Closeups

The camera has been taking a walk around the living room, catching glimpses of this'n'that. The photos are arranged in reverse order of being taken - so at the end, you see what started this "line of thought" - a footprint stamping wet paint onto the protective flooring. 

Several of the final photos enigmatically show the current progress on the bookshelves, with the shelves arranged to dry in the painting booth.

Josef Frank's rugs

Josef Frank (1885-1967) trained as an architect in Austria, also designed fabrics, and in the 1930s moved to Sweden to work for Svenskt Tenn, where he became important in the Swedish modernist movement that was a forerunner of ... ikea. 

The Fashion and Textile Museum in Bermondsey is just finishing a show of his textile work, with a little furniture included too - he designed over 200 pieces of furniture. 

And he designed rugs - for instance this cheerful take on the Tibetan tiger rugs -

 and Carpet 1 -

 and Carpet 3 -

Shapes and textures that, like his fabrics, bring lightness and space into rooms.

Running late

I try to blog every day - it's part of my "art practice" (hopefully my posts are, and will be, about Art in some form!) and also it's a record of where I've been and seen ... though not in the sorts of details contained in my little black notebooks. 

Tonight I'm running late, having started cooking dinner on return from a pleasant day seeing art and friends - and having eaten in 10 minutes the food that took more than an hour to prepare, we sat around, chatting about this&that, as you do....

So the day is very near its midnight end. Briefly, here's the rest of the day, starting with the exhibition at Raven Row (till 11 June), in Karen's company -

Tent/suit by Lucy Orta

Carrying on, after a quick sandwich, with the "Stitch and Play" workshop in  Selfridges, led by Aimee Betts and Tom of Holland (of darning fame) -

We worked on a grand stitchery of natural-dyed fabrics

My little patch, from underneath

 Heading home via tea and cake at Sylvia's -

Her birthday flowers

Tomorrow, a day of "rocket science" at the Royal Institution - " a one-day introduction to astronautics which assumes absolutely no knowledge of physics, space science or rocket science. A series of excellent presenters will give talks covering the basics of spaceflight starting from “Why can’t we simply fly an aeroplane to orbit?” through to GPS, LEO and even the chances of meeting E.T."

International Send Tulips Day

Today, May the 4th [as in: "... be with you"], started with the rather whimsical act of a photo of my current vaseful of tulips to the first email sent -

and somehow the photo also got attached to the next email I wrote, and the next. Suddenly it's International Send Tulips Day! 

Now I must shut down the computer, so here are those tulips for blog readers who don't have an email waiting for a reply.

A little chain reaction has started, as people respond that they are about to send tulips to someone else. Who knows, this little "day" might take on a life of its own. 

I love having tulips at home, and photographing tulips ... here are a few more, as the tulip season draws to an end.

In the tulip vase obtained at Chelsea Craft Fair some 30 years ago

So lovely when they go floppy

So lovely when they don't go floppy

In the jug that came from the Dalhousie art exhibition, nearly 40 years ago

Soaking up the sun in Kew Gardens

In my own little garden - tiny tulips

Poetry Thursday - Sometimes, by Sheena Pugh

Sometimes 

Sometimes things don't go, after all,
from bad to worse.  Some years, muscadel
faces down frost; green thrives; the crops don't fail,
sometimes a man aims high, and all goes well.

A people sometimes will step back from war;
elect an honest man, decide they care
enough, that they can't leave some stranger poor.
Some men become what they were born for.

Sometimes our best efforts do not go
amiss, sometimes we do as we meant to.
The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow
that seemed hard frozen:  may it happen for you.

(via)

Sheenagh Pugh was born in Birmingham in 1950 and lived in Wales before moving to Shetland. She studied German and Russian at Bristol University and taught Creative Writing at the University of Glamorgan until retiring in 2008.

