A new project perhaps

While ill recently I found it very soothing to read this book, which has been on my shelves for some 15 years, waiting for good intentions to fly into a window of opportunity. It was first published in 1993 and oh my, hasn't sewing technology changed in the past quarter century! The internet, rotary cutters, and a myriad of small things. But the basic principles endure, and this book sets them out clearly and in detail.

It wasn't just escapist reading, or harking back to my teenage years when I devoured books/information on garment making. I made some complicated garments back then, in quantity and at speed, squeezing them out of remnants for myself, or "sewing for money" for my mother's friends and even for teachers at my school - in fact it all started with a hem needing to be taken up, for which I was paid $1.00. It was amazing to earn money by doing something I so enjoyed. (To think that decades later I would fall into a serious job that did the same - what a fortunate life!)

My mother had wanted to be a dressmaker but her father deemed that no, she was to do secretarial training. Fortunately she was a person of resource and could - and did - turn her skills to a variety of jobs - bus conductor and pharmacy assistant for a start, and then anything that came along in her new life in Canada. I often think of that autocratic father, and how that decision made her life so different. Perhaps she was a bit jealous of me being able to do what she hadn't, or perhaps she was eager to encourage me. Perhaps a bit of both.

Now, the project - my son's wedding shirt was tailored to fit him - long arms, slim body. The idea is to use it as a pattern for subsequent shirts, half a dozen casual classics that will last for years. But first I need to brush up on a few skills and get a few tips on fitting and finishes.

Next, making a prototype from some of the acres of fabric that's on hand. Then comes the joy of finding lovely fabric -  recently when I was buying a bit of sinamay (to resume a previous project, the dipped pots), I noted in passing that shirting comes 150cm wide and costs £18 a metre. Probably online is a good source, but I really like the idea of an expedition to a fabric store with my son. He's no slouch when it comes to sewing (and printing) teeshirts and sweatshirts, and took to my serger like a duck to water, but doesn't have much time for such frippery at the moment.

Poetry Thursday - found on instagram

So visual. Such a picture from my own Canadian childhood - my family were immigrants, though there was no grandfather, and we only passed through Montreal on the way west to Vancouver. Growing up, there were many neighbours from other parts of the world, and England - the other side of the world, it seemed - was for me one of the exotic places. Now I live in England! As I get older even the familiar places are starting to reveal their exotic undercurrents, things to make you wonder.

Blast from the past - advice to self

Admonitions, worries, moans, doubts ... 'tis always thus!

Recto

Verso

These were probably written 15 years ago, during a low point. The two sides of the tiny bits of paper seem to relate to each other.

It's interesting to find "old stuff" like this - you do wonder if you've moved on at all, if you have different ways of coping with things, if the same problems keep occurring or if new things have arisen.

There's the surface, and there's the depths, wot?

Into the bin they go!

Sedgwick Museum, Cambridge

We went up to Cambridge for a bit of Shakespeare, and discovered that the Fitzwilliam Museum, in fact just about every museum, was closed on a Monday - but the geology museum was open. 

What a revelation, just the sort of old-fashioned museum with handwritten labels and cupboards and drawers and vitrines and quirky things that I love.

Professor Adam Sedgwick's walking boots

The obligatory dinosaur

Rocks and fossils large(ish) ...

... and small

Dinosaur bones and ammonites...

... and starfish ....

... and sea-lilies (crinoids)

Microfossils - how do they even find them?

A quiet room with chemical explanations

Fog oak- "Part of a tree found March 1839
near the Reach in Mildenhall Fen at 7 feet from the surface
by men digging for clay. Its head pointed west by north.
Height with its branches 250 feet.
Height to the first branch 159 feet."

The all-too-familiar touristy view of The Backs and Kings College Chapel. Living in Cambridge in the 1970s, I used to cycle from the Sidgwick site, through the gate [now shut] at lunchtime to the market. (The site (departmental buildings) was named after the philosopher Henry Sidgwick, who studied at Cambridge in the 19th century.)

 Across the road is the Fellows' Garden, or is it the Master's Garden -

 It's big.

The evening wasn't particularly warm, and the actors, as night fell, weren't easy to hear. There was a lot of rushing about, if only to get on "stage". No doubt the tower of the University Library has seen stranger things -

The Mathematical Bridge of Queen's College, on the way back to the station -

 ps - what delight to happen upon a labyrinthine sculpture (Between the Lines, by Peter Randall Page), which set off my labyrinthine trousers -

Walkikng near water

The main project for this sunny(ish) day was to finish a section of the Capital Ring that we started a while back - the heavens had opened just after we'd pootled round in the cemetery of Old St Andrew's Church, but fortunately I knew, from visits to the garden centre nearby, where to find a bus that would eventually get us home. So, months later, we are finishing that walk - which ends where Brenda started walking the Capital Ring; I've done a few sections with her and am gung-ho to do the rest, "for completeness sake" ...

