocre needlewoman - but it’s far beyond what most of us could do now. The tension is even, the stitches regular, the corners properly mitred. This was baseline skill, what every woman was expected to master.
Seventy-seven years later, so many of us couldn’t darn a sock if our lives depended on it.
Why Looking Matters Now
There’s something that happens when you spend real time with a handmade object. Not glancing, not photographing for Instagram, but actually looking. Twenty minutes with the nightshirt. An hour with Maureen’s exercise book, turning pages slowly, noticing where her stitching gets tighter or looser, where she’s made a mistake and corrected it, where you can almost feel her frustration or satisfaction.
You start to see the hands. You start to notice mood - the careful sample done when she was fresh, the slightly rushed one done at the end of a long day. You see decisions: where to start the patch, which direction to run the darn, whether to unpick and redo or just carry on.
This kind of looking is harder than it sounds. We’re trained to glance and move on, to consume images quickly, to form instant opinions. Sitting with one object for twenty minutes feels almost transgressive. Your mind wanders. You get restless. You think you’ve seen everything there is to see.
And then, if you keep looking, things begin to reveal themselves. The nightshirt’s bloodstain becomes a person’s wound. The patched gussets become evidence of someone’s decision that this was worth saving. Maureen’s ever so slightly wobbly hemstitch becomes the hand of a young woman learning, probably bored, possibly hungry (1947 had food rationing too), definitely not imagining that seventy-seven years later someone would be looking at her work and thinking about her life.
An Invitation
You probably have something in your home that deserves this kind of attention. Something handmade, handed down, or made so long ago it almost feels like someone else made it. Find it. Clear some space. Turn off your phone. And just look.
Look past what you think you already know about it. Look at tension in stitches, mistakes corrected or left visible, places where the maker changed their mind or persevered despite difficulty. Look at wear patterns, stains, repairs. Look until you can almost feel the hands that made this, the mood they were in, the decisions they made.
This isn’t precious or spiritual - though it might feel like both. It’s just the kind of attention that handmade things have always deserved and rarely received. The kind of looking that connects us back through time to all the people who made and mended and kept things going, whose names we mostly don’t know, whose work mostly didn’t survive.
But some of it did. And it’s still here, waiting to be really seen.
Visit the V&A Storehouse: You can book appointments online - remarkably underused and absolutely worth the trip
Join us in The Studio: This season we’re making bags inspired by Irish traveller tales.
Why We Buy Online Courses and Never Start Them (And Why That’s Perfectly Fine)
Let me share something I’ve noticed after years of running online courses and talking with creative people: we’ve all got that folder of good intentions. You know the one – filled with courses we bought with genuine enthusiasm, promising ourselves we’d finally learn that new technique or tackle that project we’ve been dreaming about.
Then life happened, and those courses became silent witnesses to our supposed creative failures. But here’s what I’ve discovered – that story we tell ourselves about being course-collecting failures? It’s missing some important context.
The Three Types of Online Courses We Buy
After countless conversations with members of my creative community, I’ve noticed we buy online courses for three very different reasons. Understanding which category your purchase falls into can save you from unnecessary creative guilt.
1. The “Support” Purchase
This is when we buy a course primarily to support a maker whose work we value. Maybe you’ve been following someone’s YouTube channel for months, enjoying their free tutorials and insights. When they offer a reasonably priced course, you buy it – not necessarily because you need to learn that particular skill right now, but because you want to show support.
I experienced this directly when I created a charity course for making patchwork stars. People bought it knowing they already could make those stars, or knowing they’d never sewn a stitch in their lives. The point wasn’t the star – it was supporting the cause.
The key insight: You’ve already done the important work by purchasing. The guilt about not completing it? That’s the real problem, because it can actually damage your relationship with creators you genuinely enjoy supporting.
2. The “Fantasy February” Course
These are the self-paced courses we buy thinking we’ll tackle them “when things quieter down.” You know – in February, after the holiday rush. Or October, after summer chaos. We’re seduced by the mirage of empty calendar space that never actually arrives.
The truth nobody talks about? There is never going to be this open empty time. Life doesn’t work like that.
These courses trigger our deepest creative guilt because scheduling time for something we want to do (rather than need to do) feels selfish. When someone asks us to do something else during our planned “course time,” we immediately abandon our creative plans. After all, it’s just for us, right?
Two approaches that actually work:
- The skim approach: Watch the videos (perhaps on double speed) just to absorb techniques and approaches that inform your general making practice. You paid for access to knowledge – you don’t have to make the exact project to get value.
