Postal surprise

When you order several books online, it's a bit of a surprise when any one of them arrives - which will it be...?

When the postie rang the bell and needed me to sign for what was obviously a book, I couldn't for the life of me remember what I'd ordered recently. With the amount of forgetting I managed in the past week, this memory-failure didn't exactly come as a surprise.

But inside the package was this -

an advance copy of a book I'd had a small part in producing - the real work (photographs, design, layout) was done, in time freely given, by Hilary, Janet, and Jane.

The book, which will be available at Festival of Quilts next week, is the catalogue for the CQ@10 exhibition, and also gives an extensive photographic record of the challenges, exhibitions, and journal quilt projects in the group's first decade. Fully 139 of the book's pages are absolutely full of high-quality photos.

A heartfelt plea

If anyone from CQ is reading this and has ever considered volunteering to help with CQ projects, I urge you to do so. Most urgently, CQ needs people for several vacant committee posts - the term is three years, otherwise I'd have been happy to continue for longer. It's definitely good to have a change of personnel, though! We started "not knowing how" -- but this book is an example of what can be done when people decide to do something and Just.Get.On.With.It.

"Pulling people out of the ranks" to do the necessary jobs is always a problem for any membership organisation. Some members are too modest about their abilities, or imagine it will take over their free time. (These are unfounded worries, imho.) What these shy members forget, or perhaps have not yet experienced, is how much fun it can be to be involved, and to contribute - we're all in it together, but we do need folk to step forward!

Book du jour - pocket folder

The "split sonnets" needed to be collected together somehow; I adapted Alisa Golden's instructions for the pocket folder so that it would accommodate four items -

 Two pieces of A4 paper (printed with journey lines, rubbed with graphite, and inked over) were available. I joined them with a a notched strip of the same paper, mimicking the fold-over used on the outside edges. The magic item in this design is the half-circle cut out just where the fold-up ends, to hold it in place and allow the booklet to be slipped in -

The pocket-folder idea looks to be very useful for what might otherwise be loose bits of paper - add a flap and tie (like this one) and  things get very tidy indeed.

To serif or not to serif?

The tiny skirmish with the delights of letterpress and typography has whetted my appetite to do more - but left me none the wiser about what font is suitable for what text. In my working life, fonts were already decided as a matter of house style, but for making individual books, the choice of font can cause all sorts of problems ... for instance, for the book of sonnets that I  rewrote as part of memorising them. Here are two possibilities - "modern" versus "ancient" -

Someone who looks at this rather incomprehensible book is owed an explanation of what's going on. The title page seems to be a good place for that - and given the sonnet's popularity "long ago", a title page that reflects the title pages of that era seems appropriate - hence the old-fashioned looking type. And yet - two of the ten poems were written in the 20th century, and my book was written in the 21st, so why not use a sans-serif font, which I understand is the modern way of doing titles ("display matter") even if text is in a serif font.

As it turns out the serif font I blindly chose from the drop-down list is Perpetua, which I now discover was designed in 1925. It's classified as a transitional type (it has high stroke contrast and bracketed serifs) so might be entirely approriate. But I'm still thinking about it....

Found art Friday

Mango heaven

EcoPeace distributes these super-yummy mangoes in London - they are big, delicious, wonderful and, incidentally, organic. The money goes to a good cause: "everyone at EcoPeace is a volunteer so all the profits from your order will contribute directly to community projects at the Pout eco-village in Senegal . To view our video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FL0RAUQP_Ac"

Book du jour - Cooking from Memory

After the photoshoot, making the book -- taking ever more words out of the recipe, as the pages go on.

I've kept the cut-out words but don't think they're needed. One idea, though, is to attach cut-out words to the photo beneath, so that at first glance the recipe looks complete, and only when you turn the page do the holes appear. In this case the words to cut would be those that are remembered, not those that are forgotten.

A page of filletage -

 and my favourite photo -

Now, sewing and a cover.

