My earliest memories of gold thread are my grandmothers sister Imi knitting jerseys and shirts with wool and a gold thread.
This is one of the shirts Imi knitted with running a goldthread alongside the wool. I still have it and wear it sometimes.
I spend a lot of time with her when I was a child and she first taught me crochet, knitting and embroidery. She didn’t have children herself and I loved spending time with her. She had a cosy little and very old limestone house. I am pretty sure my parents said its one of the oldest houses if not the oldest in the village I grew up in. I still have dreams of being in the house occasionally. A new young family bought it after Imi died and renovated it.
I recall afternoon teas watching old German movies and drinking tea from the good porcelain cups with home baked cakes and cookies. Imi was a sweet tooth. I remember her patiently teaching me how to crochet, embroider and knit when I got stuck, lost the thread or it was just too hard. I remember pots of fresh herb tea from her garden for dinner and the distinct smell of fresh peppermint and melissa tea. I also remember the long drop toilet in the shed, which was dark and scary and she had to come along with me when I was young because I was too scared to go on my own. Especially after she let me watch a Dracula movie way to early in the game, which gave me nightmares for months.
I remember her husband giving me 1 east german dollar for stamping a stack of his chimney cleaner receipts and when he wasn’t looking she would give me another 2 dollars from her secret jar in the kitchen for my work. I remember sitting for hours in her garden watching ants build nests and busily carrying their eggs to safety when we did weeding on the path. I remember cutting off the ends of the black and red currents and gooseberries with her embroidery scissors in the garden to the birdsong in the shade on the garden bungalow veranda in summer. I remember her making a sirup for cough with onion and honey. I remember her telling me that she had always wanted to be a nurse, but her parents didn’t want her to do it. She was a shop assistant before she got married and become a housewife. I remember her making her own calendula cream and having only 1 tin of cream that she occasionally used for her hands and face. She never wore make up. She still had the most beautiful soft skin in her 70’s and 80s. I remember the peace and quiet, which I enjoyed at times being away from our busy household with my 2 rowdy brothers. She was such a kind, gentle and patient soul and she lived a simple life full of routines and old fashioned wisdom that I still draw back onto now. She always saw the good in people. I have many fond memories of the times I spend with her and I am pretty sure she is still close by as one of my guardian angels.
This is a photo my husband Tim took of Imi at her entrance door. She still wore the old east german polyester aprons over her good clothes so as to not to ruin them.
When I started creating art again after my kids were grown up a bit in combination with my yoga practice I started using gold pen quite a bit. I also found the Japanese art of repairing pottering with gold cracks (Kintsugi) inspiring. While living on a sailboat in Turkey for a couple of years I had my water colours and some pens with me and I had vivid inspirations coming in repeatedly to use gold colour and gold thread in my art. I experimented with it a bit but lack of space and limited resources on the boat, meant I couldn’t really fulfil those inspirations at the time. My great aunt Imi died a few years back and my parents emptied our her house and sold it. When we sold our boat in Turkey and were waiting to be let back into NZ in amongst all the Covid chaos we spend a couple of months with my parents in Germany. My mum had saved a bag of gold thread from Imi from her crafting stack and had kept a couple of crochet shirts she made, because she thought I might like them. How is that for synchronicity – I think Imi was trying to tell me something from the other side with all those inspirations about using gold thread in my art. This is the stack of threads I brought back to NZ in my luggage and one of the beautiful gold threads still has the East German price sticker on it.
This is Imi’s gold thread I inherited with the east german price sticker still on it.
Then followed a few years that were quite stressful and busy re-establishing our live in NZ in the aftermath of Covid where I had not much time and headspace to be creative. Although I did a bit of crochet in that time and made a shawl that I finished off with some of Imi’s gold thread.
In the past few months I was having again very vivid and intense visions of artwork with gold paint and gold thread. However I had also developed a total block and great resistance to creating art. I am not sure why. One night my daughter asked if I wanted to join her to play around with some clay. My first response was no, but soon realised this was a good opportunity for me to reconnect with creativity and spend some quality time with my daughter. The next night I pulled my canvas out and started playing around with my 18 years old Acrylics, which had gone all bit weird in all those years and I didn’t like how restrictive the Acrylics felt after just working with water colour for a few years. So away the Acrylics went and the water colours came out and the goldthread and it felt so good to create again. Peaceful, quiet, fluid, watching the colours go wherever the water takes them, creating beautiful patterns. First it felt scary to stab holes in my art work, but once my first creation Seed 1 was done I was away. A fun fact is while gold, green and blue are my favorite colours I have never liked gold jewelry.
Seed 1 was inspired by a yoga retreat my friend Bonnie and I just held, where we planted seeds of intention. Seed 1 is now in one of my sacred spaces at home where it reminds me on a regular basis to sew conscious seeds of intention and imagine the influence this work might have on others. I like to create artworks that allows people to find their own inspirations and interpretations in it. I create them with an idea in mind, but usually the colours lead the way and the stitching is very fluid – I don’t use specific patterns. I like the fluidity and imperfection of the process.
