Spring, Knitting, Stitching

Some things seen at the show at Olympia -

Volunteers from the Quilters Guild, ready to help newbies make their first four-patch

Crochet lessons in the crochet jungle

"Modern" blackwork by Charlotte Bailey

Vintage swimsuits

Dyed clothing by Marian Clayden, also at the Fashion and Textile Museum stand

Woolly animal friends (by Sincerely Louise) 

Temptation among the fabrics

The long way round

Much as I depend on the Citymapper app to get from A to B, sometimes a little local knowledge is a useful thing. 

Trying to get from home to Olympia for a stewarding stint on the Quilters Guild stand at the Spring Knitting & Stitching Show, I suspected the quickest way was by Overground, starting at Crouch Hill and changing at Gospel Oak, as you do when travelling westwards. But Citymapper disagreed with me -

In the end I left home at 8.35, caught the delayed train at Crouch Hill at 8.50 (fretting about not making the connection), changed at Gospel Oak with 3 minutes to go down the stairs and up the other side, and sat on the Clapham Junction train to Olympia, arriving at about 9.30, in plenty of time to find the right entrance etc.

So, 60 minutes by the direct route, vs 74 as predicted by the badly-programmed robot. You can't believe everything you read!

Labyrinth of wooden tunnels

... being built -

It happened in Sao Paolo, and the artist is Henrique Oliveira - see more photos here ... and do, do, do visit the artist's website - henriqueoliveira.com

And for those of you are interested in seeing more "fine craft" - and those who have asked me "where do you find these things" - one answer is, the Crafts Council's weekly roundup, which you can subscribe to at craftscouncil.org.uk/newsletter

"an immersive experience"

SciArt Week

For a scientist, being published in the weekly journal Nature is Mega. To see a quilt published in Nature is ... unheard of?

"Electricity" shows two interacting neurons (via)

That published quilt, by Joni Seiderstein, is one of the illustrations of how art can enhance scientific communication and understanding, as part of a media-storm by artists called #sciart, launched as part of SciArt Week via Symbiartic, the art blog of the monthly magazine Scientific American.

The aim is to get educators, researchers, journalists, scientists - and the rest of the world - to notice science-related art and "to help advance the presence of images in science communication and culture."

Nature's report is here; the science and art link is a thread worth following!

Poetry Thursday - a trail of crumbs

First crumb - a link on the Quiltart list to the work of Michael James, which had fallen off my radar. On his site I was struck by the unusual colours in this, and the way the light seems to come through the work -

The Concept of Qi, 2008, cotton and dyes, 50.5"h x 52"w

It being Thursday, I needed to find a poem for the blog, and this would be a great illustration for such a poem ... so I started looking for a poem about "qi" ... which led to the second crumb - the work of Qi Baishi (1863-1957), purveyor of "poems in a brush stroke", for example (what, after much looking, to choose??) -

Gourds (via)

Third crumb - what is "qi", actually? The ancient Chinese described it as "life force" which permeated everything and linked their surroundings together. Moving into the scientific realm, qi becomes an elemental force: "Fairly early on, some Chinese thinkers began to believe that there were different fractions of qi and that the coarsest and heaviest fractions of qi formed solids, lighter fractions formed liquids, and the most ethereal fractions were the "lifebreath" that animates living beings." But the scientific view is that "Qi is a purely hypothetical concept."

Fourth crumb - the traditional Chinese character for "qi" -

That took me to the Chinese dictionary which still sits centre-front in my field of vision, right next to various thesauruses. (Sidetrack: get camera, take picture, download, tweak, upload ...) -

What looks to us like a short, simple word is manifest in my dictionary in 37 different characters, gathered into four different pronunciations (tones), with a variety of meanings including: a period of time; deceive; seven; wife; strange; ride (eg a bicycle); awaken; get up; abandon; utensil; and, right near the end of the list, "our" qi - whose meanings include air; gas; breath; smell; airs, manner; spirit, morale ... and as a verb: make angry; get angry; bully, insult. Isn't language a wonderful thing?

How many crumbs have we pecked at on this trail? I turn back to go find today's poem - and see that the crumbs that should lead me back have, like Hansel and Gretel's, disappeared.

Wordless Wednesday

Tuesday drawing - minerals at Natural History Museum

When we were recently at the Natural History Museum, I had a quick look at the minerals and wrote a bit about the collection in this post. Drawing there seemed to offer too many choices - I had brought coloured pencils and watersoluble crayons, but spent most of the time not with the fabulous colours but with textures, and of a small section of minerals at that.

The theme for the CQ challenge this year is "Elements" and the mineral elements simply fell into my lap, so to speak, in their cases near the entrance to the gallery. I set about collecting an example of each on a page with 15 little squares -

Capturing some of the textures in pencil was beyond my powers or patience, but it was good to look so closely at these forms and structures. Nor were the examples I'd chosen the only possibility - some of the elements had many different examples, truly a bewildering array when the subject is new to you.

These are "my"elements; whether they become a quilt in some way (one does wonder, how...) or not, it's been an education to study their appearance and learn something about them. Did you know that two-thirds of chemical elements only occur in nature as compounds? I was lucky to find 13 of them in one room -

Sulphur

Antimony

Arsenic

Copper

No photo of Tellurium, "lamellar on quartzite" ... ah well ...

