Drawing Tuesday - Holland Park and Design Museum

On the walk through Holland Park toward the Design Museum, it was the zinnias that caught my eye -

 and later thelavender and the sweet peas and ??? in the plantings -

 I had a few (only a few) soluble crayons and pencils, and tried to be free -

 This page pleased me. Although it looks a bit "pretty", it is the result of observation, unconscious placement of elements, and daring colour mixing with my few colours -

 Joyce too was being free and colourful -

 Judith found a compendium of objects in the museum -

 Janet B continues to be captivated by chairs -

 Janet K carefully explored spatial relations of objects -

 Najlaa captured an interior view of the museum's central hall -

 Jo experimented with left-hand and right-hand drawings of the same tree -

 Mags writes more about the Femur Stool on her blog -

 Carol went from the particular to the general in the Japanese garden -

 Extracurricular activities

Carol had taken her sketchbook to Blickling Hall -

Janet K had been out drawing "in the wild" too, at Victorial Park and in Kew Gardens -

... as well as at Cafe Sketchers -

 Mag's train-sewing grows and grows -

 ... and this is how she keeps her threads from rolling off down the carriage -

Humble objects

These "nice old things" emerged from one of my boxes-needing-sorting - an old-fashioned natural-bristle nailbrush, and a rather ancient pencil sharpener.

The nailbrush and its bristles set into holes in wood reminded me of a video about making brushes that I'd seen a while back, but rather a lot of fruitless hunting for it didn't find it, and I now wonder if I was remembering an article or other format. Never mind, brush making was a tedious and repetitive process, all those bristles to set in. Such a humble object with hidden complexities.

The sandpaper board comprises a rough paper and a finer one, and would have been used to keep a pencil - sharpened with a knife - very pointed. "A.W. FABER  51/2  GERMANY" it says, and I wonder if it dates back to Tony's apprentice days in the 1950s. Well, I like to think it does - and it looks like a left-handed person used it. Another humble object, this time with a hidden history.

Another week gone...

The downstairs neighbour has started work on his garden 

- after three men cut branches from trees for one day, it looked like this -

Several days later the decking and the shed are in place -

...until we have a Grand Finale -

 At T&G's garden, the rose is finally planted -

and the dig-sift-replace work has rounded another big corner -

Clematis seen on a walk, heading to the "old man's beard" stage -

 ...a walk during which I investigated this sideroad - presumably this is where the brickmaking for the 1880s development of Whitehall Park took place -

Last look at the little exhibition at City Lit - I loved Lucy Bradshaw's piece, which is "simply" a sawn-up door -

One moment there's a great flurry of pigeons wheeling round your head, and the next moment they've all landed on one of their usual roofs -

At the Science Museum late, some food prepared for eating in space was on show - that's a beefburger in the bag (add water to rehydrate it) and on the left, at the chef's insistence, is a metal can encasing the bacon sandwich he developed - a very luxurious bacon sandwich, thanks to Heston Blumenthal (no pushover, he) -

 This tide-predicting machine from the 1870s is in the mathematics gallery - turning the handle (at the side) for 4 hours produced all the tide timing for the year -

 "William Thompson gathereda large amount of tide data from around Britain's coastline. Then he used the mathematical technique known as harmonic analysis to break down the complicated tidal motion into a series of simpler components. Finally, he used this machine to recombine them for future tides."

Creative activities included wiring up a flashing light with "electric paint" -

 The TV programme Tomorrow's World was being filmed right next to Tim Peake's space capsule -

The museum is so different at night - no schoolchildren, for a a start!

More walking, this time in the hinterland of Muswell Hill. These double doors are on a steep street, and alternate houses have a single door ... I couldn't figure out how that worked ...

 Round the corner, some doors were for the ground floor and others for the upper flat -

 Elsewhere, many had original glass -

 and the sculpted tree gave these houses a fairy-tale look -

 Love those olde-worlde signs -

Remember how Swiss Army Knives used to have a tool for getting stones out of horses' hooves? Where was it when it was needed ...

But Lady Luck came to my rescue - I found this handy bike combi-tool in among the plants in my garden recently, and it has a tool for getting stones out of corrugated soles. (Alas, judging by the state of the heels, these most comfy shoes will soon need replacing.)

As for my own garden, it's looking a bit neglected -

Let's reword that - it's looking "quite mature". (And even mature things - gardens, people - benefit from care and attention.)

Art I like - Charles Poulsen

While looking for images of early work (1980s) by Pauline Burbidge, I came across - among the random photos that a google search throws up - some lovely "japanese-feeling" images -

 

... and there are more at the gallery website. They are by Pauline's husband, Charles Poulsen, and were made in 2015-16. 

The pair have often exhibited together and will be doing so again in Edinburgh (from 4 November).

"Charles Poulsen was born in Kent in 1952. He completed a BA (Hons) Fine Art at Loughborough College of Art in 1983, and an MA Fine Art at Trent Polytechnic, Nottingham in 1986. ... Together in 1993 [Charles and Pauline] came to live and work in the Scottish Borders at Allanton near Duns. At Allanbank Mill Steading they have modified and adapted a group of buildings of differing sizes to serve as studios, exhibition spaces and living quarters. In the process, they have created a superb garden in which Poulsen’s sculpture practice – both studio works and ‘growing sculpture’ – finds expression."

I'm also very taken by his Winter Series, which you can see on his website - this is just one, others are here -

The "gridded" quilts so far

With quiltlets to be made for Sept-Dec, here are the 2017 journal quilts so far.

January - Fissure

February - Gaming

March - Illusion

April - Camouflage

May - On Autopilot

June - Loosely Woven

July - Sultry City

August - Underwater Archaeology

The "grids" theme is something I do want to explore, so I'll try to do the next journal quilts in a timely manner, and hopefully in a prolific manner too. With the studio back in action, and no family commitments, there's no excuse.

Anyway, is an excuse needed? Playing with fabric is a happy thing. "It's only fabric" - empires will not fall if something goes wrong! Why do we deny ourselves these small pleasures? And on the other hand, why do we beat ourselves up for not doing "enough" of it? (Can't win!)

Loved this book

"Winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction 2001" - gosh was it that long ago?

"The Idea of Perfection" was sitting on the shelf at the Oxfam Bookshop and I tried to find the passage that impressed me, about a quilt remembered from childhood, the alternation of the colours of the pieces ... isn't that how a fascination with patchwork often starts?

Instead I found something else, something completely forgotten, but something that still seems to be happening.

Starting on page 147 is an account of a quilt meeting in a small town in Australia. Fictional - but oh so true -

 

Several pages later, the interloper - who is a contemporary quilt maker, brings out her piece, which  has "little triangles that did not quite match up together, and big odd trapezoid shapes in many shades of grey".

"It was a feature of Harley Savage's fibre art, the way she made her seam-lines not quite line up. It was one of the things that held the surfaces in dynamic equilibrium and wittily subverted the form. This one, Shearing Shed #5, was one of a series she was quite pleased with, that took the big simple shapes of country sheds as a basis for lights and darks to fit against each other in interesting ways.

"When you had been sewing as long as she had, it was actually quite hard, getting the seams not to line up exactly. But she already knew that many people, the ones who knew a lot about Log Cabin and Bear's Paw, only saw her patchworks as a series of mistakes. They could not see past the fact that the seams did not quite line up, and the way the stripes of the fabrics ran in different directions, and that the quilting was just done on the machine, and not even in proper straight lines."

Why didn't I buy that book, then and there? I might have to go back for it - it was such a good read altogether, and how often do you find quilts being written about so knowlingly?