A miscellaneous week

What are they? Nothing else was growing in front of the house; the entire "garden" was crazy paving -

Bloomsbury seen through, or in, a Claude glass - it makes you look at a reflection of what's behind you -

 Part of a "reflective" walk around Bloomsbury led by artist Sheila Ghelani, part of the Wellcome's events programme to go with their "Museum of Modern Nature" exhibition (till 8 October) -

 Changing trains at Highbury & Islington - gloomy and spooky, isn't it? -

 Walking to Stoke Newington, via the Woodberry Down wetlands -

 The back streets of Covent Garden

 Some "old work" - this is discharge printed silk organza, in a workshop with Bob Adams in 2007 -

 Young rose and old rose, Hyde Park Gardens -

 ... and further along in the park, birds take their leisure beside the Serpentine -

 near the coffee truck -

 This lovely mosaic doorstep is somewhere in W1 -

I discovered how lovely Kew Gardens is in the rain - so so green, and few people. The lanterns led the way to the Japanese event near the Minka House -

 ... and the rain came down ....

 ... but the activities carried on ...

Elsewhere, the Water Lily House was open as usual -

 Lovely tiles in the side streets of Kew -

 on the way to the National Archives ... first visit for me -

 This fellow looks resigned to the rain -

 Very pleasant inside, and an interesting talk on 14th-century shenanigans, with viewing of relevant court records. (Podcasts of previous talks can be accessed here.)

Later in the shop - it was hard to resist the 1000-piece jigsaw puzzles -

 and there are several bays of books about researching your family history; titles like "Tracing your Tradesmen [or servant, or artistocratic, or textile, or railway, or police, or ...] Ancestors" -

Fascinating; new to me, but not much use as my family isn't British.

This was the week of The Carpet Cleaning - "Lazlo" needed only two hours, and his machine needed many changes of water, to remove all the stains and spots. Magic! - no, more than mere magic, practically a miracle -

 I've also been looking for a waterproof walking-jacket -

The search goes on.

"Red sky at night" - here's hoping for some summery weather! -

In my notebook, reminders of talks - "Measuring what matters", insights on epidemiology (some of these events are available as a podcast), and "In search of the right words", insights on dementia (at the Wellcome Collection);  week 2 of the "geology of the British landscape" course (fascinating, and slightly overwhelming);  and two visits to the Hokusai exhibition (ends 13 August). 

Samples from last century

These embroidery samples, unearthed during a fruitless search for gardening gloves, were made in my early, heady, days of textile courses at City Lit. 

Keep (er, why....)

Gone - a few were kept as candidates for porcelain dipping

The "running people" are gone too (hurrah)

Undecided (12" square)

Details

Stitching this closely is harder as the eyes get older

"Snow in summer" - I'd completely forgotten about this

Kantha sample, and practice free-machining feathers with loose bobbin tension

From my first grapple with "drawing people" - during a medieval-themed
course with Julia Caprara (1993?) I get a strong sense of some sort of
story happening here...

Gridded buttons - fun to do, but useless

The back of those bright squares - practice free-machining

A disappointment: the intense stitching should have been in the background,
to make the insects "pop". But I was an over-enthusiastic beginner, rushing in...

And the underside

Another underside, a bit of campfire carousing

 In the same big box was a little bag, full of offcuts from the outsides of journaly quilts, Little Gems, and Bookwraps. They can be sorted into colour families and stitched together (but, why....) -

Poetry Thursday - Witness by Amy Clampitt

Taking a long-unopened slim volume from the shelf, I find its pages (dense with reference and resonance) turning brown, and tturn to my favourite poem in it -

Witness

An ordinary evening in Wisconsin

seen from a Greyhound bus - mute aisles
of merchandise the sole inhabitants
of the half-darkened Five and Ten,

the tables of the single lit café awash
with unarticulated pathos, the surface membrane
of the inadvertently transparent instant
when no one is looking: outside town

the barns, their red gone dark with sundown,
withhold the shudder of a warped terrain -
the castle rocks above, tree-clogged ravines
already submarine with nightfall, flocks

(like dark sheep) of toehold junipers,
the lucent arms of birches : purity
without a mirror, other than a mind bound
elsewhere, to tell how it looks.


from "What the Light was Like", published in 1985 (via)


Amy Clampitt (1920-1994) was born in rural Iowa, worked in publishing in New York, and did not achieve poetic fame until Kingfisher burst on the literary scene when she was 63, "with critics praising in particular the allusive richness and syntactical sophistication of her verse". Her sudden success was hailed as "one of the most stunning debuts in recent memory"; later the New York Times obituary called it "a delayed but auspicious beginning". (Read more about the critical reception of her work here.)

As for the poem - Edward Hopper could have painted the five-and-dime store, the single lit cafe; and who among us hasn't encountered an "inadvertently transparent instant" along the way?

Hyde Park Rose Garden

Yesterday - lovely colour combinations, and so many blooms - not just roses, in fact most roses seem to have finished, compared to four years and one month ago.

Why do sedums always flop?

Wildflower meadows - you see them everywhere at the moment

Gorgeous combinations in huge beds

Drawing Tuesday - Museum of London

It was pots I wanted, and it was medieval pots I drew -

with biro (about 900-1000)

another group - these made their way to London from northern Europe, 1000-1300

my pencil put them at the bottom of the page

and then I went round the gallery looking for a few more,
trying to get the oval at the top right

Janet B found a mixing machine and a motorbike -

 Mags started with pots and moved on to neolithic tools -

 Sue couldn't resist the glass - amazing that it's survived since the 1st-2nd century -

 Jo gathered some amazing 14th century agricultural implements -

Janet K was intrigued by a temple lamp -

Extracurricular activities

 Janet K's furniture -

... and her puppets (part of her professional life) -

... which includes being able to whip up a model of how a dragon can be "worn" -

 Mags brought prints and blocks from the japanese woodblock printing course -