About Jill

I learned to make needle lace quite by accident. As an embroiderer in the early 1970’s, I met author and embroiderer Jacqueline Enthoven, who suggested that there should be a book on needle lace. After several years of research, writing, stitching, photographing, and drawing, Needle Lace and Needleweaving, A New Look at Traditional Stitches was published in 1974. As a result of my book emerging on the embroidery scene I was asked to teach needle lace workshops all over the US, in the UK and in New Zealand. In 1999, my second book Needle Lace: Techniques and Inspiration was published in the US (Hand Books Press- The Guild) and in the UK (Search Press).

By this time I was using needle lace stitches to embellish watercolor backgrounds, but my editor, Katie Kazan, at Hand Books Press was excited about the idea of including my recent work with a new material to me, hog gut, better known as sausage casing. I had “discovered” gut while on a trip to Alaska, seeing how the native people historically worked with seal and walrus gut to make clothing and vessels. I imagined stitched gut as lace.

Unfortunately, seal and walrus gut are protected and can only be used by the native people, but then I discovered the work of artists Pat Hickman and Lillian Elliott who had pioneered the use of “animal membranes”. Pat’s article in an old Fiberarts magazine told me how to prepare hog gut, including inflating the washed intestines using a bicycle pump!

I have now been working with gut for about 20 years. When I discovered that wet gut could be threaded on a large needle and used as a thread, then when it dried it would be stiff and could stand on its own, my work suddenly changed from two dimensional to three dimensional. Basketry was a natural transition for me by combining my knowledge of needle lace stitches with gut, an intriguing material with infinite possibilities.