Her poems, says this site, " are devoted to the project of storytelling, employing a beguiling simplicity of language to navigate the no man’s land between the real and the fictional. ...  Although the spectre of death is never far from Pugh’s work, the poems are fundamentally concerned with life as it is lived, its tenaciousness and exuberance even in the toughest circumstances. "

A gathering of JQs

Making so many journal quilts in a short space of time seems to have gone to my head. While on the CQ yahoogroup site, looking at photos, I discovered you could tick a box to display just your own photos ... and there they were, all my jqs, in more or less continuous date order (but in reverse order, so January is at bottom right - never mind...).

2007 - the first year of journal quilts (A4 size)

 

2008 - 10" square - another year of miscellaneous subjects

2009 - 6"x12" - a frieze of moons -
each month is based on the folkloric name for the moons, eg March is "Crow moon"

2010 - 8"x10" - off to a bad start with those doors, but how
I enjoyed improvising the scrappy "weather" quilts!

2011 - 10" square, with a button and a word on each

2012 - 7"x 10" -Stellar Sunrise
circles of black card tucked into or laid onto stripes of fabric; each quiltlet is
named after a constellation

2013 - Olives!
their adventures got more fanciful as the year went on

2014 - Gatherings
organza with additions, pleated and heat set before stitching onto 6"x12" background

2015 - High Horizons
(bottom left is a magazine page, rearranged and stitched down)

2016 - stitching into paper (with a fabric backing) - orange,
green, purple squares in each

Some of my JQs were mounted on canvas and sold through exhibitions, others became Bookwraps to raise money for the Quilters' Guild in 2013. And then there was the Little Gems tombola, a very successful fundraiser in 2009, for which I made rather a lot of A4-sized quiltlets, with great pleasure -  with about 2000 contributions from dozens of other quilters around the UK and internationally, Contemporary Quilt raised over £10,000 for the Quilt Museum and Gallery in York.

Drawing Tuesday - British Museum

Most of us were in the "Pacific North West" exhibition...

Yellow spruce and cedar root cloak collected on Capt Vancouver's 1791-5 expedition

Chilcat blanket - a very complicated weaving technique

Judith's masks

Najlaa's modern glass bowl

Sue's mask and rattle

Carol's collection

Janet K's wood carving

Jo's little wood sculpture

Janet B - a Greek horse

More journal quilts

The theme is "Gridded" series; the first two quiltlets are here. The next two were made during the afternoon of Deadline Day and uploaded to the requisite website with a couple of hours to spare. No sweat...

Gridded: Camouflage

Although I used my thickest embroidery thread, the carefully-couched squares rather disappear ... hence the title. I had the pleasure of hours of hand-stitching (and catching up on podcasts) with this one. The black/white fabric was already quilted - it's the back of a sample made towards the CQ "Elements" challenge in 2015. So in terms of holding all the layers together, the couching functions as quilting.

Gridded: Illusion

Perhaps you've seen the large grid, the slipped rectangles, in a couble-page magazine car advert - I immediately appropriated the non-car page, thinking ahead to a JQ. The background has a strip of self-fabric added (with invisible stitching) to give a further illusion; with that ready, and all the layers carefully aligned I invisibly stitched round the edge and only then couched the paper onto the background.

For those of us who need to turn over embroideries etc, here are the backs of the first four JQs of 2017 -

The coffee table has become my "studio", spilling over with threads and complete with snacks to keep the spirits up and fingers busy -

 In the background, intensive and prolonged filling and sanding of bookcases, to make a perfect surface for spray painting -

Much progress was made on both the sewing and carpentry fronts.

With the change of month, it's time for a fresh JQ - I was on a roll and had enough fabric bits on hand to start another -

Yet more podcasts and stitching - it's ready to upload as soon as the album on the website is available -

Gridded: Off Grid

The black/white fabric is left over from previous JQs and the circles were made from threads that fell off the torn edges of the previously-prepared black backings and from other fabrics. Lots of careful, invisible, pleasurable stitching on this one, but ... I'm not happy with the rumpled look of the top section. Machine quilting might have worked better, but my machine is currently inaccessible.

Still, one of the aims of JQs is to see what works and what doesn't. 

On to the next!