Half

Half price, half eaten. You don't get a lot of berries for your buck! Usually they come from Poland but these come from Spain. I'm looking forward to eating lots and lots of blueberries when we visit Pitt Meadows next month. As an adolescent I earned money for a bike and sundry such necessary luxuries by berry picking - after all, we lived round the corner from the biggest blueberry farm in the Commonwealth. These were hard-earned luxuries - pay was 5 cents a pound, and my record on one day was 105 pounds. Usually a whole day in the field got you four, five or six 10-pound buckets - sometimes the berries were small (Stanleys were small, Dixies were the biggest) or the bushes not very loaded. And picking blueberries meant leaving the green ones on the bush. Now the picking is done mechanically, and the remaining peat bog is used to grow cranberries.
At £1.49 for 150g, what's that a pound? £4.50, which works out at about 10 Canadian dollars. Wonder how much the Spanish pickers earn.

Lucy Boston's quilts

I was thrilled to help turn over the pile of quilts kept on one of the beds, and was able to peer very closely at them. They're all hand done, piecing over papers in the traditional way. Apparently before her eyesight went, she "managed" 26 stitches an inch, and you can see the sewing thread between just about every thread in the fabric, where the pieces join - but only if you look very, very closely.These photos are from the postcards I bought. "Moon and stars" has the moons made up of many small pieces, and the fields of stars are made up of squares with embroidery, just straight stitches, making the other points. Points - ah yes - are very, very sharp. Impressive.
A symphony in greys, with the same fabric used in various ways.
Leaves and creatures, her only applique quilt.
And this kaliedoscope must have been a nightmare to plan!

Stranger at Green Knowe

This book by Lucy Boston won the Carnegie Medal. It tells of Ping, an orphan refugee who has been in an internment camp and sees Hanno the gorilla at the zoo. Hanno escapes, and lives in the grounds of Green Knowe, where Ping is on holiday. Guess what happens next....

The drawings are by Lucy's son Peter, and show objects that are still in the house. I read the book in the History of Children's Literature course at library school, and thought at the time that we'd been living so very near the house during the years in Cambridge - Hemingford Grey is about a dozen miles away. By then I was living in Nova Scotia. Years after reading all the Green Knowe books I read Lucy Boston's autobiography, Memory in a House, in which she tells of buying and restoring the house - and of the wartime gramophone concerts held in the music room, attended by airmen from the nearby base.
The postcard of the music room has had many of the seats removed, but the 1930s wind-up gramophone is still there and we heard a bit of Mozart played on it.

You can see the lantern from the drawing, still there in the music room. The stairs are at the very right, beside the gramophone, and the door looks out towards the thicket where Hanno hid.

Stranger at Green Knowe culminates in the appearance of Hanno at the house. Here he's at the doors which Lucy Boston added, so she could easily get out to her beloved garden. She spent the summers gardening until she was in her 90s.
Mrs Oldknow and Ping are sitting at the table -- it's still there -- where Lucy Boston wrote her books in winter, during the day. During winter evenings she sat near the fire and made quilts.

She started both writing and quilting when she was in her late 50s.

"Green Knowe"

The Manor, Hemingford Grey, was the home of Lucy M Boston, author of the "Green Knowe" books, which are set in the house.
The house is said to be the oldest continuously inhabited house in England. It was built in 1130 and added to and altered over the years.
The gardens are delightful, and are open daily.
It's foxglove season; scented roses abound, and we liked the california poppies. And all the other flowers!
The topiary was planted by Lucy Boston when she moved in, in 1939. There are crowns and a dove of peace lining the path to the river. In a side garden, she made a chess set.

Kew Gardens - in the palm house

Unexpected abstract art, either side of the north door, the unpainted metal gone to rust.

Gasometer geometry

One of those fly-by shootings. These are somewhere between Stafford and Watford, beside the train tracks.

From the forest

New cones on a branch from a tall old tree (fir? pine?) that was being cut down - a branch had broken off so for some reason the whole thing had to go. The needles feel soft and whispery. And like all cones, these obey the geometry of nature.