Photo shoot

The idea of a memory-loss cookbook is with me still. I've tried various things, and the latest involves finding a recipe to make and photographing the results. I've chosen Cream Scones from my old Fanny Farmer (Boston Cooking School) cookbook: "Wedge-shaped with lightly browned sides and tops, cream scones and English tea are traditional partners. Serve with a plump mound of butter and some marmalade or jam."

A rummage through the cupboards found dishes I'd forgotten about, and a further rummage found tablecloths and napkins.

The making of the scones was the quickest bit! They were scarcely cool when I started to set up "tea for two" -

After the photography, we tucked in - delicious! Now dishes and cloths need to be put away, and the book made....

Cream Scones - makes 12 wedges


2 cups (280g) flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 tablespoon sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
4 tablespoons butter
2 eggs, well beaten
1/2 cup (100 ml) cream


Preheat the oven to 425F (220C). Lightly butter a cookie sheet.
Mix the flour, baking powder, sugar, and salt in a large bowl. Work in the butter with your fingers or a pastry blender until the mixture resembles coarse meal.  Add the eggs and cream and stir until blended.
Turn out onto a lightly floured board and knead for about a minute.
Pat or roll the dough about 3/4 inch (1.5cm) thick and cut into wedges.
Place on the cookie sheet and bake for about 15 minutes.

(My dough was still very floppy even after adding flour during the kneading, so I put the circle of dough on the baking tray and scored it before baking, then cut the wedges when the scones had cooled a bit.)

Blue again

As the Field Guide to Getting Lost has been so important in my "Blue Distance" piece, I'm looking for a way to include it in the actual exhibition.

One of my "boxes" will be a bookshelf, a mini-library, of the books I've made that relate to memory, and the book could be part of that - but it needs something doing to it that will make part of the "disintegration" that is the theme of my show.

Wrapping seems appropriate. Threads will hold closed some of the the chapters, and leave the "blue of distance" chapters readable in their entirely. The photo is a trial, quickly done with some threads that were handy. What colour to use? There are so many shades of blue...

An invitation

It would be great to see readers of this blog at the Camberwell MA show in September! The PV is on Weds 5 Sept; it will be very busy, if previous years are anything to go by. (We love a party!)

The show is open 10-8 on weekdays, 11-5 on Sat 8 Sept. The last day is Thurs 13 Sept. I'll be making a piece during the show, every day between noon and 2pm and also between 5pm and 7pm (or maybe 8pm), and also all day Saturday. If you're coming to the show outside those hours, do let me know so I can be there. (I love meeting blog readers, and having a chat.)

The building will be full of MA shows - Digital Arts, Conservation, Designer Maker, Fine Art, Printmaking, Illustration, Graphic Design.

Dual-use studio

The studio is back to being a carpentry shop, "just for a day or two". Hmm.

 The dust-curtains have an ingenious new system of wires and clips, for quick and easy installation.

Next improvement could be a ceiling-mounted filter system to collect the pesky sawdust.

Best improvement would be a nice big shed in the back garden ... which would involve buying a flat that isn't even for sale. Another possibility is a (shared) workshop somewhere else, but these seem to be few and far between...

So we're doing the best we can in the circumstances. As long as I can sit at my little table for a few hours a day, and escape to the computer in the other room -- and the more that the Domestic Handyman keeps getting jobs elsewhere -- things are just fine. At the moment. Perhaps there will soon come a time when I need access to the sewing machine and fabric collection...

Book du jour - many Blue Distances

The top row is wastage - envelopes with titles not centred, books with folding gone wrong, that sort of thing. The bottom four include one that's finished, one that's nearly there, and two blanks, ready for copying out.

A page of writing takes about 10 minutes, and each book has 12 pages. On the one hand, you're paying attention to your handwriting and keeping the margins straight and not smudging (the technical details) and on the other you're thinking about the way the author has put the words together, and trying to remember the exact words and exact order (and the punctuation) as you copy big chunks of sentences.

Memory balls - are they personalities?

