S
ophie Boylan is talking me through her extra- vagantly beaded cape, cascading with a hanging garden of rose-coloured sequins, the culmination of 24 weeks of intensive study and practice as part of the Chanel and King’s Foundation Métiers d’Art Embroidery Fellowship. “I was inspired initially by the wildflower meadow and the koi fish in the kitchen garden farm,” she says. “I really wanted to look at the repetition in the scales and also the wilder nature in the flowers.”
The cape, which comes in two parts to be worn on top of the other, took 450 hours to embroider. It looks like a museum piece with its precise, scalloped edges and blooming flowers. What makes it truly innovative is that in place of the usual plastic sequins, Boylan made a bioplastic sheet from cellulose and agar, out of which she hole-punched each sequin individually.
Boylan is one of six students who are selected every year to develop and refine their embroidery skills and creative practice at an extraordinary residential programme at Highgrove, King Charles’s family residence in Gloucestershire. The students live in a purpose-built block of rooms by the pretty kitchen garden, next to a farmhouse that has been converted into studios.
