We are meeting in the Council Chamber in Leominster Information Centre every Monday morning, and this week Francesca brought along an embroidery of the sign from theCouncil Chamber door to add to our mock Atlas front cover. We are using an old Times Atlas with the pages repurposed to bring together the information we are finding out about folklore and songs in places as we go along, and to add in photographs from our research walks.
Each week, we meet around a very long wooden table whose shape I have stitched onto the book cover, and everyone has embroidered their first name onto scraps of Valencia linen left over from my pilot project about The Lugg Embroideries. These are stitched on to the mock atlas cover to give a sense of the whole group. You can see traces of the printed snowdrop template on these material scraps and I like that this past pilot project which informs this new one, has bled in to the new project in this subtle way, connecting and linking the projects.
Several participants in my two new case study projects were also original group members of the pilot project, so the pilot project helped with recruiting for this research project. I find I have unwittingly developed a ‘Community of practice’ (CoP) (Lave & Wenger 1991; Wenger 1998). The type of learning in communities of practice has existed ‘…for as long as people have been learning and sharing their experiences through storytelling.’
This week in themeeting we discuss work in progress, and I comment on the importance of people to place, highlighted by Meg recreating in thread some of the photographs of people in Mrs Leather’s Folk-lore of Herefordshire.
Maggie Crompton reads the group three poems which she has worked on, inspired by the working processes and stories she is noticing in the group. The first is about Puck of Pokehouse Wood whose story and place Caroline T is investigating:
The second is inpsired by the story of a pig seen from a coach near Burghill, which Liz is investigating:
The last poem, Maggie has written after observing all the processes in the workshop on Natural dyeing with plant materials which Helen kindly taught us:
Here are some other photos of work in progress in this week’s meeting:
To end this meeting I brought along E. David Gregory’s (2010) informative text ‘The Late Victorian Folksong Revival – The Persistence of English Melody 1878-1903‘ and I read from it as the group work on their embroideries. The aim is to help us understand how they may have informed the Edwardian Collectors, of whom Ella Mary Leather was one. I do stumble over a few words as I read after having had a huge personal shock in the last week, so please forgive the lack of fluency.
The Stitched Atlas 