Wasting time?

Just now I sent along an interesting website to one of my online groups, adding that it had:
Interesting photos, and lots of links to follow, if you have time to "waste"!

Which brings up the question - just exactly what IS wasted time? For me, looking at websites that make me think or that motivate me to get out of the chair and into the workroom, that isn't wasted time. Probably, looking at more than three or four at a time would be... but not necessarily - there are times when we're gathering information and other times when we're putting it into action.

It's a risk, checking out those links - will they be tooooo riveting, causing the loss of time that had been scheduled for some other activity? Will they be so boring that the 10 seconds they take to load will be wasted?

Hanging on the phone, waiting to be put through to a person and having to listen to their tinny music, now that DOES qualify as wasted time! So, in my book, does getting angry with someone for having wasted your time, or with yourself for the same reason.Finding a pic for this was fun - if you want to really waste time, search for an image of "wasted time" and see what comes up. This one is from here.

A quote for these troubled times

"He who loses wealth loses much; he who loses a friend loses more; but he that loses his courage loses all."-- Miguel de Cervantes

"Ally Pally"

Look closely and you'll see that the sign says "Knitting and Stitching Show".
The SDA booth looks better with some textiles (the big one is by Claire Benn, the others from the discharge workshop I did with Bob Adams last year) - and with lots of people milling around - the other SDA members in the photo are Catherine and Hilary.Nearby was "Seeking Pearls" an interactive installation by Alfreda McHale - marvellous! You choose a jar of buttons,
emptied it into the big bowl, then refilled your jar - it's absorbing work -Yes there was knitting (and wool, wool, wool) at the K&S show:
And stitching - darning, even - here's Michael Swaine and his darning project -
I had my darned sock-toe photographed in vivo -
Felt - yes there was felt. In many manifestations, including brooches -
and pincushions (these from Tait & Style, in the Orkneys) -And of course there were bags - everywhere you looked -Oh, nearly forgot to mention the exhibitions, ethnic textiles, and the conversations -- and the shopping opportunities. There were one or two things I forgot to buy, but I'll be back there tomorrow...

A visit from the moth

Each pin represents the feeding ground for a larva. Then they turn into moths and fly off and lay eggs somewhere else, and those larvae make holes there, and so it goes on. This is a favourite top, thin boiled wool, wearable again now that I can bear high necks once more -- but in the meantime ........

..... a design opportunity! This label, Ischiko, has lovely fabrics and quirky styles (I used to find bits in the sales). So, this piece is getting enhanced by little nobbles of darning wool, randomly sprinkled - or rather not so randomly, but who'd know they were covering multitudes of sins?

A surprise on my desk

The canteen has been closed for refurbishment for nearly two years. To announce the grand reopening, a card was placed on every desk in the building, redeemable for a jute bag. Of course I was sniffy and cynical about this blatant marketeering. A kind colleague took the voucher off my desk and redeemed it for me -- so when I arrived at work, this cute little bag was waiting (thank you Les!) -- complete with apple, a few biscuits, and a colourful book on eating "5 a day" fruits and vegetables. The attached loyalty card offers your tenth coffee free. I'm resisting being sniffy and cynical about that, but it's definitely an effort. Love the pic of the building!

On the street where I live

Standing on the corner in the sunshine, with time to look around - I'm looking at my flat in the middle of this terrace (only it's not "flat", it's on two floors) -and at a different view of two businesses I can see from my windows - Continental Cafe has been going for years, but the place next to it keeps changing hands. A few months ago it was a Greek restaurant, before that ... can't remember. Wonder if Vietnamese food will be a success. When I first lived in this area there wasn't a pizzeria, very few other restaurants. It's changed in the past couple of decades. It was built in the late 1880s. Wikipedia has an amusing entry on Stroud Green Road.Usually this street is really quite busy - lots of people on their way to Finsbury Park tube station.

Getting set up

The Surface Design Association booth at the Knitting & Stitching Show - before and after. Minimalist because everything had to be shipped over from the States - there are boxes of magazines etc hiding under the table.
I'll be sitting there (RC, stand A7) on Friday (3-5.30) and Saturday (12.30-3) - drop by and say hello if you're at the show!