- The realistic schedule approach: Choose ONE course, calculate the actual time needed, and block it in your calendar like any other commitment. Be brutally honest about timeframes and stick to your creative appointments.
If neither approach appeals to you, consider this radical idea: delete the courses you’re not going to do, and stop buying more until you’re ready to properly schedule them.
3. The “Journey” Course
These are the substantial, community-based courses that unfold over weeks or months. They often combine making with deeper themes – the kind that promise to be transformative rather than just instructional.
The stumbling block here is feeling “behind.” Every course I’ve run or taken includes people apologizing for missing a week, convinced they’re the only ones struggling to keep up, certain they’ve blown their chance at the full experience.
Here’s what course creators won’t tell you: We expect people to miss sessions. We design for it. This isn’t school. We’re not giving out gold stars for homework completed.
The rhythm of these courses often mirrors life itself – sometimes you’re deeply engaged, sometimes you step back and observe, sometimes you jump back in halfway through. That’s not failure; that’s how humans actually learn and grow.
When Guilt Kills Creativity
The real damage happens when we carry guilt about our course-purchasing habits. Guilt kills creativity – it’s the fastest way to shut down the very exploration and joy we were seeking when we bought the course in the first place.
Your relationship with online learning doesn’t have to follow anyone else’s rules. Some courses are meant to be fully completed, others are meant to be browsed, and others are meant to be supported. The key is recognizing which is which, and releasing yourself from the obligation to treat every purchase the same way.
Creating Better Courses (And Better Relationships with Them)
These insights are shaping how I design my own courses. The next project I’m launching – called Threaded – incorporates everything I’ve learned about how people actually engage with creative learning:
- Built-in gap time so people don’t feel behind
- Regular, predictable rhythms rather than front-loaded intensity
- Permission to engage at your own level without guilt
- Community support that acknowledges real life
The course begins on the autumn equinox and explores folk tales, making, and creativity through the lens of midlife awakening. But more than that, it’s designed to work with how we actually live, not how we think we should live.
Reframing Your Course Collection
If you’re carrying guilt about unfinished courses, try this: go through that folder and categorise everything. Which ones were really support purchases? Which ones were fantasy February optimism? Which ones still call to you?
Delete without guilt. Keep without obligation. And remember – your creative journey belongs to you. There’s no wrong way to learn, and there’s no timeline you must follow except your own.
The courses will still be there when you’re ready. And if they’re not? Well, perhaps that tells you something important about what you actually needed from them in the first place.
If you’re curious about Threaded and want to hear more about this gentler approach to creative learning, you can sign up here to receive details before the course begins. And if you found this perspective helpful, I’d love to hear about your own experiences with the courses sitting in your digital library.
Studio Exclusive: Dyeing with Hollyhock, true blues
We’re always told that blue is the most difficult colour to achieve naturally. Indigo and woad are the traditional sources, but they come with their own challenges - you need masses of plant material, the fermentation process takes weeks, and there’s often some fairly unpleasant chemistry involved. For anyone working on a smaller scale, it can feel like blue is simply out of reach.
Which is why I was so surprised when I discovered black hollyhocks.
A small handful of Alcea nigra petals will give you genuine blues - not the murky greenish tones you might expect from most flowers, but clear, true blues ranging from pale denim to deep navy. It seems almost too straightforward to work, which is probably why it’s not talked about more.
Black hollyhocks might sound exotic, but they’re more ordinary than you’d think. Mine came from one of those plant racks outside a supermarket - three for a tenner. Nothing special, no hunting through specialist nurseries or ordering heritage varieties online. Just regular garden centre plants that happened to be the right ones. If you see them, snap them up.
And you only need three plants to get started. Each one will give you flowers throughout the summer, and each flower holds enough colour for small-scale dyeing projects. A few petals will tint a skein of wool, a handful will give you a deeper shade.
The process itself is refreshingly simple. No fermentation vats, no complex chemistry, no waiting weeks for results. Just flowers, heat, and fabric.
If you want to grow your own, it’s even easier than buying them - I’ll share the growing details below. But there’s something satisfying about discovering that one of natural dyeing’s most coveted colours can come from something so wonderfully unremarkable.
Studio Exclusive: Heather for Natural Dyeing: Golds and Greens
At the heart of my love for creating colour from plants is place, connection, and a spiralling back through time. A thousand years or more, to when colour was coaxed from nearby plants in much the same way as I do now. Textiles were treasured, not disposable. Colour was earned.
