“It’s useful to have the evidence stitched together.”

Five years ago today, I completed my Wolf Hall Quilt. At 46 feet in length, it is the first of the large scale Stitching Cromwell pieces, and, while I had made smaller pieces prior to this, it was this particular project that set the course for more ambitious work - I had stretched my quilting to new lengths, and I felt that there were now no limits.

I started the first Wolf Hall quilt on 9 August 2020, and worked on it exclusively for just over a year - stitching entirely by hand, listening to the audiobooks of the trilogy read by Ben Miles while I sewed. It was the time of the Covid-19 pandemic, and the circumstances led to a very intense stitching experience. I used my needle as a drawing tool, quilting my impressions of (among other things) comets, birds, feathers, scissors, leaves, horseshoes, jewels, and a single eel, I finished the Wolf Hall quilt at 3 minutes past 1 on 19 August 2021.

I remember this day five years ago with astonishing clarity, even though it feels like it was a lifetime ago. It was an odd day. I was tired, and my hands and wrists hurt from manipulating 46 feet of quilt. Each section was joined with a placefinder bar, with the book title and part on each bar, and it had already taken five days to join all the sections together. On the last day of stitching, I started early and worked solidly for hours. I had left trimming away the wadding until the final stages, and I developed blisters on my thumb from the scissors. As the piece got longer and longer and heavier and heavier, I found I was grappling with something that twisted and writhed like the snake that bit Cromwell in Italy. I became afraid to move in case I twisted it further.

I phoned my husband as I put the very last stitch in, so that there would be a witness to the end of the making. I was exhausted but also exhilarated as I rolled it up as one piece, and later, he helped me to record the day it was completed. I put some of the resulting photographs of me holding the quilt on social media.

Five years ago, I was very active on what was then Twitter,1 and I tweeted the development of the Wolf Hall Quilt as I stitched it. And lots of people were interested in its development and, therefore, its completion. Among the congratulatory messages - that this piece was finally finished - people were clearly comfortable in telling me it was ‘insane’ and that this quilt was ‘taking me over’. Someone felt obliged to point out that ‘Your Cromwell quilt isn’t going to keep anyone warm is it?’ As textile artist Sarah Impey says:

The lengthy and painstaking process of stitching can lend itself to invite ridicule. Non-stitchers often struggle to understand why anyone is prepared to spend so much time making textile objects, particularly when they have no practical function.2

The question ‘what’s it for?’ was posed a number of times. My answer was clearly unsatisfactory to those questioners, but made perfect sense to me: it was made solely for the sheer joy of sewing and the intense pleasure in reading and listening to the novels that had inspired me. It also provided a sense of having something tangible to show for my time during the pandemic.

And I have something intangible too. The Wolf Hall quilt was being stitched while the RSC theatre production of The Mirror and the Light was in preparation. I still have an email I received from Hilary Mantel saying that she had shown photographs of my work in progress to the cast during a break in rehearsal. Given that Stitching Cromwell was dreamt up on the train home after seeing the RSC production of Wolf Hall, it was a magical way of threading things together.

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