Online at the Tate

The Tate gallery has an online course on artists' techniques in which you learn about them, then make work of your own. They also have a series of podcasts on "modern paints" - which will complement this book that occasionally surfaces from the heap beside my bed:

Gather and paint

Take a length of cloth and some longer lengths of sturdy thread. Stitch each thread along the length of cloth. Gather.
Paint.
Remove the threads.
Here they are, neatly braided and ready to re-use on another length.
Impatient to see what it looked like dry, I ironed the still-gathered cloth between other cloth:

Withdrawal symptoms

It's true, I haven't touched a needle or thread all week. The Linus neonatal quilt is still lying untouched beside the sewing machine, waiting for its quilting.

Yesterday evening found me in Liberty's, looking at the high-fashion labels and stroking the fabrics. Fabulous fabrics. Fabulous prices. But a pauper can stare at a king.

Indeed there's been lots of interesting stuff happening in London town, and plenty of things to distract. Sometimes the sewing has to wait, the other commitments have to take priority. And hey, sometimes you feel like you're drowning in other commitments!

Two fountains

Above, in the Rose Garden at Hyde Park Corner; below, in Russell Square, Bloomsbury.

Two gardens

Above, the sunken garden at Kensington Palace; below, the Kitchen Garden at Kenwood.

Bloomin' beautiful

At first the stems, later the blooms.

Another small pleasure

A shiny sink. (And a useful cleaning product.)

Giving objects a second life

One of the headline events at the Knitting & Stitching show next week is San Francisco artist (and ceramics teacher) Michael Swaine. He mends clothes.

He runs The Free Mending Library, an on-going project in San Francisco. Twisted Thread’s publicity says: “He mends holes, alters garments and trades skills for free, using his mobile sewing unit, which resembles an ice-cream cart. This sturdy device has a beautiful old treadle-operated sewing machine mounted in the middle, an umbrella for shade, drawers stocked with an assortment of threads, needles and specially designed patches, and is emblazoned with a neon sign that flashes the word SEW.

“He will be travelling the neighbourhoods of London, knocking on doors and offering to repair the holes in people's socks. While he is fixing socks he will ask the owners about how they move about the city and how they deal with holes. ‘When I encounter people who darn themselves, I will ask to take some photos of socks they have darned, and perhaps ask them to sit and darn with me - even teaching me how their grandmother taught them.’

“Continuing in this way, Michael plans to weave along from neighbour to neighbour collecting interesting interactions, culminating in an exhibition and demonstrations of his performance darning techniques at The Knitting and Stitching Show, Alexandra Palace 9-12 October.”

A video interview with him is here - and another here has more on the history of the Free Mending Library.

He says tha art is "a mooshy substance in between things - it's very flexible, and we as artists should embrace that."

100 years of motoring for the masses

On this day in 1908, the Ford Motor Company introduced their Model T - the Tin Lizzie, "strong, sturdy, with a will of its own". A car was made every 10 seconds, and this model was produced until 1927. Ford's innovations were using an assembly line instead of handcrafting, and paying workers a wage proportionate to the cost of the car - so that they could afford to buy one.

Why Model T? Ford started making cars in 1903 with Model A, and worked his way through the alphabet till he got it right. After that, he made a fortune - £190 billion at today's prices.

One is currently on display outside the Design Museum. Fascinating recollections by members of the Model T Club here, and vintage video footage here (goodness, the state of the roads!).

There's even a Model T Snowmobile Club (in New Hampshire) - this video proves it.

Apparently Henry Ford never did say "you can have any colour as long as it's black". It needed saying, though.

Inspiration, or jumping off point?

The two pix on my wall at work are inspirations - Malevich's village scene and Klimt's birch forest. Have I used them as jumping off points though? Not yet... so, how could I do this?

Malevich uses red, blue, black, rich brown, sandy brown, mudy brown, grey, and golden yellow. Oh and a bit of blue-green. Actually that grey has lots of nuances. At first the colours look to be few and the shapes simple - triangles, mostly, shaded with the colours. Solid puffs, also shaded, of smoke rising from the chimneys. When I sit down to draw from this, something will happen on my paper that will set my design going - the jumping off point. I keep looking at the yellow hat and the way the red areas march across the picture - maybe that will be the jumping off point. Or maybe it will be the arcs of black. I won't know till I do the work for myself, making the spark from the tinder.