Tin - it occurs chiefly as tin dioxide in the mineral cassiterite

Bismuth - tarnished flattened crystals showing stages in growth

Lead

Carbon in the form of graphite

Carbon in the form of diamond (or rather, glass models)

Mercury is a liquid but sometimes found in tiny globules with cinnabar

One of the forms of silver - as a wire; it also looks lovely as a dendritic spray of crystals

Nor did I photograph the gold, though I drew it as a "group of rounded crystals" and as a "waterworn mass on quartz".

And now for something completely different - eventually I sat down in front of this beauty and got out the crayons -

"Wardite, grey-blue with green variscite and cream crandallite" - from Utah. Possibly I'd used up all my looking ability by then, or just wanted to indulge in colour ... it was difficult to decide how much detail to include, knowing that leaving out details would misrepresent the structure of something that had "grown" in a particular way.

A pale imitation of the real thing ... just wrong

Mike had, as usual, captured a great number of separate objects, of which this is but one -

Those look like lamellar crystals, and the moment I saw them I wanted to stitch them! He preferred using pencil over pen for the minerals, but in her drawing of wiry silver, Caryl found the opposite - with pen she felt freer -

 Finally, a curiosity -

Continuing the first JQ of 2015

The printed fabric has had two weeks to dry, plenty of time, too long even, and the JQ is finally underway. First, some layout -

Then, finding fabric for the back, and something for the middle - stiffness might suit the "grids and structures" theme, so I'm using some fairly heavy interfacing that was left over from another project, a 17-foot "river" made in 2003. (See, these leftovers do eventually have a use!) Cutting all the backs and middles at the start of the project is a useful thing to do. Keeping them where you can later find them is useful too...

After a wee while at the machine, stitching down the few blocks of colour with a dark silvery thread, it looks like this -

And that's one of the backs and middles underneath - the interfacing cut to 6x12" size and stitched to the back. I wonder what will happen with the quilting, will the size change at all or will the stiffness prevent that - and if so, what will the top look like, will it be pulled in unattractive ways? The only way to find out is to try. 

Another decision made at the start is that all the quilts will be faced, so the design goes right to the edge rather than being framed.

After doing a minimal amount of quilting, pulling the thread ends through to the back, it was getting very cluttered back there, so I'm having to bury the thread ends, a little job I quite like on an item this small. There could be as many quilting lines as printed lines - I like to think the back will be similar-but-different to the front in its basic patterning.

Note the useful frame, cut out of some stiffish paper. The 6x12" cutout area is useful too - once you have the exact quilt area chosen, put the cutout back in the frame, remove the frame, and draw around the block (and trim if you're adding binding) - or stitch just outside the drawn lines in a different colour, and use those for adding facing, which will be turned to the back.

After doing rather a lot of heavy-thread-in-bobbin stitching from the back (in red and metallic silver) it ended up looking unbalanced - that yellow area is too big! - so I added some criss-cross yellow threads near the bottom -

and then some criss-cross black areas to integrate the yellow ... this could go on and on, but I decided to stop, and here it is, with the edges pinned under (for now) -

One thing does rather lead on to another, and when making this JQ I had in mind the entire series. The "big idea" is to take one element and continue it into the contiguous quilt, so they join up in a frieze somehow -

Instead of working ahead to February, I'm working back to January (and have an inkling of what March will be, too). 

Hurry UP!

Some of the zillions of photos I used to take on the escalator at Vauxhall, on the way to college.

Scottish sundials

In the Edinburgh Botanical Garden, a modern sundial (running two hours fast!*) -

Made by Ian Hamilton Findlay with Michael Harvey in 1975, installed at Inverleith House in 2013.

In the National Museum of Scotland, two polyhedral dials -

Sundials were very popular in the orderly gardens around castles and mansions, particularly in Scotland (said the label).

The lecturn sundial above is from Cantray, Croy, Inverness-shine, and has 13 dials on five faces, showing the time in Peking, Goa, Bengal, Ozaca, Troy, Smyrna, Cairo, Jerusalem, Syracuse, Naples, Rome, Paris and Cantray.

But 13 dials on five faces are nothing compared to this beauty, an obelisk sundial with 76 faces near Crieff -

The photo is from a comprehensive and fascinating website called Sundials of Scotland.

Both obelisk and lecturn sundials are thought to have originated in Scotland.

This one was made in Scotland in the late 17th century and sold at Christies in 2011 for £16,000.

The NMS website shows its wide-ranging holdings of sundials - 57 - many portable and most made outside Scotland. But it doesn't include the lectern sundials shown above.


*Addendum
I contacted Dennis Cowan (Sundials of Scotland) and he helpfully replied:

There can be any number of reasons why the sundial in the Botanics is showing the wrong time. A sundial has to be designed for its particular location and it could be that this was not the location for which it was originally designed, in which case it would not be accurate.

It may be wrongly designed but as it was made by IHF this is probably not the case.

The gnomon is only fixed by a single point and it may have moved. If it was not in its designed position then it would be inaccurate.

It should also be noted that because of the earths eliptical orbit and its 23 deg tilt, the sun is not in the same place at the same time every day, so any sundial can be up to 16 minutes fast or slow depending on the date. The Equation of Time gives details of how many minutes fast or slow on any given date. (Google it for more details - Wikipedia is good). At the moment its about 12 minutes slow. Also each degree west of Greenwich the sundial is, it will be 4 minutes slow. For Edinburgh this would be 14 minutes. So that could account for 26 minutes of its slowness. In addition it may be showing British Summer Time which would account for another hour of its slowness.

Nothing definite of course but I hope that helps.

By the way it is a south declining west sundial which means that it does not face due south exactly but it edges westwards.