Eppie Thompson first had the idea for the Fabled Thread around Christmas 2018. Back then, she was working in finance and, she admits, ‘hating every minute of it’. She developed the plan over a period of 18 months before quitting her job and launching her embroidery-kit business in late March 2020, just as the coronavirus lockdown hit. It turned out to be the best move she could have made. Over the past year, as sales of embroidery supplies nationwide have increased more than 500 per cent, her new business has blossomed. She has been running everything single-handedly from her one-bedroom basement flat in a Victorian house in Dalston, east London, and is scheduled to expand into larger premises later this year.
For many of us, the restrictions of the past year have meant the loss of a sense of control over our lives, our activities and our movements. As a way of compensating for this lack, many have turned to activities that use and soothe the body in new ways, from cooking and decorating to yoga and jogging. With sewing, Thompson says: ‘You control what you do with your hands and then you have created something.’ When it comes to an artistic undertaking, embroidery can be particularly satisfying because the maker is guided by a pattern that is guaranteed to work out well. ‘It’s like colouring by numbers with thread,’ says Thompson. ‘You can very easily unpick anything that goes wrong. In any case, mistakes add to the character of a piece.’ Eppie Thompson even embroidered her own wedding dress which took more than 150 hours, a true labour of love.
An urge to make things definitely runs in Thompson’s family. The first piece of embroidery Eppie acquired is a sampler celebrating her birth. It was made by her grandmother, who is now
97 years old and ‘still furiously stitching away’. Born and raised in Yorkshire, Thompson studied chemistry before moving into finance. In a bid to sublimate her work-related stress, she participated in all kinds of art classes, including life drawing and pottery. Around three years ago, she discovered a love of sewing and all things textile, which she found helped her to ‘stop thinking’. Thompson developed a strong desire to share the calming and enjoyable effects of the practice.
Noticing that the available kits tended to be rather twee, she set out to reinvent home embroidery in a more expressive and erudite style. From the inception of the Fabled Thread, Thompson knew that she wanted the experience of receiving and completing her projects to feel like a treat. In keeping with this intention, most of the product ranges (except the ‘Camels’ designs) are packed into lavish book-like boxes containing thread, needle, detailed instructions and even a tote bag for people to take their work-in- progress with them wherever they go.
To keep the time-consuming process of stitching engaging, her tapestries are rich in varied colours and forms and have imagery that stresses character, visual intrigue and impact; they deliberately avoid large areas of background filling, which can be tedious to complete. Her new ‘freestyle’ range featuring circus performers will launch later this year, with heavily patterned areas that invite makers to explore their creative independence by choosing how to fill them in – a kind of word-search version of embroidery.
Storytelling is central to the Fabled Thread’s ethos, its designs inspired by both Aesop’s Fables and Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories, as well as folk and naïf art. Traditionally, embroidered samplers were made to celebrate and record big events and rites of passage. Thompson, who made her first sampler to celebrate the wedding of two friends, says that part of the magic of a piece of embroidery is its ability to hold stories, some of which may be known only to the maker. Even when there isn’t an explicit personal or literary reference, as with her ‘Musicians’ series, her work invites narrative. So much so that she has taken to writing short tales about the characters in her tapestries, which are printed up as booklets and tucked into the kits.
The literary theme extends to the décor of Thompson’s flat, where the first lines of Lewis Carroll’s 1871 poem ‘Jabberwocky’ are painted around the entrance to the sitting room. For Thompson, ‘nonsense is good. Carroll’s madness and whimsy are a reminder to be not too controlled, not to overthink things.’ The lines set the tone for the rest of the flat, which is a playful palimpsest of both objects and furnishings, many of which Thompson made herself. Her loo is chemistry-themed in honour of the subject she studied during university, with a framed periodic table on the wall, topical textbooks and photos of university friends. Her mantelpiece features a menagerie of ceramic animals. Humorous artworks hang cheek by jowl with samplers and tapestries that are displayed in hand-painted frames. Much of the furniture has been adapted to serve the double use of the live/work space, including a high, narrow kitchen table at which she cuts fabric and an extra-high bed with storage of her bedroom workshop is a bobbin-beneath. The centrepiece
winding station, where she prepares thread for her kits using a device her father concocted from a lazy Susan, a fishing-line measure, a bulldog clip and a power drill.
Texture, colour and pattern chase one another through the flat, which is threaded through with a motif of red-and-white candy stripes and a nautical theme, which Thompson confesses is ‘an obsession’. Model boats and images of ships, including a 19th-century ‘woolly’ tapestry made by a sailor at sea, contribute to the maritime atmosphere. In fact, Thompson is planning a range of kits for banners celebrating famous ships, including the Santa Maria and HMS Beagle. Her enthusiasm for colour and form is balanced with a deep appreciation of history in both its official and personal guise. She has recently been receiving messages from customers sharing their sewing stories, including one from an intensive-care doctor, who wrote that her embroidery is the most therapeutic thing she can do when she returns home from work. Confirmation, if any were needed, that Thompson’s career move was a good one.
For more information, visit thefabledthread.com
A version of this article appeared in the May 2021 issue of The World of Interiors. Learn about our subscription offers. Sign up for our bi-weekly newsletter, and be the first to receive exclusive stories like this one, direct to your inbox
