A landscape quilt

This week I'm starting a six-week online class "exploring art quilts" with Jane LaFazio - the first week we're doing a landscape quilt. The fabrics - including brown, not a colour I have a lot of, for some reason - mostly came from the bring&buy at Saturday's regional day.First attempt -- note the menacing clouds in the sky: rain clouds -
Second thought - making the clouds into misty hills and adding roads going over the nearer hills -
But while we were out on Sunday morning, drinking in some culture and haunting a few bookshops, I saw a photo that appealed for this project, and scribbled it down to reinterpret in the fabrics on hand -
The edges are ironed under and then stitched down with invisible thread. Some of the areas are machine quilted
and here all the areas are machine quilted. It needs -- what?

Embroideries from India/Pakistan

Some of the gorgeous textiles that John Gillow passed around.This pulkari pattern is called the moon pattern. I was tempted to take it home with me...
A jolly interplay of elements in this one -
It does cry out for some stroking....
More "mixed media" - on a largeish bag -

Lots of beads and lots of stitches - and the zipper makes it edgey -Gorgeous colours in this "saami" quilt -- made by a beggar caste, who make their living by gathering rags -
Some saami quilts have stitched embellishment -
Tassels take many forms -

Signature quilt takes off

The idea of a signature quilt was well received, and Region 1 members flocked to pay their £1 and join in. We did a couple of mock-ups of possible designs
But there are a gazillion possibilities, as shown in "Spectacular Scraps" by Judy Hooworth and Margaret Rolfe:At the next Regional Day (15 March, International Quilting Day!) we'll be voting on what layout to use. Among other things... speakers on Red Cross quilts and hexagon quilts, traders to tempt us to part with our cash, the drawing of the annual raffle, show & tell, challenge (small item inspired by the Indian embroideries shown by John Gillow on Saturday.

Ikon gallery, Birmingham

A typical urban-regeneration art gallery - white walls, bookshop, cafe in a converted school, with additions like a glass elevator up the side (complete with sound piece by Martin Creed, a scale being sung as you travel from floor to floor, great art-bit to come across accidentally!) and some original features (or are they too art-bits to come across accidentally?) like a set of simple little windows on the stairwell:
The show was Cornelia Parker, and photos were allowed for personal use if you signed a list on a clipboard. So I can't show the actual work, which really does gain from being personally experienced anyway. But while taking pix of some items under glass I was annoyed by the way there were always reflections - until the reflections overtook the work under glass and became my own reconstructions of the experience:
One of the works was some earth from under the leaning tower of Pisa, removed to stop the tower from leaning yet further, and suspended in a room. Just clods of earth...

Another consisted of chunks of metal drawn out into wire, looped and framed under glass: a silver dollar drawn into a wire as long as the statue of Liberty is high; a gold filling drawn out like thread (there was a golden needle too); something else drawn out to the height of Niagara Falls.
Also on show were her "Brontean Abstracts", made at Haworth Parsonage, home of the Brontes. They included a sound recording of conversations with psychics in various rooms; electron micrographs of the sisters' hair; extreme closeups of unnoticed things like the holes in a pincushion or erasings in the margins of manuscripts. And - of interest to editors - photographs of places in the manuscript of Jane Eyre where one word had been crossed out to be replaced by another - could becomes would, natural becomes actual, glimpse becomes idea, soul becomes spirit.

How would you categorise Cornelia Parker, we wondered -- certainly not a painter, not a photogapher ... does she call herself a sculptor? Perhaps she's more of a conceptual artist. "Looking is a different kind of knowledge" she once said in interview.

Looking through a camera is a different kind of seeing - the next day, recording rediscovered bits of ancient wallpaper in the bathroom that is being renovated, I found this Parkeresque object, a drip of plaster from the ceiling, looking like a blow-up of a passing atomic particle -

Signature quilts

Region 1 (London and Middlesex) of The Quilters' Guild Of The British Isles is launching a fund-raising signature quilt at the Regional Day on Saturday. You pays your £1 and you signs your square, or rather half a square - the other half is a blue fabric, patterned or plain, that you supply. We're using a simple block, a plain cream signature triangle and the blue triangle, but these can be arranged in many ways. It would be so good to get all, or most, of the members of the Region to sign -- with 6" squares, think how big 200 or 250 squares would make the quilt!

I'm putting together a display about signature quilts, and this blog post is part of that. It's a way of showing lots of pictures, gleaned from the internet, in one convenient place. I was amazed at the many different blocks used in signature quilts (and of course some crazy quilts got signed too). Some examples come from the mid-19th century, others are modern - and indeed it's a tradition that is worth reviving.

One important reason for making signature quilts is as a statment of friendship, or as a memorial for leaving family or friends -

Or it could be a way of commemorating an event - an important birthday, as for this quilt (detail) signed by 450 family and friends -or this memento of a quilting symposium -

The fund raising could be for schools, churches, community groups - or for special projects, like restoring the home of the author of Anne of Green Gables -

The quilt might have hundreds of signatures and be raffled off - and then re-donated by the winners to be raffled again. They are also called subscription quilts: "A particularly effective means of raising funds is through the making of subscription quilts, a form in which individuals, businesses, and organizations pay a small amount of money for the privilege of having their name inscribed on a quilt in support of a particular local, national, or even international cause. When other avenues to engage in support for these causes were denied women, making subscription quilts proved an effective tool to demonstrate their convictions and to channel skills and energies that would make a difference in the causes they believed in."

