SPOTLIGHT / Eppie Thompson, The Fabled Thread

Spotlight is a special corner of Buonfresco, our subscriber newsletter, in which we invite a creative person whose work we love to answer questions tied to a theme. Our summer edition’s theme was Dear Reader, all about stories and how we tell them, and Eppie Thomson was our lovely guest.

Eppie Thompson, textile artist and founder of The Fabled Thread, and her dog Roger.

Eppie Thompson's world is a kaleidoscope of colour. Nourishing, bright and layered. It is unafraid, positive and exuberant. Her rainbow-hued London home was recently photographed for The World of Interiors, and the kits which her company, The Fabled Thread, sells, are rich with colour and bursting with energy.

It was in 2020, after 18 months of planning and just before lockdown, that Eppie left her job in finance and founded The Fabled Thread. It is the step up that the world of embroidery needed. Beautifully presented, and carefully thought through, The Fabled Thread kits are well-designed and special - but simple. Not just exciting but unintimidating! The perfect answer to her mission to get everyone sewing. Last year saw Eppie deservedly nominated for the Female Founder Award at the Holly & Co. independent business awards. We can't wait to see what's next!

As well as being expressive, the kits strike an erudite note. Behind many of The Fabled Thread's kits is a storytelling element. Some were inspired by Aesop's Fables and Kipling's Just So Stories. Not forgetting Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky! Each artwork has the capability to hold onto tales, winding and binding them in threads. Yarn after all is a synonym for story. And even when without a direct literary reference, the tapestries all invite narrative interpretation and imaginings. Eppie has also written short stories about the characters in the pieces which have been turned into booklets to accompany the kits.

With the perfect combination of joy, colour, creativity and storytelling, we are thrilled to welcome Eppie to this month's Spotlight and to hear her responses to our questions about inspiration, memories, and, of course, stories.

The Elephant's Child tapestry kit by The Fabled Thread.

1 | Storytellers you admire?

Rudyard Kipling, Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear - all the nonsense - all the mad stories! I love Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories. I think it’s incredibly hard for any of us to be free enough to write anything like that. You get so constrained by what should happen or how things should be, and whenever I read Edward Lear’s poetry it’s an amazing reminder to just be really silly and not worry. There’s such a lot of magic in that concept. You just have to let go of your inhibitions and have a go at it. I think so much of their work reminds you to do that.

2 | What does storytelling mean to you?

I love the idea that storytelling transports you to somewhere else, something else, a different view of yourself and who you are, and who you can be. I spend my days listening to audiobooks, I get through a ridiculous amount of audiobooks, and I think there’s nothing like losing yourself in a story.

You often have that devastation when you get to the end of a book and it’s hard to move on. I was listening to all the Strike novels by Robert Galbraith (J. K. Rowling). They’re murder mysteries and easy listening. It was such a pulls-you-along story. Now they’re all finished and I’m slightly overwhelmed! I just want another one exactly the same. 

I definitely go through genre phases. I go through periods of serious fiction, then through periods of a lot of business and non-fiction. Right now, I’ve been in a bit of a who’s dunnit phase and I’m loving it. And I do love a bit of poetry. But things like that I feel need to be a physical book. Audiobooks are good for things I might not have on my shelf for example but I have a different mindset with poetry.

3 | A person that inspired or has influenced you?

My mother. My mum is an amazing creative. The blessing she gave me is that I’ve never ever doubted my creative ability. In a way, I’ve just been instilled with a sense of confidence. Before I started The Fabled Thread, I felt like everyone had that but it was only in starting it I realised it was a rare thing. It’s such a gift. I believe we’re all creative, the only thing that varies between us is how confident we are. So, my mum, just through her ability to always celebrate everything we’ve done, and her own dabbling in every single craft imaginable, and her weird and mad projects, made me confident to do this, and continues to inspire me. There’s one set of designs we’ve done which is a collaboration between us. Her drawings, my colours, and she’s also a great sounding board for me. I really trust her.

The Fabled Thread's The Jabberwocky Act II embroidery kit.

4 |  The best colour combination is…

For me it’s always a red and pink. It’s almost as near as you can get in colour but with slight difference. I love that close clashing of a tomatoey red and a warm pink. In my flat I had a lot of red and pink everywhere. Pink is an incredibly uplifting colour. It can be a cold colour but if you get a warm shade it glows. My flat was a basement, north-facing at the front. It was quite dark but it had orange curtains, and when the light came into this pink room, the whole room just glowed! 

I also think pink is an amazing backdrop. Things all look very good on pink. It seems to complement everything. For hanging art, if you don’t know what the colours will be, it can be a great base.

5 |  Places you go for creative inspiration?

My first favourite place is second hand bookshops, either proper second hand ones or the Oxfam used bookshops. I think they’re absolutely amazing for making you see things you would never otherwise see, or you wouldn’t come across in any normal course of life. I picked up the most amazing old magazine from a used bookshop in Venice. It’s all in Italian so I wouldn’t be able to read it - but the images! It covered all sorts of topics. 

