Designed to spread joy

Stroud textile artist Emma Giacalone uses everyday objects to deliver thought-provoking messages about being good to yourself. She tells BEE BAILEY about drawing with her sewing machine and banishing mum guilt

SUCCESS was something that artisan Emma Giacalone thought she’d already found. After leaving a career in aerospace project management, she was so busy as a textile artist that her working days were filled with charming pictures of appliquéd trees and houses with miniscule bunting strung outside.

But Emma, who lives in Stroud, felt something was missing from what she was making. Giving herself a three-month break from commissions, she let her imagination run wild. She started playing around with everyday household objects, recreating well-known brands on her sewing machine and often swapping the wording on the packaging for her own uplifting messages. The first thing she made was a Hendrick’s gin bottle, followed by a can of Creative Juice drink ‘for dreamers and thinkers’. Injecting her own personality gave her joy and was an instant hit with her followers.

“I allowed myself to let my own interests come into my work a bit more, things that I was feeling or conversations I had had with friends. When I started putting that into pictures, people connected with it,” Emma says.

“As soon as I started doing the brand pictures I felt I had found something that I really loved, especially when I started playing around with the wording. When you really study a jar or a product design for a picture, you find there are lots of them that have really nicely designed graphics and fonts, things that someone has taken a lot of time to make look so lovely but they are hidden in plain sight.”

Artisan Emma, 43, taught herself free-motion embroidery where she turns off all the mechanisms that would normally pull the fabric through the sewing machine. The technique allows her to move the fabric in any direction and draw a picture or write words on the material, with the ink of the pen replaced by the thread of the sewing machine. One piece – like a chocolate Freddo – can take two days of embroidery work alone.

“Just like drawing or handwriting, one of the things I adore about the technique is that the results are so individual,” she says.

“If you look in a book at how you’re supposed to do it, everything I do is a bit wrong. But I am self-taught, and I think the advantage of that is that I never learned any rules, or what ‘wrong’ looks like. Maybe that’s the free part of my free-motion embroidery.”

Combining her skill with a brilliantly creative mind has seen her produce a stitched list of care instructions for humans, tiny banners carrying motivational words, tea towels, napkins, personalised bows for the Christmas tree, and velvet medals that make the recipient feel like a champion.

“If I suddenly have an idea for something it is a bit of a drop everything and I’ve got to do it,” she says.

So much of Emma’s heart goes into some of the original pieces that she likens selling them to how she expects it would feel to give your dog’s puppies away to good homes, somewhere between great and a massive wrench.

“One of the ones I don’t think I could part with was one I made which was called Journey of an Idea. There was a bit of me in that; it was such a personal thing.

“I sold the Creative Juice can that I made. I nearly cried when I packed that one up,” she says.

“But I know it’s gone to someone who has got it on their wall and really enjoys it.”

Some of her original brand packaging artworks are still housed together in her home studio in Stroud and it’s those that really make the eyes pop.

Emma has embroidered treacle tins and jam jars, Tunnock’s Tea Cakes and chocolate frogs, mustard powder and peeled plum tomatoes, packets of ‘Frazzled’ crisps, Chipsticks and Monster Munch. Sometimes she’ll leave the look of the product identical, sometimes she’ll redesign it to write words of solidarity to women, parents, small business owners, anyone who is overwhelmed or just loves witty, clever art.

The body of work that really resonated with her followers was Wash Your Hands of It – a series of connected pictures designed to encourage others to stop feeling guilty, embrace their feelings, or have a well-earned rest. The thought-provoking pieces were little reminders of what’s important in life. And the familiar household brands that might be associated with some of the chores that weigh down women in particular have provided a powerful medium for her messages – each one beautifully executed in stitch.

The centrepiece was a liquid hand soap bottle, which proclaimed it contained ‘worry removal’ to wash off the notion that if we’re not doing absolutely everything and getting it right every time, we are somehow failing.

A colourful box of ‘Dazed’ washing powder saw Emma talking about the mental weight of all the invisible tasks involved in managing family life and the ‘triple shift’ of women working, running the house and managing all the extras of day-to-day life.

A ‘Recover’ bottle – containing 40 doses – was designed to help people slow down, take a break and ‘tackle eternal busyness’. Her can of furniture polish was intended to remind people that we don’t always have to be upbeat and smiling and polishing our feelings away.

And her ‘Sweary Fairy’ washing up bottle had a four-letter word on the front advising people to lighten the load, starting with ignoring the drying up in favour of something more restorative. It was an idea that popped into Emma’s head while waiting in a long queue at a Gloucestershire sub-post office one Christmas, studying the products on the shelves that ran alongside, no doubt thinking of all the jobs on her to-do list and wondering whether anyone else was feeling the pressure of everything they had to get done.

As a business owner and mum of a 13-year-old and an 11-year-old, Emma understands that parenting, working and keeping on top of life can be a hefty juggling act.

Perhaps that’s why her zingy hot