margaret-cooter: The quiet week

I used to love going to work in the week (or remnant of week) between xmas and new year - the city was quiet, the traffic was minimal, there was always a seat on the tube, and in the early days, lunch hours were long and often spent at the British Museum.

Without the day job, these days get mixed up - I spent most of yesterday thinking it was Friday, and today (Friday) vaguely aware that it wasn't Saturday but not sure how many more days 2018 has left to run. (Does it matter, without the need to get the year right when writing a cheque? Huh, who does that any more!)

So the days drift by, without anything accomplished. Xmas guests have gone, the thank-you letters - er, emails - have been written, and a day has been spent on the sofa with an escapist novel. I wondered what "the quiet week" had been like in previous years, and looked back through this blog.

2006 - I was grappling with a "lace" knitting pattern (at the moment I'm knitting generic, straightforward - but colourful - socks) -

Call me Penelope

Very slow progress, much ripping out of this pattern - it just won't stick in my mind, like patterns used to. And, unlike in years past, the graphic representation was so confusing that I had to write out the pattern, simple as it is! But my streak of sheer cussedness has kicked in, and I'll stick with this till the wool is used up (another 3 balls to go -- this scarf will be about a metre long).

The book is Barbara Walker's Charted Knitting Designs, published in 1972 - I used it a lot in the 1980s for making up my own combinations of cabled designs, real knitting from scratch -- where are all those sweaters now, the ones knit on the bus to and from work?

2007 - as now in 2018, I was a bit slow in sending out new year's greetings -

Happy New Year

This year I'm a bit slow with getting the New Year cards mailed out. If your smailmail isn't in my address book and you don't get one of these little "origami" books in the post, you may want to fill in your answers under the headings - and perhaps act on them -

Reasons to leap out of bed

Books to read and films to see

Fun things to do without a screen or monitor

Unusual places to go

Nice things to think about

Habits to make, or to break

Interesting people to get in touch with

The folded books are based on Paul Johnson's creative book-making projects for children, and can be found on page 6 here. Some more folded books are shown here - have fun!

2008 - I'd left the day job in November... and was reflecting on one of my breakthrough works, which was sold to a neighbour some years later.

"Blown Away"

In 2001 or so, new to the internet, I joined AlternativeQuiltList, a yahoogroup. This was in the good old days when there was lots of discussion in the discussion groups - that sphere of action now seems to have been taken over by blogs, which has its pros and cons.

Anyway, AQL had a "painting challenge" where you chose an artist and wrote a bit about them on the list, then made a quilt based on their work or something that arose from your research. My choice for the first round was Elisabeth Vigee Lebrun, who painted aristocrats around the time of the French Revolution. More about her another time (maybe).

For the second round I wanted something completely different - so, why not Australian Aboriginal art? I chanced on an online photo of a "desert garden" on the Art and Australia magazine site. It's no longer there, but looked rather like this -

and turned out to be by an artist named Gloria Petyarre. I loved the flow of the shapes, and did a sample, and then pulled out all sorts of yellow, orange, red, brown fabrics, and it evolved into quite a large piece (44 cm x 100 cm).

Each of the seven sections has a different combination of colours. The "leaves" are about the size of a thumbnail, built up in layers to cover the background, and then the different sections are applied to a piece of black fabric -