I also love going to museums. In London, if I’m ever stuck for an idea, I always go back to the British Museum. I like to take myself out of what I do, working in textiles, and I really love ceramics for finding inspiration. I think often of those small areas with some kind of imagery within them, they’re so limited on size, and the fineness of line, and everything like that. I think most of my inspiration actually comes from ceramics, not from textiles, from one item and one image depicting the entire story. There are some amazing 13th century BC, I think, Andean vases with antelopes in the British Museum, and I very much love cave paintings. Any really early depiction of prehistoric depictions of wildlife I feel are absolutely perfection.

One of The Fabled Thread’s tapestry kits.

Eppie Thompson's home, featuring the How The Whale Got His Throat tapestry as a cushion.

6 | What other creative past times you do you enjoy?

I do all sorts, I’m a real dabbler with everything. I do collage and make lots of patterned paper. Loads of the artists that I love are collage artists. I love Mark Hearld and Jo Waterhouse, I’m quite obsessed with. There is something about that layering of pattern which is so complicated but so wonderful. No matter how good you are with embroidery, every piece takes time. The great thing about collage is that it’s so much quicker. I’m very happy to sit down, I don’t need an immediate result on things - but I also have lot of ideas!

7 | Where do you start with your designs?

For all my designs, I always start with colour before anything else - before I even know what I’m stitching. It comes back to the Edward Lear thing of trying to free myself up. To not think: because I am going to depict an elephant I must have grey. Choosing colours in a totally separate way allows this. Colour makes and breaks a design but design doesn’t make and break colour. The colour draws you in to find out about the piece. If something about it didn’t draw you in, then no-one would find out the story - so that’s always the first starting point. But I always draw in black and white. The first time I see it in colour is when it’s stitched. This is the first time it all comes together.

8 | How do you find new ways of seeing?

There’s a wonderful appliqué artist in Leeds called Kate, and she was talking about one thing she’d started doing: taking a figurine, an animal, and then shining a light on it at a really weird angle and seeing what shape the shadow formed, and then taking that shape of the shadow to become the outline of the animal. It’s a way of forcing you to look at the thing but not in an obvious way. And I always think the best drawings come from the people who can’t draw, or believe they can’t draw. The moment you can draw it’s too hard to make an elephant not look like an elephant!

The Peacock and The Jay embroidery kit, framed in Eppie's home.

9 | How do you stay creative and encourage others to be creative?

Now I am five years in, and I stitch a lot. My sewing is very neat and I know a lot of stitches. In a way I worry about that making me lose the freedom. I preferred it when I was worse! I think if you’re taught too much it’s very hard to unlearn that. I limit myself sometimes. I say I’m not going to do any known stitches when I do this piece, I’m going to work entirely continuously, or just trying to work really loosely and not go back and fill in gaps. Trying to create that freedom. Less planning and slightly more go with the flow. Also, I’m never happy with a piece until I am about 90% of the way though it, and then it all starts coming together. There is also an element of you-can-only-do-that-if-you’re-willing-to-persevere.

It’s skilled to be creative. And you are often not taught it. You’re sat in front of a blank piece of paper and either expected to do something or not. And actually no artist or creative does that. Everyone has a method, and we are just not taught how to find a method. It’s experimentation. Trying all sorts of crazy projects. Getting it wrong. Thinking ‘I’ll have a go’ and not being afraid. Experimenting, and then being able to analytically look back on what you did - and think what did I like about that, what didn’t I like about that. We so infrequently take stock of our own creative process. You think it is a weird enigma that you can’t grip a hold of. I notice more because I teach. You notice it’s not a weird enigma it is absolutely a process! So I think that’s quite a liberating thing in a way.

The Horse and Rider embroidery kit, inspired by Aesop's Fables.

A customisable special occasion sampler, The Fountain, from the Wedding Samplers range.

10 | A special object or keepsake?

I have an old sailor’s woolwork. It’s the first thing I bought for myself for my own home. I think it was stitched in about 1780 - a big beautiful ship. They were always stitched by men when they were back on land after long periods at sea. They would stitch with whatever material they had on hand - any wools or fibres, or ropes, or bits of twine, string and old net they had. This one provides me with so much inspiration. Last year, I launched a range of woolwork designs of my own, a more modern interpretation, and that piece has always been the root of it. The ones I’ve designed as kits are exactly the same size as the one I own. I love the nautical genre, I’m fascinated by it. 

I also picked up, in a bookshop in Venice, an old magazine which has these incredible paintings: American folk art, by James Bard. Steamers on the River Hudson. They’re these amazing long images and I’m desperate to get them into a stitched kit but they’d be big! The woolies most encapsulate what I’m trying to do with The Fabled Thread: kits that you would never know are a kit but that they can be a piece of art. I want the pieces to be art foremost, kit second.

11 |  Wise words/ a favourite quote/ mantra?

“If it’s for you, it won’t pass by you.”

It’s constantly something within work and within life; I try to remind myself and to not worry about stuff - because I think if it’s meant to happen, it will happen.

The Fabled Thread’s Freestyle Embroidery Course.

SEE MORE

You can follow The Fabled Thread on Instagram for behind the scenes content, new products, and lots of colourful photos. And visit the new website to order kits, framing and sewing supplies, and sign up to one of their courses. Eppie has also just launched a brilliant new Journal packed with creative inspiration.