I haven't given up on making a video or slide show of the making of one - or more (let's think big...) -  of the memory balls. Tony set up his fab camera with fab macro lens and I spent a happy afternoon winding and clicking, winding and clicking. The result is the size of a squash ball - maybe 5cm diameter - and I'm not as pleased with this one as I am with the ones that have the sharp ends of tacks coming out. (Nor am I entirely clear, still, what they're "about"...)

In case you're wondering what's inside, here are all the raw materials (I didn't use the dark blue, in the end; might use it in another ball...) -

And this is what happened during the making -

What kept running through my mind while making this is the importance of memory for identity -- if you can't remember what's happened in your life, who are you? Memory is thus central to personality ... perhaps a better word is personhood? Also, what you want to remember might be a different thing from the memories that are buried. Not sure how this manifests in these memory-ball objects ... this one was an attempt to use something abstract - the knots of thread - to think about something general. (I wish I'd left the knotted threads out of the photos. Will try again...)

Only the surface of these balls is accessible to the viewer, just as - until the person speaks, until you communicate - only the "surface" of the person is visible. A matter of "don't judge a book by its cover", perhaps.

Farmers market

Too much yumminess from Poppy's Kitchen

Summer fruitiness

Queen's Park, every Sunday 10-2. No need to travel down to Borough Market (over-rated, imho).

Floribunda

Art I like - Pictorial Websters

An amazing book - the video shows how many processes and how much skill is involved in handmade books. Worth the £3500 for the full leather edition; there are only 100 of them. More info on the project is here.

Three exhibitions and a pavilion

Over to the Serpentine Gallery, first to have a sit in the cork-lined pavilion, which digs down to the level of the water table, encounters archaeological remnants of previous years' pavilions, and retains a watery mirror on its flat roof - ostensibly reflecting the sky but looking more the colour of cork itself -

 In the gallery, Yoko Ono's work spanning the 1960s to pretty much yesterday; outside, a wishing tree, and round the back, a chance to be part of her Smile film -

 Right across town, work by Sarah Sze - the gallery becomes a kind of laboratory for observation, examination, and exploration of our psychological and emotional location in our environment -

Upstairs were Grayson Perry's tapestries, a modern version of Hogarth's The Rake's Progress, full of fascinating contemporary detail; what will they think of it all, a hundred years from now? See them here. Thanks to digital technology, the detailed and skillful intermediation of his designs into complex interweavings of many different threads is invisible. In looking for more info about the "craft" aspect of translating the drawings into tapestry, I found  this video about his Walthamstow Tapestry (2009). Although the tapestries are produced on a digital loom, they don't have "that dead feeling" that you associate with digital things, he says.

He's right-on about rebellion and consumerism in that video, and talks about the pots in that 2009 show too - this one has a map of the new Westfield shopping centre and then was smashed and put back together by a restorer, using the oriental idea of gilding the joins to highlight the preciousness of the object. The gilding makes an alternative map -

A video of a visit to Grayson Perry's studio in Walthamstow, sprinkled with wryly quotable nuggets about life as an artist, is here.

Just when you think it's all over...

Wanting to hand some work in before the deadline - for possibly the first time in my life - I prepared the 500-word reflective essay a week before the due date, printed it out the night before going in to college -- and forgot to collect it from the printer.

Which might be a message from the gods? Certainly in the past few days I've found a lot to revise -

And even spilled a dab of blood on it!

On retyping, yet more changes are creeping in. Will I be able to leave the new version alone ... it's a long time till Monday ...

Book du jour - The Blue Distance

This came together quickly, and took only a few hours to do the handwriting. When there's only one layer you can read it, once you figure out where to start -

 But when the second layer goes on (it gets written on the back), it becomes mysterious and even "distant". (that splodge is something inside the camera) -

Having a little light behind the book might be a good way to show its blueness. 

Due to the grain of the paper, the cover curls round - this might not happen if I use a sheet from a large pad. Also, I'd like the blue ink to be more muted - perhaps the way it's over-written will make a difference. 

You could go on and on doing different little things, and never get anything finished!

