In her new book, Stitching with Nature, Katerina Knight promises to share with her readers ‘the place where horticulture and textiles meet’. Using wildflowers and her own allotment-grown plants, she creates unique textiles by embroidering dried petals and seeds into fabrics, and by incorporating them into her own lace-like textiles. Ephemeral and unique, these beautiful pieces can take months to complete – but it is the slowness of the process that Katerina celebrates.
The route to this distinctive craft has not been easy. Having studied textiles at the Glasgow School of Art, Katerina worked in fashion for several years. ‘I found the fashion world stressful,’ she recounts. ‘The systems seem unsustainable. I’ve always cared so much about my work, and because I was taken away from the core of that,I wasn’t really connecting with myself any more.’
She started to feel burnt out and became disillusioned with the industry. Knowing she had a place at the Royal College of Art to do a Master’s course, she left her job and moved back to live with her parents in Worcestershire. ‘I was in a bad place mentally and physically, so I decided to take some time out and focus on getting better,’ she says.
Back home, she started gardening on her parents’ allotment. She began to sow her own seeds and found herself drawn further and further into the seasonal rhythm of growing flowers. ‘It was so healing. When I look back at it now, I realise that I was at a point where I wasn’t really capable of taking care of myself, but I was able to take care of something else on the allotment, and over time, that took care of me,’ she says. Gradually, she came to realise that gardening had to be part of her life going forwards, and she began to think of ways to incorporate flowers into her textiles practice.
Initially, Katerina experimented with natural dyes, but she felt that she was losing the essence of the plant from just extracting the colour. ‘Flowers are such a significant motif in textiles and I’ve always referenced them in my work. I love going to visit herbariums, and the idea of the preservation of flowers and capturing their ephemeral quality has always interested me.’ But what she loved most about blooms were the intricacies of each petal or seed, which were lost when she was using them to extract colour, so she came up with the idea of drying the flowers and using them in embroidery.
She started experimenting by drying different flowers, from dahlias and cornflowers to lavender and marigolds. ‘Some petals or seeds just seem to be designed to have a needle threaded through them,’ she says. ‘If you look closely at a lavender seed, you’ll see it has a tiny hole through it, so I’m always looking for other flowers that are almost asking to be a tiny bead or sequin.’
Now Katerina runs courses to teach people her craft, using a mixture of traditional embroidery and her own needle-lace techniques. It requires a certain degree of patience to embrace this meticulous sort of work, but it is the process that is all-important as well as the finished result. As she writes in her book: ‘For me, this slow dedication becomes a ritual. It’s my greatest form of meditation. I stop noticing the passage of time and fall softly into the stitching.’
Interestingly, the same could be said for the practice of gardening – the sowing of seeds, the nurturing, the harvesting and drying of the petals – and for Katerina, the growing is inextricably linked to her textiles. ‘Of course people could easily go and buy a bag of dried lavender or petals, but I want people to understand the whole process, to have the satisfaction I have from seeing a flower go through its whole life cycle and then preserving it in a textile.’
Katerina has settled into a seasonal pattern of growing and stitching, spending the spring and summer months growing and harvesting, and the winter making her textiles. ‘Through blending horticulture and textiles, I have found my most organic rhythm, both in life and my artistic practice,’ she writes.
Her book, therefore, is as much about sowing and growing as it is about embroidery techniques. The muted, natural colours of her works give them a special quality that shines through – and despite their ephemerality, the pieces have a surprising robustness. ‘They’re not going to last for ever, but they have more longevity than you might think,’ she says. ‘I still have pieces from my first project and five years on they look the same.’
Anyone looking for a way to preserve precious flowers from a garden, bouquet or plant that means something to them will find Katerina’s book fascinating – and by embracing her techniques, they may also discover the healing power of nature just as she did.
‘This book is an offering to slowness,’ she writes at the end of her introduction. ‘Let the shifting seasons move through you. Let it be a reminder that we do not need to live life in acceleration in order to grow, to learn or to thrive.’ Her wise words sum up her thoughtful, meditative approach, inviting each one of us to try our hand at stitching with nature to make our own petal-studded textiles.
Stitching with Nature is published by Batsford. katerinaknight.co.uk
