The Remembrance Snippet Roll ~ A little archive of the things we might otherwise forget

If you’ve been following my steps inside this studio for a while, you will know that much of my creative work has become an act of remembering.

I am interested in the lives that came before us.

The landscapes they walked.

The hands that worked.

The homes they made.

The faces that have long since disappeared from photographs.

The little things they held onto.

And so, over time, I have found different ways to remember.

There are my ancestral paintings, where I try to bring past landscapes back into view, places once walked by people whose lives eventually became part of mine.

There is the memory quilt, speaking in stitches about one particular line of my mother’s family.

There are portraits that allow me to look again into long lost faces and wonder about the lives behind their eyes.

And now, there is something new.

Something much more humble.

Something that I hope might continue to wander long after I have breathed my last breath.

My Remembrance Snippet Roll.

I have been inspired by Karen at Railway Cottage Studio, Corrine at To Be Loved Treasures and Dawn in Her Art Room all on YouTube whose beautiful snippet rolls have shown me how much life can be gathered into one small, unfolding piece of cloth;

• Scraps.

• Treasures.

• Buttons.

• Photographs.

• Old pieces of fabric.

• Found objects.

• Little remnants of days that might otherwise disappear.

I love the idea that these things don’t necessarily need to be valuable to be precious.

They simply need to have belonged somewhere in a life.

And so I have begun my own.

The foundation is a roll of hessian that already carries memories for me ~ memories of my Pop.

To wind the snippet roll as it grows, I am using a rusted old bolt found on land connected to a line of my paternal family.

Even the beginning has a story.

And as this hessian roll slowly moves along, I will glue and stitch all kinds of things onto it.

Some pieces you will recognise.

Others may be completely ordinary.

Some will come from the past ~ little fragments I have found from yesteryear.

Some will come from the present ~ scraps and objects from the life I am living now.

And perhaps, one day, something will find its way onto this roll from a future I cannot yet imagine.

That is what I love most about the idea.

It isn’t finished.

It isn’t meant to be.

It can keep growing as I do.

Perhaps one day this little roll will be held by someone who never knew me.

Perhaps they will wonder about the woman who stitched these things together.

Perhaps they will recognise a photograph, a piece of fabric, an old button or a rusted piece of metal.

Perhaps they won’t know the story at all.

And that’s okay. Because sometimes remembering isn’t about preserving every detail. Sometimes it is simply about leaving a trace. A little evidence that we were here. That we loved. That we noticed. That ordinary things mattered. That a life was lived among scraps and treasures and photographs and pieces of cloth.

And so, I am going to let this Remembrance Snippet Roll unfold slowly.

There will be no rushing it.

I will share little pieces of it here as it grows over on my YouTube channel https://youtu.be/bVQo7Dd1h00?si=cfBMIo-op1-t1seG~ the things I find, the things I stitch, the memories that surface and perhaps some of the stories that sit quietly behind them.

A weekly remembrance.

One little snippet at a time.

Because perhaps this, too, is a way of leaving an inheritance.

Not an inheritance of wealth or possessions, but of memory. Of noticing. Of love. Of the beautiful, imperfect fragments that make up an ordinary life.

And perhaps, long after we are gone, someone will unroll it…

and remember.