Last updated at 12:17, Tuesday, 27 January 2009

Mary Ingham meets Victoria Relph, a milliner and textile designer from Penrith whose 'wearable works of art' are winning her awards and a rapidly growing reputation

Victoria' daughter Verity wearing a Pheasant topper

‘People say they can’t wear hats. Everyone can wear a hat but maybe not a brim,” says Victoria Relph.
The hats she makes – and which are making a name for her in design and in embroidery – range from the daintiest fascinators to big-brimmed, bold statement creations guaranteed to turn heads.
Working from home in Yanwath, near Penrith, Victoria recently graduated from the University of Cumbria with a first class degree in contemporary applied art.
The graduation ceremony in Carlisle Cathedral came towards the end of a remarkable year in which Victoria’s second career (her first was in nursing) has taken off at high speed.
She designs to commission and the hats
in her collections may be customised also, through detaching or adding accessories
such as feathers.
Victoria’s work was selected for the New Designers exhibition in July at the Business Design Centre in London, a prestigious showcase for graduates.
After joining Made in Cumbria, she exhibited at the Lowther horse driving trials near Penrith in August and won the craft category of The Distinctly Cumbrian Best Stand Awards.
As a result of the New Designers show, she was awarded a licentiateship by the Society of Designer Craftsmen for five years and was selected by the Embroiderers Guild to present work at its Knitting and Stitching shows in Birmingham, London, Dublin and Harrogate.
Between these shows she and fellow University of Cumbria graduates, Andrea Nixon and Helen McKenna picked up the award for best degree show at the Madeira-UK sponsored Fashion, Embroidery and Stitch Show in Harrogate.
Victoria also came second in the international Hand & Lock Prize for Embroidery with ‘Pheasant – sphagnum moss’, her spectacular take on the tam o’shanter. Victoria’s interpretation of the competition’s theme ‘wistful highlander’, demonstrates the passions for ornithology, landscape, natural materials, painting, and historical research which infuse her work.
“I want to make hats which are environmentally sustainable, wearable yet beautiful works of art,” she says.
The felt tam o’ shanter, topped off by two magnificent tail feathers, is made from wool from Victoria’s own Blue Faced Leicester X Cheviot sheep. The wool is naturally dyed with indigo, weld, marigold, brazilwood, logwood and madder to evoke sphagnum moss, cranberry, saxifrage and lichen. The tam o’ shanter is embellished with free machine embroidery, hand embroidered bullion knots, beading and kink corded Madeira Décor and Lana wool threads.
“Natural dyes are great,” says Victoria. “You get lovely muted and subtle shades which describe the landscape.”
The tam o’shanter was the starting point for Victoria’s current collection Romancing the Feather – a series of designs reflecting the splendour of our native heath, marsh and woodland birds and their behaviour within vulnerable or endangered habitats.
The designs include hats and fascinators based on Victoria’s studies of black grouse at the RSPB’s Geltsdale reserve near Brampton.
Her extensive background research includes studying taxidermy exhibits in Tullie House at Carlisle and Keswick museum and, in the case of her hats based on falconry hoods, spending time at the Lakeland Bird of Prey Centre in Lowther, near Penrith. She also has the advantage of being an accomplished artist and works from her own beautiful sketches and watercolours.
Brought up on a hill farm at Bampton, near Haweswater, Victoria went to Tynefield school and Queen Elizabeth Grammar
School in Penrith.
“I always loved drawing, painting and mixed media and come from an era when a lot of embroidery, crochet and knitting were done,” says Victoria. “I made a lot of things and had a passion for embroidery.”
As a child she painted china with Margot Slack in Bampton and remembers Margot telling her, when she gave up in her mid teens, that her artistic side would re-emerge in her thirties or forties.
Victoria nursed for a number of years, specialising in orthopaedics in London, Oxford and Edinburgh after gaining her
SRN qualification in Hereford.
In 1985 she married Richard Relph, joint director with his brother John of agricultural suppliers TW Relph & Sons of Yanwath, and they have three children Greg, 22, Verity, 19, and Patrick, 17.
True to Margot Slack’s prediction, Victoria’s creative side came to the fore once more as her children were growing up.
“I had been thinking of possibly returning to nursing and decided to take a basic computer course first. Then someone told me about the access to higher education course in art and design at Cumbria Institute of the Arts [now the University of Cumbria] and it opened up another world,” says Victoria.

She studied for her degree part-time, taking six years – including the access course – to complete it. “I’m glad I did it that way as I got an awful lot out of it,” says Victoria. “I can’t speak highly enough of the course and the support from its leader, Maggi Toner-Edgar, who’s a milliner, and staff including embroidery tutor Angie Wyman and ceramics tutor Steve Ogden. The tutors and technicians at the University of Cumbria are all makers in their own right and encouraged us to explore every aspect of design and surface decoration. They provided a network of support and helped us get out into the market place.”
Victoria did her dissertation on plumage within millinery from 1880 to 1980. “I love the history of design,” she says. “I made a contemporary version of a riding hat from the 1880s and found it had a 1940s look about it.”
While she was doing her degree course she also helped set up the Philip Treacy exhibition at Tullie House in Carlisle in 2006.
Victoria had intended to specialise in ceramics but kept being drawn back to embroidery: “Working in three dimensions and with hats took over and I learned
basic blocking skills.”
Most of her hats are in felt, which
she makes, or sinamay, a sisal
grown in the Philippines, and she
uses natural and recycled
materials – feathers she by her own poultry, local alpaca fibre, and thread from the charity shop where her mother helps out.
“It’s a pleasure just to explore different materials and how they work and I’m very particular about stitches and the finish being right,” says Victoria. As in tailoring, little of the milliner’s craft is written down and in the past few months she has taken a couple of courses on traditional techniques in London with Rose Cory, who has made hats for members of the royal family.
Victoria is invited to do lots of talks and demonstrations but wants to become fully established as a designer before going too far down the teaching route.
As part of her Hand & Lock prize, she
is being mentored for a year by Anthea Godfrey, principal lecturer at the London College of Fashion and chairman of the Embroiderers Guild.
The past few months have been a whirl of shows and travel and Victoria is now looking forward to spending more time with her very supportive family – daughter Verity is a talented artist who also models her mother’s hats – and building up her collection.
“There’s also a great joy in commission work, in making someone happy with just the hat on their head that they had in mind,”
she says.

 www.victoriarelph.com

First published at 11:47, Monday, 26 January 2009
Published by http://www.cumbrialife.co.uk