Basted before breakfast

Didn't quite get finished with the basting last night - had to put the project away and lay the table for dinner* - so I got on with it immediately on coming downstairs this morning, and now, at last! it's ready for the machine -

Start in the middle... The horizontal pins mark 10" intervals, and the masking tape will be moved along so I can keep an eye on the straightness of the quilted lines.

While handstitching (and listening to continuous podcasts!) I've been looking forward to the quilting, and its sense of systematic progress after the many revisions of the layout. Of course the tidying of ends will be tedious, but I'm looking forward to more continuous listening, catching up with some favourite radio programmes.

The machine awaits - not the newer model that fastens the stitching at start and finish, and cuts the thread, which then unthreads itself. No, not that one, with all its electronic "leave me alone, I'm thinking!" noises.

I'll be using the non-computerised straightstitch, quite old now, one of the first "speedy" models with a big throat (for bulky quilts, ah when did I last make one of those...) -

Before the back could be basted on (yes, it could  have been fused on, but that would have meant a search for the fusible!) I stitched round the edges of all the pieces, and for the lightweight and slippery silk pieces, put in some background stitching - perhaps to remove later, perhaps to leave in. That handstitch took raaather longer than expected, and in the end some tonal adjustment was needed -

Once a few rows have been stitched, I can estimate how long the quilting will take - current guess is 6 hours, but this could be a wild and grievous underestimate! Only five days are left till the deadline. The race is on!

*When he came for dinner last night (and stopped my basting) my son brought these, which gladden my heart and adorn the now-serene surface of the table -

Blast from the past - June 2014

In search of the high-res version of a photo used in a blog post some years ago, I have been trawling through various hard drives and backups. The photo has still not been found (my sporadic filing system is perhaps to blame), but it's been fun to revisit June 2014 and the various "art jaunts" and exhibition preparations. 

The missing photo originated at the Royal Academy Schools degree show, where for some reason the life drawing room was open to the public, and we went in, sat down, and took a photo of this venerable place. But is it in my files? Obviously not. 

The low-res version of the elusive photo

While the search continues, today's blog post is rather flustered; normal service will resume asap! Below is a mere repetition ... what I chose from the photos of students' work at that degree show - alas the link to the Ragged Cloth Cafe post (whence came the elusive photo) doesn't work! - so if you want to read about the RA's part in art education of women, it's here -

https://raggedclothcafe.com/2014/06/29/art-education-for-british-women-ra-style/

And now, a quick trip back to the past, while the photo search continues.....

RA Schools exhibition (29 June 2014)

A few things that caught the camera's eye...

Hold by Ariane Schick ("Hole, plexiglas pole") - and a bit of the corridor

Hold from the other side

Monotypes by Aimee Parrott (and note the many-times-painted floor)

Untitled by Daniel Lipp

Two interspersed works by Natalie Dray - Zone Heater and 6 Sheets

This sound sculpture by Hannah Perry is a shivering mirror

Paintings by Alex Clarke

It's done with mirrors, and louvres ... captivating ... Ariane Schick again

From the outside, the studios look like garden sheds; they're tucked away behind the main RA building

Students in the postgraduate course at the Royal Academy are there for three years - fewer than 20 are selected each year from about 1000 applications. 

In my concurrent post on Ragged Cloth Cafe you can read about the education of women artists in Britain, in relation to the history of the Royal Academy. The first woman slipped in (almost) unnoticed - L. Herford turned out to be Laura, not Lawrence. The year was 1860 ... and fairly soon, women outnumbered men at the RA Schools. So, what happened to the men....

Plain and simple woodblocks

It was good to get back to "woodblocks" after the halfterm hiatus.

Today's entire output

I made notes of things done and things to try, so that bit of organisation feels like progress in itself.

Block has colours for overprinting onto rather pale first print
(results are on the left in the top photo)

A stronger print - more heavily inked, and then printed twice,
and showing the remains of the yellows mixing into the blues

Doing one colour at a time, so the ink [watercolours] doesn't dry out

Mostly the colours came straight from the tube, and colour mixing
- if any - was through overprinting

 Still thinking about the diptych books - some combinations -

More printing to come... some sort of cohesiveness is needed

Messy here and there

Drawing Tuesday - V&A

We went to different parts of the V&A and gathered for lunch at in the Members Room, which was veryvery busy, on account of it being half term. As we left the museum, there was a queue outside - it was judged to be so crowded that admission was restricted. Gosh; a victim of its own success.

