Journal

A Remarkable Textile Exhibition in Paris (On Until July 2026)

 

I ended up in Paris rather by accident. I’d flown to Naples and decided to come back by train: Naples to Turin, Turin to Paris, then through the Channel Tunnel to London. Two days in Paris meant I could see several exhibitions, and one of them was at the Halle Saint-Pierre in Montmartre.

I want to mention the space itself before I get to the work. The Halle Saint-Pierre is an outsider art space: folk art, art brut, things that exist outside the main establishment. It sits in the middle of Paris’s textile district about 5 minutes from Montmartre, it is surrounded by shops selling fabrics, yarns, buttons, zips. And the space itself felt genuinely alive. The bookshop was full. The library was full. The café was busy, there were people having head massages, workshops clearly running. It’s the kind of art space we all want more of.

 

At the moment, right through to the end of July 2026, they have an exhibition called L’Étoffe des rêves (The Stuff of Dreams). Thirty-six textile artists, two floors of work. It’s extraordinary and, honestly, quite overwhelming. I could only take in so much.

So rather than attempt all thirty-six, I want to tell you about three artists whose work stopped me.

Lili Simon

Lili Simon was born in Alsace in 1980. She trained at the Beaux-Arts but her practice has always been more outsider than establishment, taking magazines, catalogues, adverts and subverting them, poking fun at them.

During lockdown, she became interested in needlepoint and started thinking about those very camp, kitsch landscape canvases from the 1960s and 70s. The deer, the mountains, the idealised coastal scenes. Women spending hundreds of hours on these complicated pieces, sitting and thinking. And she started wondering: what are their fantasies? We talk endlessly about the male gaze. But when a woman is sitting stitching for hours and hours, what is she looking at in her mind’s eye?

Lili Simon took some adverts featuring men in their underwear (the Calvin Klein kind of aesthetic) and inserted them into the canvases.

She did this in two ways. In some pieces she has carefully unpicked the original stitches and restitched over them to create her figure. In others she has cut the original needlepoint, made a new panel, and sewn it in. Very different techniques, quite different results.

I found them very funny. Understated. And it occurred to me that this is also a genuine technique for craft activism: taking an existing textile object and replacing elements of it with something entirely unexpected.

Aurélia Jaubert

Aurélia Jaubert was born in 1967 and grew up in a household where looking carefully at things mattered. Her mother, Marie-José Jaubert, wrote La Mer assassinée in 1978, a book documenting pollution along the French coastline. Her father, Alain Jaubert, spent his career making documentary films about how to look closely at paintings. That’s the kind of household this is.

She began her big tapestry works in 2017, after years of collecting old needlepoints from car boot sales and flea markets. She has always found them a bit naff, she says, and also beautiful, and also important. Because all of that needlework corresponds to a condition of women. Right up into the 1950s, there were books about how to be a good housewife and how to occupy your leisure time.

Her ambition from the start was to take all of those small domestic pieces and make something monumental from them, something on the scale of a medieval or Renaissance tapestry, with a foreground, a middle ground, a background, figures, and stories.

The two works at the Halle Saint-Pierre took up an entire wall. They are extraordinary. There is so much to look at: hunting scenes, women in crinolines, classical figures, animals, all assembled from pieces that might span a hundred years of women’s making. She also uses the backs of some sections deliberately, so you see the workings, something like a pencil sketch showing through, which softens the weight of it all slightly.

People were standing in front of these for a long time.

There is a short film on YouTube of Aurélia working in her studio: cutting needlepoints, assembling pieces, walking round and round the work. It’s worth watching.

Shao Liyu Chen

Shao Liyu Chen was born in Beijing in 1946. She grew up in a traditional courtyard house in the heart of old Beijing, in the hutongs, the network of alleyways that ran through the old city. She went to university, became a professor of philosophy, and in the early 1980s her husband left for Paris to study contemporary art. She joined him five years later.