The Klimt is grey and brown, with flecks of orange. There's a high horizon, a late-afternoon sky in a fall landscape of many thin trunks. Nothing is happening in this picture. It's like that old conundrum of "if a tree falls in the forest and no-one is there to hear it, does it make a noise?". It's very satisfying to look at - just like being there in the forest in the silence in the light with the smell of decaying leaves that will refresh the soil. Again, looking and drawing is the way forward. For this, I'd want to convey the atmosphere, whereas for the Malevich there might be some sort of story involved.

I've been looking at these -- glancing -- for about a year now.

The Big Draw

A month of drawing-related events was launched last night at the Wellcome Collection with a lot of events. The biggest draw was Nathan 'Flutebox' Lee, wired up to an electrocardiogram, with the readout projected on the screen:and on another screen, cartoonist Steven Appleby drawing what might be going on in his head:



I gathered from the lectures (by professors Arthur Miller and Semir Zeki) that the world is merely a mathematical construct and a problem in physics has been finding ways to visualise these schema, and that ambiguity is the essence of art -- reality happens in the brain, not the world, and although perception is hard wired, colour is unambiguous: we know what colour we're seeing, never mind the lighting conditions. Yes that sounds garbled - I wasn't taking notes. Lots to think about.

I'm truly sorry to have to miss the talk on snails by geneticist Steve Jones - Snails in art, the joy of snails, and the art of camouflage.

Celtic connections

How to make a quilt on a celtic theme without using interlacing motifs? This is my personal challenge-within-a-challenge, as I plan a 24" square piece for CQ's challenge for the Quilters' Guild AGM in March 2009. The theme is Celtic Connections, and for some reason my first thought was of Visigoths, who made objects like this crown:
But it turns out the Visigoths weren't celts; in fact their kingdom (418-508) didn't include the celtic areas in northern Spain, Asturias and Galicia.

And celts fall into two linguistic groups, known as P and Q, what a coincidence for a P&Q challenge! Of the seven celtic nations, P celts comprise Welsh, Cornish,Breton; Q celts comprise Irish, Scottish, Manx, Galician. Before contact with the Latin world, Q celts didn't have a P sound, they used a sound that's usually written as C -- so in Welsh the word for head is "penn" and in Ireland it's "ceann".

But it's visual connections we're after -- language=writing, yes? Think runes ... think ogham script - and I'd better check out the celtic connection of those -- they could turn out to be anglo-saxon or norse...Some fascinating info about runes: 'The name "rune" is a fairly recent term, and was originally thought to have evolved from the German word raunen, which means "to cut or carve." Yet an examination of older German dictionaries long since retired from general use reveals that raunen once meant "to whisper secrets" and "Rune" (always capitalized then) was the noun for "secret" (also written "Run" or "Runa").'In thinking about this topic, I'm pulling relevant books off the shelf and leafing through, waiting for the random thoughts. Making little sketches on backs of envelopes. Most of all, it's amazing to have the wonderful resource of the internet to roam around in. This bit of background conjures up many visions:

• To the ancients, the Heavens appeared to wheel overhead, turning on an axis which points to the north polar stars. At the crown of the axis, a circle of stars revolved about a fixed point, the Celestial Pole, which was believed to be the location of Heaven. At the base of the axis was the Omphalos, the circular altar of the Goddess' temple. The universe of stars turning on this axis formed a spiral path, or stairway, on which souls ascended to Heaven.

• This Sun-wise, clockwise, or deiseal (Gaelic), motion of the spirals represented the Summer Sun. The continuous spirals with seemingly no beginning or end signified that as one cycle ended another began ­ eternal life. The spiral's never-ending, always expanding, motion also symbolized the ever- increasing nature of information and knowledge. Many of these symbols often also appeared in triplicate, a sign of the divine.

Ah yes, spirals fraught with symbolism -