Or branch out into sea creatures - these sinister beauties come from the coral reef "rubbish vortex" project.
And yet, and yet ... the cyclical make-it crazes spawn their own consumer culture, feeding into the "I shop therefore I am" mentality. Quilters need ever more of the latest fat quarters. Sewers are bombarded with blandishments to buy the latest computerised machine. Knitters know the brands, varieties, and colour codes of every yarn.
Pass the bamboo (or vintage plastic) knitting needles - I need to use up my wool before the moths eat it all.
Use half inch (1 cm) seams throughout. First sew the lining to the outside. Then turn in about 1.5" (4 cm) on either side of the join, and sew it down. This is where the drawstrings will come out.
Put the two pieces together and sew the bag part, and the lining part, together, backstitching when you get as close as you can to the bits you've already sewn down. (This is not couture sewing, this is a utility bag - a bit of roughness and fudging is permitted here!)
A nice touch, but not strictly necessary, is to square up the bottom corners - match the bottom seam and the side seam, and sew across the corner, then cut off the triangle.
Turn the bag and lining inside out through one of the holes.
Tuck the lining into the bag, and insert the drawstrings between the lining and the bag.
Tie the drawstring ends together. Push the strings as near to the top as you can, and then pin in the clear space below that. Sew each half of the bag, making sure you don't catch the drawstrings in the sewing.
Write your details on the bag with an indelible pen. Add quilt; pull and tie drawstrings; wrap the bagged quilt (in brown paper) ready to mail (don't forget to include the return label). There's no need for tissue paper, or for little ribbons round the quilt that need to be untied - the people at the show who unwrap all those quilts won't thank you for the extra work.
(Oops, got the phone number wrong!)
Inspired by Deb Lacativa's "summer garden" and Jude Hill's work, as well as by Dijanne's "traveller's blanket", I've set about transforming what was once a stained tablecloth.
It will stay in the tablecloth category, but move into the subcategories "special cloth" and "picnic blanket".
Once the front is done, the centre of the circle gets cut away and another patch added. Or not.
The prints were large - and their brochure is a memorable format. More of David's photos are here - on his blog he says that it was Anna's idea to have the exhibition: "Anna started this project as an unknown photographer, but one whose images I have always been impressed with. She has now shown a wider audience that her amazing work is of an equal quality to my own."
Scroll down to 1st April on his blog for a wonderful image of a sand-filled house in the ghost town of Kolmanskop, Namibia - full of dazzling diagonals of light and shade through the latticework of the weathered building.
If you've got the patience to withstand the longeurs and derangement of buffering, and understand French, there's an amusant video of him and his work here.
The question surfaced when I was reading about how sculptor David Nash chooses certain kinds of wood for certain projects -- because of his experience of what these woods will do, how they will behave.
Along the same lines of thought: "In my isolation I grow stronger" (Paul Gauguin) and "My work is always better when I'm alone and follow my own impressions" (Claude Monet).
This appeared a couple of months ago, off Tavistock Place, WC1 - it's done on paper and stuck to the building - but it's gone now.
Really, the colours are so much more vivid than in the photo. I love the swathes of purple, white, orange, yellow - with punctuations of hot pink. And the apples on the laden tree turning from green to red (and falling off, more's the pity).
And this is the first time we have lilies -
Understated by luscious jewellery from the royal graves of Ur, on the banks of the Euphrates, at the British Museum. The statue below is a bit later, about 2100 BC. A king called Gudea built 15 temples and also had a lot of these "postbox feet" statues made - most are in the Louvre. This one, broken (and pitted), would have been particularly large.
More patterns and images are at http://www.counterfeitcrochet.org/ - "debasing and defiling designer items one step at a time" - political comment on logos, fashion, and the global economy.
Somehow, time slipped past and the degree shows came and went. I missed most of them - and missed New Designers, which is like all the degree shows rolled into one building, and happens in early July every year. But I did get to the Royal College of Art show a couple of weeks ago (...more time slips by...) and was amused by some of the Product Design projects. Like Alice Wang's idea for an alarm clock, which steals your mobile phone and randomly calls someone from your contact list, every 3 minutes after your wake-up time...
The "bricks" were ideal for sampling various types of machine quilting. My books on machine quilting refused to be found, so I looked carefully at some others and noted down, or invented, some patterns to try out -
Here's the inside, before the bag was put together and lined - 20 different patterns, including some I'll use again -
The "mortar" became so dominant, I had to knock it back with a criss-cross of a contrasting colour thread (neon green!).
At the Royal Festival Hall till 17 July.
This is the pretty part of the exhibit - and aren't those "Dr Seuss" corals wild! -
The other "reef" is made of plastic, and makes the point that our rubbishy, use-once plastic bags are ending up in the oceans. Their mass is now the size of England - and growing.
Another book that Bobby Britnell brought to the CQ summer school. Amazing photos! A whole new way of looking at flower arranging. Wonderful book. Here's a sample to whet your appetite.
Someone who has found "her thing" -
and followed it -
This work brings to mind the woodcuts of Shiko Munakata, more of which another time.
These were in the Serpentine Gallery in 1995. My son liked how the pieces seem to have burnt their way through the wall.
This piece is called Downpour
and this is another Downpour -
Views of Nash's studio, an old chapel in North Wales, with some of the pieces he has made over the past 40 years --
In the book Nash talked about the qualities of particular types of wood, and how that influenced what he did with them. And about where he gets his wood - from dead, dying, or already-cut-down trees - sometimes from what he calls "wood quarries". There are many pictures of "wooden boulder" (started 1978) on its 25-year journey down to the sea, including one just before it disappeared -
