Mend and make do

Handbag-rub is wearing out the top left of my favourite skirt, the one in a useful neutral - taupe. Instead of using an applique patch, I flirted with the idea of colourful (but muted) embroidery, then decided to do as subtle a mend as possible, with an iron-on patch underneath and some protective embroidery to cover the thinning area. Trying to match the colour of the fabric was surprising - it needed a much darker colour than I thought, and grey was better than any of the muted purples I had on hand. (Beige of any tone doesn't figure largely in my thread stock.) Mid-grey cotton stem stitch, and an ad-hoc shape ... the repair took about half an hour in total and saved me from the horrors of going shopping (just joking!) (or am I?).

Inspired by...

This is an annual exhibition at the V&A, giving students in adult education a showcase for their projects based on items in the museum.A dress becomes a flower brick - why not? both are very 18th-century... (For the curious, information on mantua makers is here; flower bricks started out as a way of displaying individual tulips.)
Interesting how one thing metamorphoses into another....
This sinuous spoon won an award for Outstanding Commitment.
The kimono has echoes of the "rail fence" quilting pattern.

Brighton

Our office outing, to the English seaside -- here seen through the "donut" sculpture on the (shingle) beach.
The intrepid swimmers are female colleagues (seems most of the fellas went to the pub...)
The seaside jollity can feel a bit alienating
But after lunch I got a chance to build stonecastles with young Aidan while his mother was swimming -
It was windy all day (which makes for crashing waves) and in the afternoon it clouded over - typical English seaside weather.
Here's another view of the burnt-out pier, in the evening light.

Wildwood

This week's Book of the Week, aired at 9.45 am (I listen before I leave for work), is Wildwood by Richard Deakin. On Wednesday he talked about meetings with two artists who work with wood, David Nash and Margaret Mellis. Your can hear this for 7 days on the BBC website.This is one of Mellis's driftwood collages. She also paints "ordinary" pictures. I first came across her work at the Redfern gallery in 1994 - they had a show of her paintings of flowers, done on the insides of envelopes.

Road

I do most of my sewing in the mornings before going to work at 10.00. The past few mornings I've been paving the road to hell with good intentions - or trying to -That was too shiny. The holes don't really work. Try again -
Hmm.... this idea needs to percolate through the subconscious for a while. What do good intentions look like, in cloth?

The "road" is meant to be just one element in a bigger picture. I was planning to bring in the idea that "hell is other people" and although it's getting away from the original idea, it's starting to look scary:That trial piece is about 12" high. Enlarging those figures could be interesting ....

Stairway

...to heaven?

Half

Half price, half eaten. You don't get a lot of berries for your buck! Usually they come from Poland but these come from Spain. I'm looking forward to eating lots and lots of blueberries when we visit Pitt Meadows next month. As an adolescent I earned money for a bike and sundry such necessary luxuries by berry picking - after all, we lived round the corner from the biggest blueberry farm in the Commonwealth. These were hard-earned luxuries - pay was 5 cents a pound, and my record on one day was 105 pounds. Usually a whole day in the field got you four, five or six 10-pound buckets - sometimes the berries were small (Stanleys were small, Dixies were the biggest) or the bushes not very loaded. And picking blueberries meant leaving the green ones on the bush. Now the picking is done mechanically, and the remaining peat bog is used to grow cranberries.
At £1.49 for 150g, what's that a pound? £4.50, which works out at about 10 Canadian dollars. Wonder how much the Spanish pickers earn.

Lucy Boston's quilts

I was thrilled to help turn over the pile of quilts kept on one of the beds, and was able to peer very closely at them. They're all hand done, piecing over papers in the traditional way. Apparently before her eyesight went, she "managed" 26 stitches an inch, and you can see the sewing thread between just about every thread in the fabric, where the pieces join - but only if you look very, very closely.These photos are from the postcards I bought. "Moon and stars" has the moons made up of many small pieces, and the fields of stars are made up of squares with embroidery, just straight stitches, making the other points. Points - ah yes - are very, very sharp. Impressive.
A symphony in greys, with the same fabric used in various ways.
Leaves and creatures, her only applique quilt.
And this kaliedoscope must have been a nightmare to plan!