Anyway, we started finishing the section at the Welsh Harp reservoir -

Lots of water, swimming no longer permitted (there is an exemption for waterfowl) -

 Sailing and kayaking are popular and encouraged -

The walk carries on over an arm of the water, with a special one-way system over the one-lane bridge that stops all vehicles to allow pedestrians a safe passage -

 On the way to our "starting point" we diverted slightly to that garden centre to check out the fish. It has a large aquatic section which Tony and I would sometimes visit on rainy weekends -

The koi are kept in open tanks and are available in various sizes - and prices. These are about 50cm and will set you back well over £100 each -

Flashback Friday

Another photo found in an envelope - "The Midnight Feed" -

October 1976, the baby is 3 months old. The parents are tired. It's hard to stay awake for the night feeds. I am reading science fiction...

We are living at 5 Dam Head, Holmbridge, in the underdwelling that we restored. Roger removed bucket after bucket of earth from what turned out to be a useful cella, and we made wine and beer down there - it was the 1970s and we were poor students, though living far from the comforts of college. 

I knew no other mothers until one day there was a knock on the door and an angel brought me a friend, and her children became my child's playmates. I spent so many lovely days in Caroline's cosy kitchen, my happiest memories of that time. 

Flashback Friday

What a surprise to find this old photo in an envelope - it must have been 1970, in our apartment on Cornwall Street, Kitsilano, Vancouver - Roger in the butterfly chair and me in my suede miniskirt and crocheted vest -

It was the era of long hair. Even the xmas tree has long hair!

Less than a year later we were in England, and the rest is history, literally - eventually there was his history PhD (Cambridge), and our son too has a history degree (SOAS). As the working wife I found myself in the African Studies Centre in 1973-5, before we moved to Yorkshire and the baby arrived.

But back then I was working as a teacher in a residential school for deaf children, after a year's postgraduate training. And Roger was working in construction, as a cement finisher, saving up for his MA in Durham.

"Adventures of The Lonely Heart"

A blast from the past.

Rumbling around in the hinterland of my home studio, aka storage room, I found some work from the 90s - the story of The Lonely Heart -

...an early work! I loved making it - it's embroidered on black velvet (very last century!) with space-dyed rayon threads, and at the time (of rediscovering the joy of stitch) each little panel, each little story, was meaningful to me.

Some details -

Voyager - to Uranus

These images are from a Sky at Night programme from 1986, when Voyager 2, which was launched in August 1977, had travelled beyond Saturn to this distant "ice giant" (temperature about -216 degrees). (Watch it and others on the BBC iplayer, here.)

Uranus has a small rocky core, but mostly consists of a hot, dense fluid of  water, methane and ammonia. It orbits the sun every 84 years, and rotates on its axis every 17 hours.

Interestingly, its axis is perpendicular to its orbit - the "hot spot" in the image is the south pole - and even more interestingly, because of the retention of heat by the atmosphere, and convection in its fluids, the temperature is much the same as at the north pole. The magnetic axis is tipped at 55 degrees from the axis of rotation, and the magnetic field is about a third the strength of Earth's - the planet's fast rotation creates a dynamo effect. 

Images show that Uranus has banding - the red spot is the south pole

The "donut" circles in the images are artefacts, due to the camera, and the pink crescent is an artefact of a different sort. The colours arise from the different filters used in separate photographs, for each of which the radius is different; combining them leaves "bare areas" around the edge -

 Special methane filters were used to look at the atmosphere. The blue crescent indicates the area of the planet that's free of high haze layers; the red ring shows areas of haze around the equator -

The atmosphere is now known to contain hydrogen, helium, and a little methane.

It was known from telescopic observation that Uranus had five moons, and Voyager discovered two more; now, it is known to have 27 moons, all named after characters in the works of Shakespeare and Alexander Pope.

Miranda "has canyons like Mars, grooves like Ganymede,
and compressional forms like Mercury" - a range of terrain

Umbriel has an old surface with very large craters

Titania has small craters and lots of rifts

The first picture of the 9 rings - some have "shepherd satellites" that
keep the fine particles of the rings organised

A longer exposure (96 seconds) in scattering light;
the long specks are due to the length of the exposure
as Voyager sped past at about a million miles a day,
50,000 miles above the planet

Next planet: Neptune

Having visited four planets,Voyager 2 is now - more than 40 years after launch - beyond the solar system, in interstellar space, having visited Neptune in 1989. The last solid body it studied was Neptune's moon Triton. It's travelling at 470 million kilometers a year, and Voyager 1, which visited Jupiter and Saturn, has also left the solar system, travelling 520 million kilometers a year on a different trajectory.

In those four decades, technology has made leaps and bounds - state of the art in 1986 still included computers with green screens, remember those? Digital manipulation - making false-colour images - took "a day or so", partly because of the low light levels at that distance from the sun.

Vintage bedlinen

Having bought a new duvet, after 47 years of good service from the one received as a wedding present (we requested a pair of single duvets - now there's forethought!), I realised that the "vintage" damask cover cover was a bit frayed and looked online for a replacement. What joy to find a pair of cotton damask duvet covers, vintage 1960s Germany. The postage was £20, reasonable as they came from the Netherlands (www.minoucbrocante.etsy.com) - and they arrived the other day, carefully packed and with nice cards included -

I condensed the story of my relationship to damask duvet covers, and my lifelong history of duvet use, into an instagram post (click on the pic to enlarge) -

I knew from the online description that there was "some fading" - confined to one edge of one of the covers - so into the washer it went. Hanging it up to dry, I noticed the lovely buttons -

What pleasure these details give! All this for the total price of just one 21st century cover of a lesser quality.