I am not drawn to the tidy, packaged pots of powdered dye. That is someone else’s story. Mine is rooted here, in the plants underfoot, in the scraps I gather from garden, hedgerow, kitchen, and hill. It matters to me that the colours come from this place, in this season.
It is easy to imagine the past in washed-out browns, but that is a trick of time and fading fibres. Our ancestors loved bright colour. They prized the purest yellow from weld, the deep orange from madder, the luminous blue of indigo. When cloth survives, it often shows only the gentled remains of those shades, except in the hidden seams or protected fragments, where the original garishness still sings through.
The Scottish plants I tend to use do give softer, more muted tones. Grey-pinks, olive greens, peach, silver. These are the colours I am drawn to myself. Earthy. Weathered. But in the earliest periods, these quieter plant dyes would likely have made up the whole palette. There is little evidence of access to strong imported colours in those times. What was used was what could be gathered, grown, or foraged locally.
Heather is an exception. One of the traditional dye plants of the Highlands, it offers a surprising richness. When you harvest it just before it flowers, it gives a glowing golden yellow, the kind that lifts the dullest grey and makes it sing. And it asks very little of you. Simmer the flowering tops for half an hour, add your yarn, and wait. No alchemy. Just time and heat.
Below, I have included some tips to get the most from it, more lightfast, longer-lasting shades. But honestly, even if you throw it in a pot over a campfire and stir in some fence-gathered fleece, you will get something. Some trace of colour and place.
There is a theory that the earliest tartans were not planned patterns, but checks and stripes that came from weaving together home-dyed threads. Each batch different. Each colour the result of what could be gathered that season. It rings true to me. That piecemeal beauty. That sense of the cloth being not just worn but witnessed.
That is how I work. A hundred grams of fibre at a time. No two batches quite alike. Each one a distillation of weather, landscape, and mood.
Below, you will find a simple how-to for dyeing with heather. All heathers will give you dye but the traditional one in Scotland was ling, Calluna vulgaris.
Studio Exclusive: Dyeing with Willowherb: From Bright Gold to Charcoal
Rosebay Willowherb (Chamaenerion angustifolium) is one of the most recognisable native plants in the UK, with tall spires of magenta flowers, narrow fringed leaves, and soft, smoke-like seed heads. It thrives in disturbed ground, often appearing on bombsites, railway sidings, and industrial clearances. During the Blitz, London’s bombed-out spaces famously filled with its bright pink blooms.
Though common now, it wasn’t always so. Up until the late 19th century, it was relatively rare in the UK. Its explosive spread may be the result of hybridisation with American species and its adaptability to post-industrial landscapes. Each plant can produce around 80,000 seeds, fitted with fluffy, wind-borne parachutes. They can travel up to 20 miles and remain viable for 20 years, making this one of the UK’s most persistent pioneer species. It is one of the few plants that will germinate on burnt ground.
It is not surprising that it is a symbol of resilience, rising from the ashes, a phoenix of a plant.
Despite its invasive tendencies, willowherb has a long and rich history of human use. Its young shoots, around 4 to 6 cm, can be steamed and eaten like asparagus. The early leaves were used fresh in salads. As they mature, they accumulate tannins and were traditionally fermented to make “Ivan Chai,” a herbal tea that was a major Russian export to Britain before Indian tea plantations took over the market. The plant’s stems contain a thickening agent once used to set jellies, and the magenta flowers were sometimes turned into floral syrups.
Its seeds, attached to silky fluff, were used to start fires. People kept them in small lidded containers called tinder boxes, used to store easily ignitable material for lighting fires before the invention of matches. Some accounts even claim the fluff was used to stuff mattresses, though the volume needed makes this questionable.
Medicinally, willowherb was used as an antispasmodic and for treating skin ulcers and digestive complaints. More recently, it is being investigated for its potential use as a renewable biomass fuel.
And - of course - it is a spectacular natural dye plant.
The reason willowherb can be fermented into tea lies in its high tannin content - but unlike many plants with tannins that produce various shades of brown, willowherb gives a surprising yellow. And, when combined with iron, the tannins react and the yellow transforms into a deep charcoal.
It’s this dramatic shift that makes it such an exciting plant for creative dyeing, perfect for layered, expressive effects in natural textiles. Dip dyeing, tie dyeing, . . . .
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