In Paris, she and her husband moved through museums and galleries, absorbing Western art. She began working for a French interiors company, bridging Chinese and Western aesthetics. And then she made a return visit to Beijing and found that the city of her childhood had been largely demolished. Modern towers had replaced the hutongs. The courtyards were gone.

She came back to France and began to make collages. Everything in the exhibition came from her own collection: these pieces were never for sale, never intended for galleries. They are made from tiny scraps of fabric, assembled into dense, teeming cityscapes and landscapes of a Beijing that no longer exists.

The level of detail is remarkable. People stood in front of these for a long time too, finding things: a bicycle, a fire, a dog, a cart. Made from the smallest fragments of cloth.

She is nearly eighty. She came to this work in her forties, after a career in philosophy and cultural work. Everything in the exhibition belongs to her personally. That felt significant.

Why these three

These are by no means the only artists worth seeing in this exhibition. But they are the three that connected most directly to conversations I find happening all the time in The Studio: about repurposed work, about the labour of women, about memory, about what we do with the small scraps of things we accumulate and don’t quite know what to do with.

If you have old needlepoints piling up. If you have a bag of tiny fabric scraps. If you’re wondering what those things are actually for, this exhibition has something to say about that.

The Halle Saint-Pierre, 2 rue Ronsard, Paris 18th. L’Étoffe des rêves runs until 31 July 2026. Open Monday–Friday 11am–6pm, Saturday 11am–7pm, Sunday 12pm–6pm.

 

 

Making a Bag from a UFO: 500 Years of Canvas Work

A Victorian needlepoint chair cover that never made it onto a chair. Someone worked and worked on it. All those fine stitches, those white flowers against the dark ground. And then for whatever reason, they just stopped, finished but unused. Maybe they’d planned a set of chairs and never got to the rest. Maybe the cover simply didn’t fit the seat.

I found it on Etsy. And I bought it. And I made it into a bag.

This post is the companion to the film below, which goes into more detail about the history. But the bag is the heart of it, so let’s start there.

The bag itself

This is part of my Maker’s Wardrobe project: a series about making things intentionally, things that will actually be worn, that go with what I already have, and that connect me to a longer history of making. 

The needlepoint is Berlin wool work, mid-to-late Victorian. The flowers are either water lilies or magnolias. I genuinely couldn’t decide when I first got it, and I’m still not entirely certain. (One of them might be a water lily. The leaves on the others are very definitely magnolia.) It doesn’t matter enormously. What matters is that someone spent a long time on it, stitch by stitch, working from a chart, and the result is quite beautiful.

To make the bag, I cut three pieces of tweed in the same shape as the needlepoint. Two for the lining, one for the back. I sewed each pair together by hand, put the lining inside, turned both tops together and ironed them. Then I added running stitches in plant-dyed thread across the grid in the backback, which quilted everything together and stopped it feeling floppy. There’s a small pocket in the lining for keys. The handles and catch came from Etsy: leather, with stitch holes.

It’s a fairly simple make, in practical terms. The needlepoint did all the real work, 150 years ago.

A UFO: and why I love them

A UFO is an Unfinished Object. In The Studio, the online creative community I run, we talk about them a lot. Our own unfinished things, yes, but also the things that have been passed down, or found, or stumbled across. Objects that carry someone else’s time and intention and stopped, for reasons we’ll never know.

I have a particular fondness for other people’s unfinished work. There’s something about it that I find easier to approach than my own. The pressure is different. You’re finishing something, not starting it. You’re continuing a line rather than beginning one.

The woman who worked this chair cover: I don’t know her name, or where she lived, or why she stopped. But her hands made this, stitch by stitch. And now it’s a bag I’ll actually use.

Where canvas work comes from

I want to say something about the broader history here, because it changes the way I look at the bag.

Canvas work, embroidery worked in tent stitch onto an evenweave canvas, has been done by women in Britain and Europe for at least 500 years. The technique in this bag is identical to work that has sat in aristocratic houses since the Elizabethan period.