Stranger at Green Knowe

This book by Lucy Boston won the Carnegie Medal. It tells of Ping, an orphan refugee who has been in an internment camp and sees Hanno the gorilla at the zoo. Hanno escapes, and lives in the grounds of Green Knowe, where Ping is on holiday. Guess what happens next....

The drawings are by Lucy's son Peter, and show objects that are still in the house. I read the book in the History of Children's Literature course at library school, and thought at the time that we'd been living so very near the house during the years in Cambridge - Hemingford Grey is about a dozen miles away. By then I was living in Nova Scotia. Years after reading all the Green Knowe books I read Lucy Boston's autobiography, Memory in a House, in which she tells of buying and restoring the house - and of the wartime gramophone concerts held in the music room, attended by airmen from the nearby base.
The postcard of the music room has had many of the seats removed, but the 1930s wind-up gramophone is still there and we heard a bit of Mozart played on it.

You can see the lantern from the drawing, still there in the music room. The stairs are at the very right, beside the gramophone, and the door looks out towards the thicket where Hanno hid.

Stranger at Green Knowe culminates in the appearance of Hanno at the house. Here he's at the doors which Lucy Boston added, so she could easily get out to her beloved garden. She spent the summers gardening until she was in her 90s.
Mrs Oldknow and Ping are sitting at the table -- it's still there -- where Lucy Boston wrote her books in winter, during the day. During winter evenings she sat near the fire and made quilts.

She started both writing and quilting when she was in her late 50s.

"Green Knowe"

The Manor, Hemingford Grey, was the home of Lucy M Boston, author of the "Green Knowe" books, which are set in the house.
The house is said to be the oldest continuously inhabited house in England. It was built in 1130 and added to and altered over the years.
The gardens are delightful, and are open daily.
It's foxglove season; scented roses abound, and we liked the california poppies. And all the other flowers!
The topiary was planted by Lucy Boston when she moved in, in 1939. There are crowns and a dove of peace lining the path to the river. In a side garden, she made a chess set.

Kew Gardens - in the palm house

Unexpected abstract art, either side of the north door, the unpainted metal gone to rust.

Gasometer geometry

One of those fly-by shootings. These are somewhere between Stafford and Watford, beside the train tracks.

From the forest

New cones on a branch from a tall old tree (fir? pine?) that was being cut down - a branch had broken off so for some reason the whole thing had to go. The needles feel soft and whispery. And like all cones, these obey the geometry of nature.

Lutradur and landscape

The course I did at the Alston Hall/Contemporary Quilt summer school was on landscape, tutored by Ineke Berlin. After supper on Friday we spent a couple of hours in the studio painting lutradur, which is a "polyester spun web" - very strong, and takes paint well. We tried both the thick and the thin, and dabbed, swooshed, and sprayed, then left it to dry.The next day we experimented with many things. I finally tried Markal (Shiva) oil sticks, and found by happy accident that by using an edge as a stencil and then moving it to the other side, you could get a 3d-looking tree trunk. Another discovery was to use the soldering iron to bond synthetic fabric onto the lutradur - the two synthetics melt together.
By Sunday afternoon I had 4 pieces on the go, all on a foresty theme (probably inspired by that woodland walk...) - and the one on the right, "spooky forest", all but finished.

Alston Hall

Overlooking the Ribble Valley in Lancashire, Alston Hall is an adult education college housed in a Victorian building, run by a most friendly and helpful bunch of people.The grounds are beautifully maintained and the views are divine - and beyond the rusty fence, sheep graze contentedly.
The woodland walk goes round a little valley with a tiny stream and is dotted with lanky rhododendrons.

A shadowing of chairs

What's on the machine?

The dust cover - I'm off to Alston Hall for the Contemporary Quilt summer school.

Don't throw out those tiny scraps!

You could make a "string quilt" like this one (found while looking through old issues of Piecework). It was made about 1880-1900 by farmwife Susan McCord of Indiana. Each panel is 4 1/4 x 78 inches and contains about 300 leaves and buds - - each made with up to six pieces of fabric.
"The fabrics are still crisp with sizing from the mills." If you're in Dearborn, Michigan, you can see this at the Henry Ford Museum.