I am Birgitte Hendricks, a native Dane and Textile / Fiber Artist, living in Suffolk, England in a beautiful old historic market town with my American husband and our very old ginger cat.
I have been crafting all my life. As a child I remember being totally fascinated by my mother knitting. I must have been very keen, because at the age of six she gave me a pair of knitting needles, some yarn and taught me to knit. I loved every minute of it and remember feeling very ‘grown up’ sitting there with my short knitting needles and ball of yarn. Shortly thereafter we moved on to crochet followed by grandmother teaching me to sew and embroider.
Denmark has a very deep crafting tradition and heritage, and I’m very lucky to have had that tradition passed on to me. The area, where I grew up in Denmark, has a very old tradition for a certain type of bobbin lace, Toender lace. At the age of 13-14 I enrolled in a bobbin lace course for mature ladies. I was so afraid, that I was too young to attend the course, and I added a couple of years to my age on the enrollment form. I felt so bad about lying and confessed to my dad, who I remembered lectured me with a smirk. I went on to do bobbin lace for several years, and still now and then revisit the technique. Later came dressmaking, pattern cutting, batik, spinning, natural dyeing, papermaking, basket weaving, quilting and other crafts. From 1999-2005, after moving to England, I was so fortunate to do diploma courses in contemporary quilting, creative hand and machine (free style) embroidery and art and design.
I love exploring and trying out new techniques, as well as revisiting old ones. The last couple of years I have been fascinated by texture, transparency and layering, creating all sorts of surfaces for my work. Applying color to fabric, paper and almost any other imaginable surface is another favorite. Free style machine embroidery is such an exciting technique with endless possibilities and has to be mentioned as well.
Starting points for my work come in different forms. I belong to two exhibiting textile groups, where we are working with either design briefs or themes. When working pieces for exhibitions, I work my way through the design process starting with a design source doing sketching, collages etc, through sampling to find the appropriate techniques, to the finished piece. A superb process that makes you think and develop your work. I take a lot of weird design type photos (peeling paint, rusty tiles, stacked logs etc) when out and about, and the photos are often part of my design source. While working on these ‘serious’ projects I get a lot of great ideas, that I jot down. Often these ideas end up as items in my shop. Sometimes I just want to explore a product or a technique and just mess about a bit, to see what happens. I love when I have time to play like that. Exciting and unexpected things nearly always happens, that I then can explore in future work.
Then there are the times where I just want a relaxing project to keep my hands busy. My husband and I spend a lot of time in airports and on planes. Most of the hand stitched items in my shop SewDanish have been stitched flying across the pond. I have never had any problems bringing two sewing needles on board, and I always inform that I have them. A favorite relaxing project is weaving my baskets. I love exploring using all types of recycled paper and non woven fabric. The baskets are woven using an old Scandinavian technique that I was taught many moons ago at school. Traditionally the baskets are made from birch bark. Some of my latest newspaper baskets were made while stewarding a recent textile exhibition. I can walk and talk while weaving, and the baskets always attract a lot of attention and questions from the visitors.
I love hunting at car boot sales/flea markets and secondhand shops. That’s where I find most of my fabrics, maps and other craft supplies. I like to recycle and upcycle giving items a new lease of life. I very rarely buy new fabrics and when, then just white or natural fabric that I can dye. When visiting family in Denmark I always bring back Danish newspapers. I like using Danish newspapers in my work partly because it connects me to my heritage and I can have a little read while working, and partly because I just want to use the graphics of the written word. In my woven bowls of newspaper I find the interplay between the text and the dots of colors so exciting. The same could be said when using old discarded road maps. I have travelled Europe extensively and it totally brings back memories when working with the maps.
A couple of years ago I came across Etsy in a magazine. I did a lot of research and decided to open my shop SewDanish – Scandinavian Textile Art, Unique Handmade Supplies. Prior to my Etsy shop some of my products had been sold in shops in Denmark and while living in the US, I had been selling at craft fairs and farmers markets. Moving back to England I was running out of storage space, so selling on the internet seemed a perfect match. My latest addition to my shop is my handmade supply section. My friends always kid me that whatever I do, I go into mass production, but why make 5 when you just as easily can make a larger number? Quite often it is the preparations that take time, and not the actual process. That’s why I’m now are selling hand dyed threads and other handmade supplies.
With my little shop, life has become quite busy. Where I used to craft in the evenings, I now tend to catch up on the computer attending to my blog, emails, photo editing, social networking and marketing. I was next to computer illiterate when opening SewDanish, so it has been an extremely steep learning curve, but fun and a great challenge
The last 5 years I have been doing a lot of yoga, walking and hiking. There is no doubt that especially yoga is helping me staying grounded and focusing my mind, when life gets really busy. I'm a trained RGN nurse and have been working in the operating theaters for many years predominantly with open heart surgery. I don’t work as a nurse any longer and can blissfully focus on my textile/mixed media journey.
For current and past textile/fiber art exhibitions that I have participated in as a member of the following textile groups: Fibrefusion , OutOfTheFold , Advanced Textile Workshop and Sindano please click on the 'Exhibition' tap for the full information.
