Order your Stissing Ham for the holidays! Bring our house-smoked Hudson Valley ham to your table. All of our hams are pasture-raised by farmers at Fat Apple Farm, Lover’s Leap Farm and Raven & Boar. Sizes range from 8-15lbs and come with a jar of spiced quince glaze. Order here for pickup.
Tune in for Martha Stewart’s holidays in the country episode, filmed at Stissing House & available on Roku.
We have room to Feast on New Year's Eve. Contact Katie, feasts@stissinghoue.com to plan a party.
Holiday Hours. We will be closed on Christmas Day and New Years Day.
It’s pheasant season. We’re aging them and pot-roasting the bird whole in our wood-oven, stuffed with wild rice, orange and roots.
Welcome hot toddy weather. Our toddy is made with a base of hot apple cider spiked with Bourbon and Allspice Dram. Useful to warm up from the cold or extend your stay with us, sipping by the fire after dinner.
This month, we had the pleasure of chatting with Henrietta Sherwin, Clare’s brilliant mother-in-law, who is in town for the holidays and shared her silkscreen printed textiles at this month’s Craft Feast.
Made in a historic Georgian studio in Bath, England, Henrietta’s beautiful designs are silkscreen printed by hand, using custom blended pigments on high quality linen. They are sewn by hand into pieces like tea towels and aprons that are unique, durable and soften with age. Beauty and function.
We’ve been so inspired lately by women who are finding their passion later in life. Some might call them late bloomers, but these women have often had wildly impressive careers prior to embarking on their passion projects. In Henrietta’s case, while she had a vague recollection of doing silkscreen prints in high school, she also had a serendipitous career in activism and research before finding her way back to the silkscreen craft in her late 50s.
Prior to her marriage, a Masters from the School of International Public Affairs at Columbia and the births of her three children, Henrietta had a career in Development Education and worked with the International Broadcasting Trust to influence the way television programs are made about developing countries. She was asked to join the BBC where she worked on an international documentary series. And while raising her children in Bath, England, she began campaigning for larger sidewalks and bike paths because she felt unsafe pushing her children in their strollers. Her work was locally and nationally recognized, resulting in First Great Western paying for her phD in Transportation Planning. Henrietta spent 20 years researching the conflict between cyclists and drivers before shifting her focus to research on the entrepreneurial journey of people who form community interest companies. In the final year of her three year research contract, she took an evening class in silkscreen printing–and it was as though she had been doing it her entire life.
Henrietta started by doing commissions for friends and family and sourcing fabric from thrift shops. As demand increased, she sourced 100% remnant linen from suppliers that made larger textiles like curtains and upholstery. Because she uses remnants, each piece is unique and must be cut and hand sewn (double fold, double stitch). But that’s one of her favorite parts of the creative process–being inspired by gorgeous fabric of varying sizes and deciding what to do with it. Here, we chat with Henrietta about the meaning of her craft, small daily rituals and her advice to her younger self.
In your previous roles with the BBC and as an early environmental campaigner, you were very much working to influence people and create change. Do you hope that your textiles influence people in some way?
I hope to help people appreciate that just as there is slow food, slow travel, etc. there is also slow fashion and home goods–things you actually need rather than adding to ‘stuff.’ It takes a while to make them, and is therefore a bit more expensive, but I hope people will appreciate them and not take them for granted. They’re functional, durable, and look beautiful. Also, linen has a relatively low carbon footprint. It’s a long-lasting fabric, and in some cases the remnants would be wasted.
What inspires your print and color choices?
Such a difficult question to answer. Life, and the way we have lived it, never instant but gradually creating something over time. At the start, we had no money so it was ‘make do.’ My garden in Bath has taken over 25 years to fully establish, and it grew organically rather than having an overall vision at the beginning. I learnt as I went along, constantly experimenting and refining. It’s the same process for me with silkscreen printing and mixing colors, which I love. The outcome is unpredictable and just a tiny drop of one pigment can have an impact. A frustration is my lack of discipline in measurement, so it’s impossible to
reproduce an exact color.
Do you have a routine for the days you're in your studio, small rituals that mark time
during the day?
I cycle across Victoria Park in Bath to my studio, usually with a rather erratic schedule. The best natural light is in the morning, but often I do not get there till early afternoon. I take a flask of tea and switch on the radio or a podcast (she loves Slightly Foxed and Serial). The studio is a vault, a kind of cocoon or another world, away from everything else–the only thing I am thinking about is the printing. If I am doing a two color print, I mix the color and print the first color and drape the fabric to dry over any object possible once my hanging line is full. I might take a walk to let it dry or come back the next day to mix and print the second color. Every piece of fabric takes the ink differently so the best part is when the hue and the weave of the base fabric blends well with the mixed color. You never know how it will
look until you print it.
Can you share a recent and/or unusual source of inspiration?
It is often something that just strikes me, and depending on my drawing skills will be more or less abstract. We went to the Falmouth Maritime Museum in Cornwall and there were all these extraordinary boats of different shapes, sizes and colors hanging from the ceiling. I used the shapes to create one print. Nigella flowers self-seed in my garden and I let them take over. They are so beautiful, but I could never draw that detail so I dried them and used their form for a print. And David MacGregor, a relation, was a maritime historian. I have a collection of his books and used some of the illustrations of barques to create a print.
What would you say to your younger self?
Give yourself permission to do something indulgent and creative. Be a bit kinder to yourself and don’t feel you’re on a treadmill and need to reach certain goalposts and do what is expected of you. The important thing about this is that it’s not a total indulgence.
What's the best advice you've ever been given?
Just do it, get your hands dirty. (Like mother-in-law, like daughter-in-law)