Beautiful books

At the Digital Library of Poland website. This is a page from Psalterz florianski -And from the National Library of Scotland, Abraham entertains the angels in the Murthly Hours:A google of "digital library" gives links to many, many more -- including of course the British Library's treasures.

Rain series

Here are the "rain and wind" journal quilts, all in one place. The aim is to get the feeling of wind and rain - but the results seem to be pulling me in other directions. This first one could be landscape?
A variation on that them - unfinished and abandoned.Sleet ? -"Tropical rain" --Using a very dark background led to using various colours of rayon thread on velvet - including orange, because night in the city is characterised by the orange glow of street lighting. During quilting the velvet shifts, leaving gaps to be filled in with solid stitching - that "mistake" is an idea waiting to be developed -"Golden Rain", enhanced with some beads ... maybe it needs more ...
And the latest, arising from memories of sheets of rain being blown past streetlamps -

Museums and photography

The V&A is encouraging people to post the pictures they take at the museum - it has a flickr group on its site, currently containing 730 images.

This leaves me curious about museums' photography policies. A quick search and dipping in at random produces:

"To protect the objects being photographed, the copyright privileges of their creators, and the safety of our visitors, there is a need for certain restrictions on taking photographs in the museum..." (Dayton Art Institute)

"Readers may use their own non-flash digital cameras and Single Lens Reflex (SLR) cameras to photograph certain items. We regret that the use of camera tripods is not permitted. All photography is under staff supervision in a designated area, using document support aids provided by staff where appropriate (See Section 4 below)." (National Maritime Museum library and archive)

"Photography for personal use is permitted in all galleries and exhibits
in the Museum. Certain traveling exhibits may have photographic
restrictions. These will be posted in the gallery..." (McClung Museum, University of Tennessee)

The sites usually mention that tripods need permission, flash isn't permitted, and use by press etc needs special permission.

Now for the visuals - taken in January during some of theV&A's refurbishment work:
Cornelia Parker's controversial sculpture is suspended over the interactive area in the southwest corner. (Comments at its unveiling were along the lines of "they could have repaired those instruments and kids could be playing them") --

The sewing machine has tension problems - just look at that loopy thread on the back of the next dotty piece -
and it can't go for repair till tomorrow. So I'm having a "desk day" today, getting caught up on "everything" - interspersing 15-minute bouts at the computer with 15-minute bouts of tidying, sorting, purging. This is so good for the soul!

But first, another eraser-cutting exercise
At first the chains of loops didn't seem promising, but you try anything, don't you - here a swarm of bees emerged. Printing on paper (yes it's the inside of an old envelope - waste not, want not!) takes rather less ink/paint than printing on cloth.

In the first stages of the clearout, an April issue of Time Out was definitely headed for recycling - but had to be looked at quickly, and who should be pictured but my (former; and briefly, alas) singing and piano teacher, Lorraine Bowen -- haven't seen her for ages, so it's good to know that she's still delighting audiences with her wacky toonz and vibrant personality -
Also in that issue, an item that fits right in with my "dames & dawgs" photography, handbags shaped like dogs. Bizarre. They're made by Love on a Leash and include dachshunds, chihuahua, labrador. Better than carrying a real live doggy poking out of a handbag, or trailing a small dog along on its least to trip up people and get stepped on?

Dealing with the ever-growing pile of magazines (never mind all the magazines that are safely stashed away) has been on my "to do" list forever. They are mostly art and fibreart mags, with so many lovely pictures in them! Working on a weekly journal, I know how much work goes into putting magazines together. OK, thousands of copies are printed, hundreds of thousands even, so why do I want to "save" this particular one .... and these images are retrievable on the net ... there's no lack of images these days, not like when I was younger and (in retrospect) starved of this good stuff. So, out they should go (some day) -- but boy oh boy, do old habits and old longings die hard!

The sorting process has already turned up several things (leaflets, newspaper cuttings) that cry out to be blogged about. This is how those annoying, endless little heaps start, right?

Browsing

in Hatchards, on Sunday afternoon. The interior design section
and the textiles sectionand in the photography section, this alluring book, which comes in small format (£9.95) and larger (£14.95) -Its photos go from the very small to the cosmic -

Season of ...

mists and mellow fruitfulness, and of these -
And some other pix from the Central Hornsey & District Allotmenst & Horticultural Society 58th Annual Show last weekend -



Knitted veg by Lianne, trug by Marco - Best of Show, imho!

Good start to a Saturday

How long does it take to make a recipe? A week to get around to buying the beans, another week to find a window of opportunity - and then you discover a vital ingredient is missing. So at 7am it was off across the road to Tesco to get olive oil ... and to discover that some of their school supplies are now on sale - including packs of erasers - needed for Visual Exercise 2, 30 Days of Cutting Stamps (in "Finding Your Own Visual Language by Dunnewold, Benn & Morgan). The book suggests cutting a stamp every day for a month - or six stamps during a sitting. At the bottom are some I prepared earlier -

The new erasers looked a bit small so I bought just one pack (at 36p). They're a bit fiddlier than those from Superstore in Pitt Meadows, which cost 99 cents for a pack of 5, but not impossible to use.

This morning I grabbed an old sketchbook, opened it at random, and used a few lines from an image on the page. Dabbed black Liquitex onto the stamp with a small sponge brush, then went to town on a bit of recycled sheeting, trying out variations from the rigid lines on the left to the helter-skelter on the right, thinking about patterning and negative space. The blobby bits where the stamp hadn't been cut away enough were initally annoying, but they have potential as adding some life to the patterning. Dyed, this could become usable fabric.
"Fagioli nel fiasco" is traditionally made in a chianti bottle (blown, not moulded) with toscanelli beans, garlic, sage, olive oil, and salt and pepper - slow simmered, and served with sausages or roast pork, or as a simple first course with bread. I reckon it will reheat beautifully.