The earliest examples I have are Elizabethan slips: small embroidered motifs, usually flowers or plants, worked in wool and silk on linen canvas in tent stitch, then cut out and appliquéd onto velvet or wool backgrounds. They’re called slips after the horticultural term: a cutting taken to propagate a plant. The designs came from printed herbals and natural history books: William Turner’s A New Herball, John Gerard’s The Herball. Women were working directly from the same botanical publications that physicians and naturalists used.

Mary Queen of Scots made work like this during her long imprisonment. An envoy of Elizabeth I reported that she said she spent her days at her needle, and that the diversity of colours made the work seem less tedious, and she continued until the pain made her stop.

The same technique, largely unchanged, runs through the Georgian period, into the early Victorian era, and then into the Berlin wool work craze of the mid-19th century.

Berlin wool work: and why it was ridiculed

Berlin wool work arrived in Britain from Germany in the 1820s, and by the 1840s it had become the dominant form of needlework for middle-class women. The patterns, printed on gridded paper with one square per stitch, were sold as single sheets or in women’s magazines. The wool came from Merino sheep in Saxony, spun in Gotha, dyed in Berlin. The colours were vivid and new, made possible by advances in dyeing and, from the 1850s, by the new aniline dyes.

And almost immediately, people started sneering at it.

The objections were partly aesthetic. William Morris felt it was destroying real needlework skills, reducing embroidery to mechanical square-filling. And they were partly social. Berlin work was popular. It was accessible. It was being done by middle-class women in large numbers, following charts, making choices that had already been made for them by publishers in Germany.

The Royal School of Needlework was founded in 1872 partly as a direct response to Berlin work, to restore the older, freer embroidery traditions that were being crowded out.

Here is what I find interesting about this: the objection to Berlin work was that women were following someone else’s design rather than drawing their own. But Elizabethan embroiderers were also following published patterns — the herbal woodcuts, the printed model buchs. The difference was that the Berlin work system made this visible and industrial. The chart had already made every colour decision for you, and critics could see the mechanism too clearly.

Morris, who objected to this, sold needlework kits through Morris & Co.: linen ready-drawn, threads included. The kit principle was identical. What differed was the class of customer.

The technique in my bag is the same as work that has been in grand houses for 500 years. The only thing that changed was who was doing it.

What the fading tells us

One of the things I find most striking when I look at surviving Berlin work is how muted the colours often are now. The aniline dyes that made Berlin work so exciting were unstable. Within a couple of decades, those vivid crimsons and purples faded to something much more subdued, more “Victorian” in the way we now imagine Victorian, which is to say quieter and duller than it actually was.

This piece, a piece of upholstery where the cushion kept one part in the dark, it shows the original colours against the ones that have faded in light.

My bag is unfaded, presumably it stayed packed away. The colours are still strong. Which means I’m seeing it much closer to how the maker saw it: bright, vivid, probably considered rather fashionable.

That matters, I think. We judge Berlin work partly by what it looks like now, which is a ghost of what it looked like then.

Natural Dyeing with Buddleia: How to Get a Rich Gold from Garden Weeds

Buddleia is everywhere. Railway sidings, canal banks, waste ground, back gardens. Most people cut it back and compost the flowers. But those spent blooms, the ones you’d normally dead-head or prune off, will give you a warm, old-gold yellow on wool. No specialist equipment, no expensive materials, and you don’t even need to pick the flowers at their best.

That last part matters. The butterflies and bees get first claim. You wait until the flowers are over.

What You Need

• Spent buddleia flowers (fresh or dried)
• Pre-mordanted wool (I use alum mordant at 8% weight of fibre)
• A stainless steel dye pan
• A small portable stove if you have one
• Washing soda or bicarbonate of soda (optional but useful)
• pH paper (optional)
• Gloves

The mordanting is the non-negotiable part. Don’t skip it. Unmordanted wool will barely take the colour and what it does take won’t last. If you’re new to mordanting, I cover the process in detail in my dyeing with foodstuffs course inside The Studio.

