Does your workspace ever look like this?

Yesterday I revisited the drawer in which all the fabric I printed at college is stored, sorting it as it came out into the light of day -

That doesn't look particularly sorted, does it? That's because most of the sorting is taking place in other parts of the room - on the workbench, for instance -

and on the ironing board (that tablecloth on the chair will come in handy at the craft fair) -

At this point I was so overwhelmed by "everything, everywhere" that I took some photos and went into the other room to escape. But it's at the point where everything is most muddled up that it can start to get so much better - you're ready to do something drastic, and often doing something drastic is exactly what's needed. In this case, it was a simple matter of quickly writing down the ideas and putting everything away tidily.

What seems to happen is that you see these forgotten fabrics and get ideas for projects that ALL seem to need to be worked on at once, starting now - hence the befuddlement, the loss of sense of purpose. Yet you have only one pair of hands and there are only so many hours in the day... It seems to help to say to yourself, "I'll work on this right now, and do those later." Which sounds self-evident - but it can take years to come to that point!

Here are some of the fabrics I'd forgotten about - they quickly got put back in the drawer for another time -

During the turmoil of sorting, another idea for the "All in a Day's Work" CQ challenge quilt (due 1st Dec...) emerged - a sketchy version is laid out at the far end of the workbench in the photo above, which doesn't give much away does it! Lots more fabric for the little needle-books appeared, too, but the search for the perfect fabric for their "pages" goes on - or rather, I'm trying not to delve too deeply in search of it, because what will happen is a repetition of the turmoil of today.

This week, my goal of six sewing kits is still far away - but a red-and-yellow one is laid out in preliminary compostition stage on the ironing board -

and most of those fabrics will be used to make one or two others in a similar colourway. It's grouping the fabrics that is the big job for each of these little objects.

The deconstructed drawer is wonderfully tidy; the workbench (and floor) is clear. I can think again, and am motivated - empowered, even! - to keep sewing.

These will knock your socks off!

Print your own

Swept along in a current of pro-activeness, I'm looking with astonishment at a ticked-off xmas list and (small) heap of things to wrap. It's not even December! And thanks to a leisurely look around the Kensington High St shops, rather than our usual cultural outing on a Sunday morning, Tony has his list complete too. (This is so unusual ... and we'll no doubt both be rushing around for "something else" at the last moment...)

Over coffee we hatched a plan to have a "print your own wrapping paper" tea party, with seasonal cookies and cake, and immediately on getting home had a trial run. Out came the potatoes and carrots, and a roll of lining paper and scalpels, paintbrushes, and tubes of acrylic paint (all the stamp pads had dried up).

The simpler the shape the better, when it comes to cutting - and the bigger the potato the better when it comes to printing, not so much for the surface area as for being able to grasp it easily. 

We used a large-ish paintbrush to apply paint to the surface, and found that the cut surface could be somewhat wobbly and rough. I like that "hand made" look, but some people will be happier with the regularity of rubber stamps, so the hunt is on through drawers and boxes for all those stamps I've bought over the years.

Simplicity and spacing seem to be the key ingredients. It's an activity kids can do, but that doesn't mean adults won't have fun with it too!

Signed, sealed and delivered

 

Once upon a time I lived in this two-bedroom underdwelling, 5 Dam Head, Hinchliffe Mill. We bought it in 1974, and in 1983, when we sold it again, received a bundle of documents -

They start in 1827 and I haven't looked closely at them. They seem to be the deeds for the entire terrace, which was a copyhold property. The Law of Property Act 1922 extinguished copyhold, rendering these documents superfluous - but I'm hardly going to cut them up or throw them out - their shapes and handwritings and seals and stamps, quite apart from their (many!) words, are far too interesting.

