Maggie Redpath

I am a child of the fifties, old enough to remember days with my grandma when school uniforms were bought much too big and worn till much too small. My grandma taught me how to darn socks and jerseys, to turn shirt collars and cuffs, to patch sheets and to make proggy rugs, but a lasting legacy was that she taught me to knit and I have been a passionate knitter all my life.

Now I am retired I am blessed with the time to revisit the skills my grandma taught me, making proggy rugs from recycled sweatshirts and denim jeans, using huge needles and multiple strands of yarn to knit multi-coloured mats, incorporating traditional skills with a contemporary twist.

I have been researching my family history and what a journey it has been. I have taken the everyday working lives of my coalmining ancestors as the inspiration for my current work. Drawing upon the pits, coal faces and coal seams at Ellington Colliery on the Northumbrian coast, the dust and slag heaps, the sea coal men scavenging a living on the hostile coast and my memories of growing up in a pit village.