Burston is a little village near Diss in Norfolk and is the site of the longest strike in British history. To be as brief as possible . . . . . . . . . . .
Two teachers came to Burston in 1911 and they were radical for their day. Tom & Kitty Higdon believed that children should be educated as fully as possible instead of being educated to fulfil their place in society as determind by the landowners and clergy. Generally that meant that the boys were educated to become farm workers and the girls to become domestic servants. Eventually the teachers fell out with the powers that be and were sacked. The children went on strike and went to school with the Higdons on the village green. Many organisations supported the strike and sent money to help out. The strike lasted 25 years and eventually a piece of land was purchased and a small school built. The organisations were remembered with inscribed stones on the front of the school building.
Many of these organisations no longer exist. I do wish the Portmanteau and Trunk Makers Society was still around today!
I found the density of the inscriptions on the stones started to appear almost decorative as there was so much of it. My piece of work came from my fascination with both the names of the organisations and the sheer amount of text on this small building. Plus the fact that as a teacher I agree generally with what the Higdons were trying to achieve!
Method
I took loads of photos of the building then manipulated the images on my laptop. I applied a filter to the photos that took much of density away and left behind the text and a little bit of grainy black.
I'd love to know who Wendy and Punch are - but all I know is that they too supported the strike along with Leo Tolstoy! They were probably local to Burston.
The next stage was to prepare some fabric with Bubble Jet Set 2000. This makes the fabric suitable for inkjet printing and works well for most images. It can make bright colours a little muted but as I was only printing in Black that wasn't an issue. I could have used ready prepared inkjet fabric but that would have been more expensive and would also have meant that I would have to dye the fabric as well. I used a combination of hand-dyed cotton, grey silk and some commercial fabrics.
To get the fabric through the inkjet printer it needs to be ironed onto to some freezer paper and I always put tape along the leading edge so the wheels in the printer have something the grab onto. All went well on the first two prints then the printer decided to play silly whatsits!! I really struggled with the next few prints and it kept chewing up the edges.
Eventually I found a way to get the printer to accept the fabric. I cut some strips of normal printer paper and folded them in half then taped them onto the leading edge of the fabric BUT I didn't butt the fabric right up to the fold. This meant the printer thought it was just taking through normal paper and it fed through nicely. By the time it gets to the fabric part it is all going through without creases and the printer is happy. A tutorial on inkjet printing on fabric can be found on my website here.
Once all the blocks were printed I added batting and a backing fabric then free machine embroidered all of the text. It was such a long fiddly job I had to spread it out over time to avoid going cross-eyed!
Each block was then trimmed and laced onto mount board before being stuck to a piece of shaped MDF. My aim was to make it look like a section of wall.
I knew the piece was unlikely to sell at the exhibition and it didn't. Having sold the other piece I'm not too bothered. I think it is so subject-specific that you need to be interested in that kind of social history to want to buy it. I will see if the trust that manages the Burston strike school are interested in showing it at the school for a while and then put it into other exhibitions.
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