Dunblane Cathedral – a lesson in craft and design

In my modest travels around Scotland I seem to be forever discovering stunning and inspiring examples of art, or maybe it's just that Scotland has a lot of undiscovered treasures (or undiscovered by me, anyway). I didn't realise that the town of Dunblane had a medieval cathedral until we met some friends for lunch in the town, who told us about it. So of course we had to visit.

Dunblane Cathedral

On the outside it was attractive enough, but inside it was one of the most beautiful cathedrals I've ever seen, with real treasures everywhere. There was far too much to mention here, including some spectacular stained glass, but what caught my imagination immediately were the hundreds of wood carvings, almost all of them in the form of little animals. I don't think I've ever seen such charming and sensitive animal carvings and of course I was immediately determined to interpret them in embroidery

 

A little hare – just one of the beautiful wooden animal carvings in the Cathedral

So we photographed as many as we could, and at home I started work on a crouching rabbit, like the wood carving

 

Taken too directly from the original…

 

Well, to cut a long story short, it just didn't work. The embroidery had absolutely none of the charm and personality of the carving. After a lot of thought, I came to the conclusion that one of the problems was that I hadn't used the carving as an inspiration – I had only copied it. And what worked beautifully in a wood carving just wasn't suited to embroidery. Every craft medium has its own particular demands, and I had tried, unsuccessfully, to turn a carving directly into an embroidery

So I started again from the beginning, and this time came up with a hare that couldn't really be carved very well, but which worked fine as embroidery.

Inspired but not copied

Anyway I've learned my lesson – inspiration is fine, but copying doesn't usually work, and every craft has its own demands and requirements, which you ignore at your peril!