One of my best charity shop buys recently has been a French tapestry kit 'Le Marais' (The Marsh). It was on sale for £2.50 having been started and then abandoned by a person who, I guess, reckoned that the 38 hours estimated to complete it were insufficient. I took it to my craft group last month and one of the members suggested that the colours such as blue, turquoise, black, white, russet and green could have been what attracted the eye of the beholder.
My tapestry depicts a marsh at night with bullrushes waving in the breeze and wildfowl flying across the face of the full moon.
As I started to work on it I realised that of course this is a representation, an interpretation and is closer to a painting than a photograph. None of these lovely strong colours would show up in reality. The moonlight would bleach them all to shades of grey. And yet, since I bought it I have been looking more closely at the reeds and the grasses of Lancashire's estuaries. And I conclude that whoever designed my tapestry and whoever translated it to a screen print on canvas have spent a long time looking at the saltmarsh, how coarse grasses colonise in clumps as the sea recedes, how blades grow from the stem and wave and cross each other in the wind.
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