Signature quilts can be personal projects too. They can be mementos of old friends left behind, and new ones made at the new home, as in this quilt that travelled from New York to Wisconsin in the 1840s -

or a project to get signatures of famous people in the 1970s -

Here's another spectacular example from the USA, begun in 1856 and made of silk -The signatures were often simply ink (which over time degraded the fabric), but sometimes they were embroidered over by the women putting the quilt together. They could consist of more than just names - sometimes, entire poems.

If you want to know more about signature quilts, this site talks about 19th century (American) quilts; Xenia Cord has written a longish essay here; and Laurette Carroll has written here. You'll see the patterns used include four-patch, mariner's compass, stars, pinwheels, floral applique...the possibilities are endless.

Sunday in the country

A good start to the day - a modernised 1950s Green Line bus chugging along the motorway. (Can you believe someone has written a history of Green Line tickets? Click here; read; and marvel...)

On the way to Rousham, this wonderful medieval barn:
And at Rousham (with its grand old yew hedge), apples and pears espaliered in the kitchen garden -
and pumpkins growing beautifully in one of the compost bins -
Here's a corner of the walled kitchen garden -
Note the dovecote behind. Here it is, from the inside, slightly smelly and humming with soft cooing -
Outside, more espaliered fruitfulness -
Wildlife includes chickens (bantams?) with feathered feet -
And a poseur of a peacock (who obligingly had left some small feathers lying around for collection) -
On the way out we saw his missus and her four chicks -
Note the metal guard around the tree, to protect from another form of wildlife, ravenous deer.

Michaelmas

A bit late - Michaelmas is 29 September. Here are some michaelmas daisies - complements of the season - The Old Farmer's Almanac explains: The feast day of St. Michael, the archangel and overcomer of the Devil, is a Christian celebration based on the ancient Celtic calendar. Its main importance in people's lives was that of a seasonal signpost in the year. In the British Isles, crops were harvested and the surplus sold by late September, so this became the time when farmers would pay their yearly rents to landowners. Everyone ate goose at Michaelmas to bring prosperity, and many farmers included "a goose fit for the lord's dinner" with their rent payments. Great market fairs occurred just before the feast day, and the large crowds these attracted made it convenient to hold elections at this time. Michaelmas is also a "Quarter Day." The ancient Celtic people divided the year into four major sections, or quarters, and then divided each of these in half to make an eight-part year that reflected the natural progression of the seasons. Foods traditional for Michaelmas include new wine; goose; cakes of oats, barley, and rye; and carrots. Some groups in the United States, such as the Pennsylvania Dutch, have kept Michaelmas, or "Harvest Home," traditions alive.

Pretty Maids?

Just sent off a quilt to an online exhibition. It started with a "what flower are you" quiz - I'm a snapdragon? - but the finished quilt doesn't really look like a snapdragon, though it uses snapdragon colours. I called it "Pretty maids all in a row" - from the nursery rhyme. Perhaps I should have found out about the phrase before using it:

(1) Protestants could not speak openly against the Queen (Bloody Mary Tudor) without retribution so they spoke in more or less a code to wit:

Mary Mary quite contrary
(Mary is a disagreeable Catholic tyrant)

How does your garden grow?
(the garden referred to is filled with the graves of protestant martyrs/opponents of the Queen and the growing number of such victims under her oppressive rule)

With silver bells and cockle shells
(instruments of torture such as thumbscrews and iron masks)

and pretty maids all in a row
(instruments like the guillotine known as maids to behead enemies)

(2) or
they were Catholic nuns; or Mary's miscarriages.

or if the rhyme really is about Mary Queen of Scots, the maids are her ladies in waiting.

More on the lore of nursery rhymes here.
And here's the quilt being put together:
Pretty maids, it turns out, is a nickname for meadow saxifrage, a small white flower with four petals (Saxifraga granulata).

Doctors in the 1920s

During the office move, a box of old BMJs from the 1920s turned up. In those days the British Medical Journal (founded 1847) carried some wonderful and dreadful advertisements. Few miracle drugs but some patent medicines, lots of private (pre-NHS) nursing homes and mental asylums, scary medical machinery
and scarier undergarments -as well as cars, livery for the chauffeur, a "motor house" to keep the car inand, indeed, cigarettes.

But there were also doctors with many poor patients, as in Elizabeth Cambridge's autobiographical "Hostages to Fortune" -- she was a doctor's daughter and married a country doctor's son who was himself a doctor, living near Oxford.

More from the V&A

Some closeups from the stained glass gallery.

The Real Thing crucifix

This was and probably still is in the V&A - it's made of bottle tops collected in Rwanda by Dr (of engineering) and jewellery prize winner David Poston, who lectures at Loughborough University and worked in Africa, helping people to make sustainable livelihoods by teaching blacksmithing techniques. (By the way, there's a sad/funny story about the coca-cola empire vs a film producer here, as well as a better pic of this object.)
But you might rather wear Poston's laser-welded treacle-tin bracelet, shown in this Guardian article about the V&As "Collect" high-end craft fair. Apparently "Ladies who wear craft usually have sculpted and/or twisted and/or painted hair or shaven heads, sausage-rimmed glasses, and dress Diana Vreeland-wise in black, to minimise the softening of the waist and to show off cunningly chosen and brilliantly combined accessories."