Here it is, getting bluer with the layers of writing and layers of paper -

 The light shining through gives it a glow -

The writing comes from a chapter in "Field guide to getting lost" called "The blue of distance" - on looking in the table of contents of the book, I realised there are four chapters called The Blue of Distance! This seems to be a sign to make more books - with different quotes. Here's the next one:

"That life is a journey is a given in these [blues] songs, whose background after all is the urbanization of rural whites and northern migration of southern blacks, but the intense love of place frames this journey not as an enlightenment narrative of discovery of the unknown but an insular tale of loss of the formative terra cognita that exists in the song only as memory, a map written in the darkness of your guts, readable in a cross section of your autopsied heart. Nobody gets over anything; time doesn't heal any wounds; if he stopped loving her today, as one of George Jones's most famous songs has it, it's because he's dead. The landscape in which identity is supposed to be grounded is not solid stuff; it's made out of memory and desire, rather than rock and soil, as are the songs."

Each book will have as its "cover" an envelope with the book's real title, taken from the quote used, possibly from the last sentence in the quote. The new one will be called "Landscape of Memory and Desire", and the one already finished is called "Something is always getting lost". 

Book du jour - back to over-writing

On the shelf directly above the desk at which I sit to type is Rebecca Solnit's "A field guide to getting lost", a collection of essays. Opening it at random:

"We treat desire as a problem to be solved, address what desire is for and focus on that something and how to acquire it rather than on the nature and the sensation of desire, though often it is the distance between us and the object of desire that fills the space in between with the blue of longing. I wonder sometimes whether with a slight adjustment of perspective it could be cherished as a sensation on its own terms, since it is as inherent to the human condition as blue is to distance? If you can look across the distance without wanting to close it up, if you can own your longing in the same way that you own the beauty of that blue that can never be possessed? For something of this longing will, like the blue of distance, only be relocated, not assuaged, by acquisition and arrival, just as the mountains cease to be blue when you arrive among them and the blue instead tints the next beyond. Somewhere in this is the mystery of why tragedies are more beautiful than comedies and why we take a huge pleasure in the sadness of certain songs and stories. Something is always far away." 

I loved typing that, both for the attention paid to the words and for the sensation of typing - and these same pleasures apply to handwriting when copying "good words". One component of my show is to be the over-writing, either pages or the book of sonnets - perhaps the pages lit from behind, or the sonnets made into a concertina with a typed version on the back - vague plans...

Yes time is running out, but it would be such a pleasure to write out those words about the blue of distance, the entire essay perhaps, imbibing through eye and hand, ex-bibing(?) through pen and ink. I fantasise using beautiful paper, sitting contentedly in a quiet room... There will be blue ink in my fountain pen, and the paper will be transparent so that "there's always something far away" and the next or previous page is almost visible - which ties neatly in to the Seepage book. This book of over-writing will encompass something that has been, and something that could be, but turns out to have already been also; something that was once clear and was skillful and meaningful in the moment of doing, but has become illegible to the doer and the observer both. (Not being able to read it doesn't matter - in fact, that's the whole point.)

That's the fantasy, now for the reality. Blue ink must be found, and the fountain pen -- not this one in its coffin, which from the start didn't write 

but the one I've had for about 30 years, and haven't used for the past couple of years...where is it now, I'd hate to lose it...

A format for the book must be decided - concertina? codex? tall and thin? short and wide? - as well as extent (something manageable, a dozen pages as they'll be written at least twice). And covers must be thought about too.

As someone (Picasso? Goethe? Einstein? - doesn't matter) once said, "If you can imagine it, you can do it". After sleeping on the idea I went to the local stationery/art supply store (Fish&Cook) and brought home some blue-ink pens. Then sorted through my paper drawers to find tracing paper, hoping to use some that I kept after an early version of my foundation course final project didn't work out. Found it, but most was too crinkled to use.

Which took us to lunchtime, and the search for a suitable, simple structure in a number of book-making books. Followed by the need to print the title and the quote before starting the writing.

 Ready to try out the pens and spacing -

But really I should do the dishes first...

Wordless Wednesday