The Process

Step one: prepare the dye bath

Fill your pan with hot water and add the flowers. Pull the petals from the stems if you want a cleaner bath, though it’s not essential. You’ll see colour beginning to leach out almost immediately.

Add a small pinch of washing soda. Less than a teaspoon for a medium-sized pan. This keeps the bath slightly alkaline, which improves the yellow and counteracts the natural acidification that happens when you simmer plant material. If you don’t have washing soda, bicarbonate of soda works. If you have neither, leave it out entirely. It helps, but it’s not critical.

Bring to a gentle simmer and leave for around 20 minutes.

Step two: strain and cool

Strain out the plant material. You want the bath to cool to hand-hot before you add the wool. If you put wool into a very hot bath it will felt. Adding a little cold water cools it down without diluting the colour, because it’s the dye pigment you’re after, the volume of liquid doesn’t matter.

Step three: add the wool

Squeeze your pre-soaked, pre-mordanted wool gently and lower it into the bath. Don’t agitate it. Leave it to sit for a couple of hours, then overnight if you can. The longer it sits as the bath cools, the more evenly the colour takes.

Step four: rinse and dry

Rinse well in water of a similar temperature, squeeze gently, and dry away from direct sunlight.

The Colour

What you get is a warm mid-yellow. Not a sharp acid yellow, more of an old gold. The kind of colour you see in dried mosses and autumn grasses. It’s a colour that sits well with other naturally dyed fibres and doesn’t shout.

Buddleia yellow is reasonably lightfast in my experience, though like most natural dyes it will mellow over time rather than staying at full intensity.

A Note on Quantities

People often ask how much plant material to use. With foraged or garden plants there’s no fixed answer, because so many things affect colour: the soil the plant grew in, the weather that season, whether the flowers are fresh or dried, your local water. I had around 30 spent flower heads in this film, all dried, and got a good strong colour with plenty left in the dye bath.

If you’re getting a pale result, add more plant material next time. If you want to keep records of what produces what, note down roughly how much you used and your timings. But don’t let the absence of precision put you off starting.

When to Collect

You can use buddleia from late summer through to spring. Dead-head into a bag rather than the compost. Dry and store what you can’t use immediately, they’ll keep well in a paper bag in a cool dry place.

If you don’t have a buddleia of your own, look along railway lines, canal towpaths, and waste ground. In the UK it colonises these places readily. A word to councils and neighbours with the bush in a public space will often get you a bag of prunings without any difficulty.

This is part of my Natural Dye Plants series, where I work through the plants growing in my Scottish dye garden and the ones I forage locally. If you want to go further with natural dyeing, The Studio has courses, a community of makers, and a forum where questions like these get properly answered.

 

A Maker’s Wardrobe: Where This Project Begins

I have spent the last year simplifying my wardrobe down to things that actually fit me and make me feel good when I wear them. That process is done. What I’m starting now is something different.

This new project - which I’m calling A Maker’s Wardrobe - is about gradually adding things I’ve made, altered, or chosen with real deliberateness. Not a capsule wardrobe. Not starting from scratch. Not getting everything down to twenty items in neutral colours. I’ve done that version of a simplified wardrobe before, and those were not, I’ll be honest, particularly happy times.

What I’m working towards is a wardrobe that feels joyous. Handmade things and vintage things and brightly coloured printed dresses and visible mending and accessories I’ve stitched myself. Things that show I’ve paid attention to myself - not for anyone else’s benefit, but because I spend a lot of days alone in Scotland, and I’ve decided that’s reason enough to dress in a way I actually like.

In this first film I talk about where the project came from, what I’m keeping, and how I realised I’d already begun it without quite noticing - with a 1950s cardigan pattern, some yarn I’d been carrying around for years, and a problem I couldn’t find a solution for in any shop.

I’ve now made five versions of that cardigan. They’re all the same pattern and the same stitch count, and they look completely different from each other. The film explains how.

This playlist will grow slowly. That’s kind of the point of it.