Tuesday is drawing day - Docklands Museum

It was off to Docklands last week, via DLR to West India Quay. An interesting mix of old and new, the old, eg the cranes, rather overshadowed by the new buildings. The first dock in the area was built in 1696, followed by Georgian and Victorian expansion; the last dock was added in 1921. The docks were massively damaged in WW2, but it was containerization that led to the docks' demise. Redevelopment started in the 1980s ... and just look at it now.

The Museum of London Docklands records the rich history of the wider area. We started with the earlier eras, in my case with the Saxon port, its artefacts gathered in a vitrine -

Behind me was the model of London Bridge as it looked in 1600 -

Drawn by the colours and shapes of the houses, I tackled a few sections, getting very frustrated with the angles and perspective in the pylons -

Caryl too had been attracted by the colours -

On the opposite page is a cast of a head of a Yoruba man, 1100-1400.

Among Jo's drawings were these very individual locks -

The one at the bottom has the insignia of the East India Company.

Janet claims not to have done any drawing for several decades, but filled many pages, including this shelf of jugs -

She had brought along just a pen and a pencil, an economy of means that I admire and aspire to, even as the search for the "perfect" drawing implement continues via the weekly show'n'tell -

London Bridge
I'm excited to discover that another model of Old London Bridge is in the church of St Magnus the Martyr, which still stands at the site of the bridge (the old bridge was torn down in 1831). The model depicts the bridge as it would have appeared around 1400, and is populated with over 900 little people, including one in policeman's uniform, among the buildings.

Here's a summary of the bridge's evolution, from 1209 to 1831 -

On the way to find that image, these mills at Meaux cried out to be displayed too - they show the jutting additions that caught my eye on the bridge model -

The site from which both these images come is "A BERLIN BASED BLOG COLLECTING LOST + FOUND PIECES OF ARCHITECTURE, ART, DESIGN,AND URBANISM" ... fascinating ... do have a look at the archive of images garnered during the author's architectural studies.

Some ceramic horses from China

Whinnying horse, Tang dynasty, 618-907 (via)

Eastern Han dynasty, 25-220 (via)

Han dynasty, 206BC - 220AD (via)

Tri-colour glaze; possibly a replica (via)

"Ancient" (via)

From the tomb of An Pu, Tang dynasty (via)

Polo player, Tang dynasty (via)

Signs of the times

Ceramics, the final outcome

The final firing from last term's course has come home, and rather than procrastinating I set to photographing, measuring, wrapping for storage -

The strangest thing - and I don't know how this could have happened, as all my pots were in a sand trays, taking up all the room in the tray - is this creature ...

though from one angle it looks fairly normal, no sign of the hanger-on -

These little pots (they have bottoms so are pots/vessels, not "chimneys" like the gathered and dipped ones) are made of paperclay and are up to 7cm tall -

Inside this one, metal threads embedded into one side of the rolled out clay -

The rest are porcelain dipped, and the black is due to the metal threads or metallic fabric. Sometimes I added stitches in thickish threads.

First, the "lumps" -

Damaged, but I love that line of stitch, metal thread added after gathering

Subtle metal threads, distorted by the dipping process

Fabric gathered into a little topknot

Collapsing into itself

Slightly more elegant, these "chimneys" aren't gathered up, just stitched, and contained varying amounts of metallic organza -

Circles made from metallic threads released by tearing the fabric
("waste nothing")

Some areas are very thin and translucent

My favourite - the inside was painted with glaze and (somehow!) has hints of turquoise

Also some flat things -

Tiles made in the first week of the course, glazed at the last minute

Coloured slips, shiny glaze

Damaged ... but in the best place possible

"Four Fields" - about 16cm wide

Now it's a matter of matching the "before" (fabric) and "after" (ceramic) photos. But first I'll wrap them all up and put them AWAY for a while, till the next course. The hexagonal tiles might find their way into the garden.

(This post is linked to Off the Wall Friday.)

A stitchy pastime

Spot the neon orange!

In odd moments - watching tv or youtube, during travel - and using simple means (running stitch), more ruched pieces are on the go. Once the "design" is done, they are mindless to make ... or rather, the work of the hand frees the mind to think. My favourite time to work on them is first thing in the morning in the company of BBC iPlayer, catching up with a Book of the Week or an episode of In Our Time, The Life Scientific, or some other gem from Radio 4.

The next one has been "designed" - bits of fabric laid out and thread colours chosen -

The neon pink simply doesn't photograph well...

Once a few are ready, I'll pull the threads and steam the gathered clumps. These are 6" wide so that they have a chance to become journal quilts. If my fascination with this simple technique continues, I'll be thinking about how to develop larger structures.

Seen in Vogue

Everyday dress in Bhutan, amid the (shiny) pages of Vogue magazine -

Traditional and dignified; the sort of clothes you don't have to think twice about. The accompanying photoshoot was exuberant with colourful fantasy costumes and the fashion was ... well, fashion ...

In the same issue (?May), the article about dry cleaning did emphasise the dangers of perc, the chemical, and mentioned eco chemicals that are increasingly being used. One firm in London will go to great lengths to clean carefully - removing the buttons and sewing them back "invisibly", or even taking a garment apart and sewing it back together - at no small cost. The figures that stick in my mind are the woman who paid - ah this was in a New York establishment - $25,000 to have her $250,000 dress cleaned. And how enlightening to hear that some people spend £300 a month on dry cleaning!

The dot as element

This year the Contemporary Quilt challenge is Elements. I've been mulling over how to approach it for months, spurred by seeing, at the Sigmar Polke exhibition, the way that benday dots change from black dots to a grid, briefly, and then to white dots. Black and white are pretty elementary, so are dots and squares. Then a title, or was it just a handle, floated into view: elements of visual perception. I've yet to research this properly, but have been dredging up bits of info from the remnants of those rather boring courses in perception that were part of my psychology degree, aeons ago. Much has been discovered since then, including a sort of "third eye" - also known as blindsight. responding to stimuli that the person can't see.

But I digress. For Elements, thinking along the line of seeing shades of grey (via the rods in the eye) and seeing colour (via the cones), I've been looking closely at Polke's "dotty" paintings, especially the one above and these sort of effects -

He started (in the 1950s) by painting the dots by hand, then moved on to using screens. I too started painting by hand - actually, drawing dots in a grid first, so they wouldn't go all over the place - on both sheer fabric and something more substantial -

The grids were laid at slightly different angles -

This is what happens when the fabrics are layered -

Benday dots can be a range of sizes, depending on the tonal effect needed - which can get very complicated if you don't start with a particular image but are approaching it from the technical end.

The switch to using evenly-spaced,coloured dots is a simplification that appeals to me. It was inspired by seeing this sort of thing -

A suitable tonal image might come along; I'm on the lookout for one. But first, there's more to be discovered through experiments with painted grids ... or maybe even screenprint.

And with the purchase yesterday at a local fabric shop of some black/white check fabric ... and coincidentally seeing this quilt in my internet browsing -

(via)

it looks like the next experiment will be to add some coloured circles on the white squares.