Up on the 6th floor it was quiet. Primed by shop windows on the short walk from Knightsbridge

I was looking to draw chairs, and left behind the temptations of the ceramics study collection, these enticing ladies among them -

 for this tableau in the Furniture gallery -

1870s at back, 1860s for the miniatures,
and the "tutti-frutti" stool is 1990s

Lots of rejigging was needed to arrive at this, but even so the hind legs of the chair just don't work -

Looking at it "afterwards" gives a better idea of what needs adjusting. At the time, there's a reluctance to, eg, rub out an entire section so that it's in a better relation to the other objects - "too much work! my careful [=fussy] details wasted!" 

Next time: get the major shapes in the right place, first...

Joyce, after travel nightmares (it's half term, wot) found "Anger" in the ceramics galleries, one of the set of seven deadly sins made in the early 1990s by Janice Tchalenko, based on designs by Roger Law (of the Spitting Image workshop) -

She went back after lunch and carried on -

Jo too had just a brief drawing time, and quickly rendered several items in the glass gallery; this one caught the transparency of the glass -

 Judith, in the Chinese gallery, found this "foreigner" - he dates to about 600AD -

Janet K was in the British galleries, collecting images of birds -

And Michelle was roaming the museum with a camera, looking for inspiration for her next project; we await developments...

Spot the difference

 The footballers have been lying on the floor for the past week, and today they made it up onto the table. It was time to baste them to the background, and at the end of a long day all the little bits were held down by stitches, ready to go "under the machine" -

Up close to it for long hours of stitching, you get so used to seeing the various bits, you don't really "see" it after a while -- but it's obvious from the photo that the brown bits were just not working. There will be some unpicking tomorrow! This shows the brown areas covered up, but they need to come right out -

Nor is it quite ready to go under the machine - the backing needs to be done, an extra layer that will make it just that bit firmer, hopefully to hang better.

Even though there seem to be more questions than answers, I'm enjoying the making process. Listening, as I stitched, to many consecutive episodes of History of English podcast, was pleasant. I learned about "the anarchy" in the 12th century, caused by the dispute between Stephen and Matilda about who should rule England; goodness what a terrible time, 20 years of civil war...

Neatening the quilt back

My plan for "the footballers" was to darn in the threads - a nice quiet occupation, with a definite end to it and pristine, if painstaking, results.

It's time to think again about this! Yesterday I quickly put together another sample, 8" square. The lines of quilting perforce are interrupted when they come to a figure -

About half the threads are yet to be cut and pulled through to the back.  I worked on the darning-in for about two hours, with this result -  

You can just about see that there are a lot of threads that have been pulled through, but not yet darned in during that session. It is Very Slow Work, and Very Frustrating.

Plan B involves cutting and gluing the threads. Three possible adhesives are on hand -

The white paint looks sloppy; the Fray-Check hurts my eyes; the Gel Medium ("an excellent glue for collage", as it says on the label) seems to work well. It's best if the threads are tied, which can also be a frustratingly fiddly thing to achieve... 1. locate both ends; 2. tie once so the ends lie flat; 3. apply a tiny dot of medium with a paintbrush; 4. cut the ends short; 5. leave undisturbed till dry.

It still takes time, but only a fraction of the time for darning in. The work of about 15 minutes produced about half as many thread-ends as yesterday's two-hour session -

The quilt will be 15 times the area of the sample. It will take quite a while to neaten the back! 

Why not fuse on a false back, you may wonder - well, I just don't want to do that... nor do I want to leave the ends dangling. Thinking this through, I find a nice tension between the "traditions" of what the quilt depicts and the methods and materials used to make it. Quilting is So Not Football. It's miles away from "sport". And yet -- both need precision.

Unabashedly floral

Returning home yesterday, I found it warm enough to spend, door keys in hand, a few minutes in the garden, doing a little (one-handed) tidying. The bulbs are shooting up, and the miniature irises are actually in flower, so they needed the weeds clearing around them so that they can be seen. 

My keys were in the non-weeding hand and no hands were free for taking photos ... but I do have lots of other floral pix available from the past few weeks of walking around and looking around -

Hellebores etc at Estorick Collection

Old tiles on pub at Highbury Barn

Outside a florist on Highbury Park

Semi-floral - hanging baskets at Sable d'Or, Crouch End

Gorgeous (huge) Chinese plate in V&A ceramics gallery, 6th floor

Victorian tiles, Green Lanes

Flowers of light! Through a steamy bus window

Sad sight, a ghost bike, Seven Sisters Road

Japanese textile design seen at Works on Paper fair

Floral table decoration ...

... and the real thing, at Works on Paper fair

Floral portrait inside the envelope, one of a series by Margaret Mellis

Drifts of snowdrops and aconites, Hyde Park (on a raw day)

Spring flowers at 136A earlier this month

And this? ... it's one of those photos the camera takes when you're
not looking - my floral quilt