Dotted

There's got to be an easier way - this journal-quilt piece took about 8 hours. (it now has a neat satinstitch border.) After free machining the big circles I cut out the centres - of some - to reveal the shiny fabric, but then their edges looked messy, so more machining was needed to hide the raggedness...

And then there had to be tiny circles between the bigger ones; there seemed no end to that, and I can see several places that still need a dot or two.... There's some experimentation with cutting out the entire centre and covering the hole with thread, as well as with cutting the backing away from some of the circles. Those techniques make it very tactile - you can hold it with both hands and then you suddenly come to the different thicknesses. The back is felted grey wool, with the threads still in place from moving from one circle to another (and two colours of bobbin thread) -

Here's what inspired this - "Geometric 2007" by Eileen Goldenberg, who works in encaustics.

After seeing her work in the "abstract and geometric" show on the website of Woman Made gallery in Chicago, I just had to do some more circles. Somehow my circles went their own way, rather than staying in nice neat rows.
Next time I'll cut the holes first, before layering and stitching. The layering could be exciting, and goodness knows what could happen with the stitching.

More "rain"

Golden rain, this time, being blown in sheets. (Perhaps not exactly meteorologically accurate.) Both the silk velvet and the pleated metallic organza come from the car boot sale and had previous lives as a skirt (Jigsaw label) and scarf (but who would have worn such scratchiness?).

The variegated metallic thread disappears into the folds of the organza and only just shows up on the velvet (it's best to stitch in just one direction, otherwise you get unwanted "texture" on the velvet). The thread for handstitching is thicker and used here and there on the organza - but is too subtle and disappears into the folds. You really have to get close to the piece to see it -

And the colours, in real life, are palepale gold and sumptuous darkest mossy green.

Vancouver, as was

This book (bought on the ferry to Nanaimo) is set in Vancouver's Chinatown in the late 1930s and 40s. Growing up in and near Vancouver in the 1950s, I was always intrigued by Chinatown and the Chinese community. Like them I too was an immigrant and spoke another language at home, but it was a language that when written looked almost like English. And yes, the family's friends were mainly German, but my own friends, though many were from immigrant families like my own, were definitely Canadian. As a child it was all taken for granted, but as an adult I question these assumptions.

So a story about Chinatown and Chinese-Canadian families hit the spot.
Vancouver Art Gallery had just had an exhibition of photos of Vancouver by Fred Herzog, mostly from the 1950s. The accompanying book is wonderful - the city I remember, and yet the city I didn't see (oh my, how it has changed!). Chinese New Year, for instance -

And an street scene -

We've bought several copies of the book but seem to be unable to hold onto them.

From 36,000 feet

Flying to Canada in July I had a window seat and it was early afternoon the whole way over - and cloudless most of the way. Here's the east coast of Greenland -

And the never(?)-melting snow of the interior --

Minutes later, these amazing patches of blue appeared -

Are these "lakes" compressed glacial ice?

After Greenland, there was sea ice -

And as we flew for what seemed like hours over the Canadian north, there was ice on the lakes - or between islands -

As we got to the Rockies the clouds appeared, but this river showed clearly -

Looking on a map doesn't help in identifying it - it could be the Fraser, Canoe, or Columbia.

Very narrow binding

This very narrow binding

is done with organza round a journal quilt (more of which another time, perhaps):

My method doesn't fit any quilt-police criteria - it doesn't use bias strips, it doesn't have mitred corners. But it's quick enough and easy enough and (I hope) neat enough.

First I pinned a sheet of A4 paper over my quilted piece, which started out a bit bigger than A4, then sewed round the edge of the paper. Took the paper off and sewed round again, just (1/8 inch?) inside the first line, then trimmed the quilt on the first sewing line. (A narrow zigzag round the edge at this stage might be helpful.)

The organza was just over an inch wide, folded so there was more in one "half" of the strip. It would probably help to press it. I laid the folded edge along the trimmed edge (rough edges towards the middle of the quilt, extra width underneath) and sewed very close (1/8 inch?) to the fold (and edge), ie on top of the stitching that was already there. Any of that stitching that shows can be unpicked. I did the long sides first, and folded the ends of the long sides to the back before I applied the top and bottom binding strips. The top and bottom strips had a bit sticking out at the ends, and when folding those ends back, I tucked them in diagonally in an approximation of a mitre. Then I pin-basted the turned binding and machined in the ditch, leaving the raw edges at the back.

This is from another piece and reveals, shockingly, that I tore (not cut) the organza. For a very tidy back, turn the edge (of just one layer of the organza) under and hand sew it. Or, add a false backing, turned under and handsewn over the frazzled edges of the binding.

Materialisation

The screenprinted "flowerbox" piece is coming along - embroidered flowers are appearing. It's great to have a "mindless" piece to hand stitch. Choosing and scattering the colours provides just enough interest. The straight stitches look scarily messy close up, but I have a vision of how it will all knit itself together once there are enough, all over.

Several more rain-and-wind journal quilts have come into being, and when daylight comes I'll photograph them.

One of the things I like about this creative process lark is how you suddenly find a deeeeep interest in some topic that you'd never given a second thought, and then you start noticing "it" everywhere. And as you work on your little series, the way the rapidity of the journal quilts encourages, it evolves and opens up into a lot of possibilities. The "too many possibilities" thing used to throw me into a spin, but now that I'm making the little quilts just for the hell of it, rather than thinking it's got to be The Best (and Biggest) Quilt So Far, the anxiety and pressure is gone and it's become pure fun.