NEEDLEWORK WITH ATTITUDE IN A KILMAC COTTAGE
DAVID MEDCALF PAID A VISIT TO ANNE JEFFARES’S KILMACANOGUE STUDIO, WHERE EMBROIDERY IS A FAR CRY FROM THE FLORAL PATTERNS AND COUNTRY SCENES ASSOCIATED WITH THE CRAFT
EMBROIDERER Anne Jeffares lives in a real Irish cottage, with door frames so low that tall men bang their heads on the lintels as they pass through.
The home she shares with husband Ronan a short pull up a hill from the village of Kilmacanogue is bordering on the quaint. The place is the perfect setting for a little old woman sitting by the fire scowling with devoted concentration at her needlework.
Anne is emphatically not that little old woman. Anne is to traditional embroidery as Mick Wallace is to the Dáil dress code.
She creates her work, not at the hearth by the dim light of a turf fire, but in the front room she calls her studio.
It has a large window and the walls are lined with shelf upon shelf of books on art and design.
It drives her daft that TV reporters attending the forthcoming Knitting & Stitching show will almost certainly spend their time ferreting out the little old women.
Anne will be at the event in the RDS at the weekend too - as a member of the Irish Guild of Embroiderers, manning the organisation’s stand.
Her message, addressed to those who care to listen, will be a loudly trumpeted assertion that ‘embroidery has modernised itself’.
She admits, with every show of reluctance that she did - just the once mind you - make an anti-Macassar.
Younger readers have almost certainly never heard of an anti-Makassar, a piece of cloth origi- nally designed to protect furniture from the hair r oil that Edwardian men used to pour on to their r heads. Older readers probably need a reminder r as they have long since fallen out of use.
However, the time was when anti- Makassars were the standard first challenge on the embroidery course. Anne hated hers which was produced at the behest of a primary school teacher and she iss similarly disinclined to reproduce Bo Peep sceness or Bo Peep’s wretched sheep.
‘Embroidery has modernised itself’ – get the e message? ‘Now we use all sorts of techniquess and gadgets.’
She has even been known to turn out items using (shock, horror) a sewing machine as well as her own fair fingers. She specialises in pieces made using soluble material, which washes away to leave only the threads.
Hers is an art form she brings into a dimension far, far removed from the floral patterns which are the norm in old style embroidery.
The Irish Guild of Embroiderers was formed in or around the start of the new millennium and it has approximately 100 members, all of similarly radical frame of mind.
Mostly from the greater Dublin area, they enjoy regular meetings and workshops at a community hall in Mount Merrion. She loves the fellowship of it as talk of thread and needles in some company tends to make the eyes of listeners glaze over.
Which is a pity, since here is a discipline which allows people – overwhelmingly people of the female persuasion – to make lovely things in their own homes…
Anne (née Golden) has always been fascinated by textile related matters, though brought up in the company of scientists and engineers. Her father worked for many years growing plants and flowers in Kilmacanogue and her husband is a lorry driver.
‘My mother never sewed – she had no interest in it.’ After her early girlhood brush with the horrid anti-Makassar Anne had little initial interest herself. She only re-discovered sewing at the age of 18, part of what she calls her love of embellishing things.
Now 60 years of age, she grew up in the seventies, a time which allowed plenty of scope for post-hippie embellishment.
She would make a long skirt and then quilt a hem or embroider a panel on the garment.
When she left school, the obvious college for someone with such a hands-on love of fashion was the Grafton Academy.
There she acquired her diploma in tailoring and dress design, prelude to taking up a post with a long gone firm called TJ Cullen.
In the days before Temple Bar was a magnet for stag/hen parties, the company had a city centre factory making children’s and women’s wear.
The new recruit made the patterns for clothes which were mass produced for the like of Dunnes Stores. It was a responsible job but one which could not survive the devastating winds of change howling through the business.
While the jobs migrated to the sweatshops of the Third World, Anne had to cast around for alternatives in a series of jobs.
She even worked six months in the wardrobe department at RTE – just as the transition was being made from black & white to colour television.
Gay Byrne and the likes were attended to by the more senior staff but Anne does remember making cushions for Twink and glamming up a few Eurovision backing singers.
As the mother of three youngsters, she took to