Lutradur and landscape

The course I did at the Alston Hall/Contemporary Quilt summer school was on landscape, tutored by Ineke Berlin. After supper on Friday we spent a couple of hours in the studio painting lutradur, which is a "polyester spun web" - very strong, and takes paint well. We tried both the thick and the thin, and dabbed, swooshed, and sprayed, then left it to dry.The next day we experimented with many things. I finally tried Markal (Shiva) oil sticks, and found by happy accident that by using an edge as a stencil and then moving it to the other side, you could get a 3d-looking tree trunk. Another discovery was to use the soldering iron to bond synthetic fabric onto the lutradur - the two synthetics melt together.
By Sunday afternoon I had 4 pieces on the go, all on a foresty theme (probably inspired by that woodland walk...) - and the one on the right, "spooky forest", all but finished.

Alston Hall

Overlooking the Ribble Valley in Lancashire, Alston Hall is an adult education college housed in a Victorian building, run by a most friendly and helpful bunch of people.The grounds are beautifully maintained and the views are divine - and beyond the rusty fence, sheep graze contentedly.
The woodland walk goes round a little valley with a tiny stream and is dotted with lanky rhododendrons.

A shadowing of chairs

What's on the machine?

The dust cover - I'm off to Alston Hall for the Contemporary Quilt summer school.

Don't throw out those tiny scraps!

You could make a "string quilt" like this one (found while looking through old issues of Piecework). It was made about 1880-1900 by farmwife Susan McCord of Indiana. Each panel is 4 1/4 x 78 inches and contains about 300 leaves and buds - - each made with up to six pieces of fabric.
"The fabrics are still crisp with sizing from the mills." If you're in Dearborn, Michigan, you can see this at the Henry Ford Museum.

A wet weekend

It rained so hard that the storm drain outside packed up. Sitting upstairs sewing, I could hear the swish of a car driving through the puddle too fast. Wrentham Avenue is used - at speed - as an alternative to roads with speed bumps.And it got so cold that the conservatory steamed up.
And it was so windy that a lot of creeper blew down. Tony freed it completely and left it lying like a wounded beast in the middle of the lawn.

Struggling

This weekend I'm off to the CQ summer school, which is being held at Alston Hall, in Lancashire (up north). Last year it was held at Hartpury, in Gloucestershire (out west). I started this piece there - and it seems like a good time to finish it, lay it to rest.After hours and hours spend adding miles more quilting to the cloth, it was time to add the flowery bits of crayoned and stitched reworked photographs (once a beautiful white rose). But how? Various people suggested various things - even Tony contributed the idea of cutting windows and having the flowers at the back - so I decided to do one thing after another and not worry too much about the final result. Not that the brain isn't trying desperately to get it all to harmonise somehow!
During the hours of stitching, a name for it appeared: Morphing the Rose. But a more apt name might be - is! - Pastel Soup. This piece is full of valuable lessons in what not to do - most of all: less is more. The cloth is too, too busy. I might get out some white paint and ....

Accidental abstracts

From a skip (dumpster) on the way home.

Put it in writing!

I find that making a mental list just isn't as effective as writing things down. There's some sort of "magic" about writing things down that helps make them happen. Possibly this is because to write them down you have to overcome your laziness, even in a small way, and this gets the process of action rolling.
Or it could be that once your thoughts are out of your head and visible ... hmm, what happens? In the case of lists of things to do, it's like you're getting instructions from someone else rather than "just"(!) yourself. In the case of "morning pages" or other journalling, getting those thoughts out of your head leaves room for the thoughts you actually want to think.
In between writing the list and getting up to find the camera and take a pic, three items "magically" got done. It works.
Some people have notebooks where they keep their lists all organised and in the same place - but give me the back of an envelope and I'm happy.

Skies

Northern France - from the train -Towards Tibidabo - from the hotel -
- and again, another evening -
Another from the hotel (we had our own terrace, what a delight) -
Against the sky, the inevitable roof furniture, as seen from the bathroom window of the hotel -

The birds of the air

These were part of the screen at the side of the roof terrace.
They've been there a while. Interesting crackling.
We enjoyed sitting on the terrace and watching the housemartins circling and swooping, and the skies changing.