1827

1864 (stamped in Holmfirth and in London)

Bottom edge is turned up, stitched together with a bit of vellum at the sides and with
the ribbon holding the seals in two places

Around 1867 there was much to-do about a debt of £500

Signatories and their seals

1920

The 1920 document - typewritten, but with embellishments - names, in a great gulp of a sentence, the tenants living in the cottages of Dam Head - "... each of them DID thereby surrender and give up into the hands of the Lord and Lady of the said Manor ... and each of them DID thereby remise release and for ever quit claim ALL THOSE Four Dwelling-houses situate at Damhead Hinchliffe Mill near Holmfirth aforesaid formerly in the occupations of Mrs. Nichol, Mrs. Cuttell, James Robson, Wright Wood and Messieurs Whitely and Green afterwards of Albert Whitely Joseph Sandford John Taylor Littlewood and Hannah Charlesworth but now of James Henry Brook Tom Moreton Willie Roberts and Newton Butterworth with the shed in the occupation of Wright Wood..."

A bit of local history

If you look online for Hinchliffe Mill, you'll come across the story of the Holmfirth Flood. In 1852 a reservoir up the valley burst and 81 people lost their lives, 41 of them in Hinchliffe Mill - six houses in Water Street, on the other side of the dam (mill reservoir) were destroyed; read contemporary accounts here and here. From one account - "About fifty bodies are said to have been floated from the graveyard of the Methodist chapel in Holmfirth, and amongst them the corpse of the late Mr. John Harpin, the projector of the reservoir which has caused this fatal calamity." The flood left many homeless and without work. The buildings and structures destroyed along the valley included four mills, 10 dye houses, three drying stoves, 27 cottages, seven tradesmen’s houses, seven shops, seven bridges crossing the River Holme, 10 warehouses, eight barns and stables.

The area affected by the flood (via)

The mill, which dates back to 1832, has been vacant, indeed derelict, for some time. In the 1830s, the valley produced mainly "plain goods" but by 1860 it produced mainly "fancy woollens". Before the coming of the mills, and steam, "the kind of cloths manufactured here were called "Leeds Beds", a coarse class of goods, manufactured in the white, or undyed state, and dyed red in the cloth, slightly finished, and then sold to the Leeds merchants. These goods were manufactured in the old form, — scribbled and carded by a single pair of cards, — spun by a single thread, and woven by the hand shuttle" (from an 1860s history of the area around Holmfirth (digitised here) - it makes difficult reading.

More recently, bits of Last of the Summer Wine were shot in Hinchliffe Mill - in fact Wesley's workshop was down the end of the lane. While living there, I only ever went down the lane once or twice - that bit of road simply didn't lead anywhere, apart from the barn that was converted into a house, something that happened a lot in the late 70s. Last of the Summer Wine was a newish tv show then - first broadcast in 1973. Soon busloads of tourists were arriving in Holmfirth ....

Monday miscellany

A vanishing art form? A collector of second-hand books has compiled a book of fly-leaf dedications - read about it here. If you read through the comments on the article, you'll eventually get to this one:

Years ago I bought I book inscribed 'To Freddie, love from Paul' and underneath it Freddie had written 'total scumbag, please ignore his odious dedication'.

Finally you can travel around Venice from the comfort of your armchair, or at least from the comfort of your computer chair - Google Street View has conquered Venice, thanks to a "super-fit" team of camera-packers -

The article from which the photo comes also has links to other exotic armchair-travel destinations - street view Galapagos, anyone?

In The Guardian, a list of the 100 greatest novels of all time - how many have you read?

Guess which novel is no.1 on the list?

Another number one - we were wondering what the no.1 popular blog is - and it turns out to be Huffington Post, with an estimated 85 million unique visitors a month. A list of the top 15 is at ebizmba.com

#techmums is a course that aims to help women with children learn technology skills - the pilot course, run in a school in Tower Hamlets, the area of London with the highest uptake of free school meals in the UK, was so successful - for the school's pupils in general as well as the mums on the course - that the school is finding funds to run it twice more.

The head teacher of the school puts his finger on the knock-on benefit: "So many parents don't know how to track or monitor their child's internet footprint, nor do they have any sense of how to programme in a computing language. The parents' own fears create a parallel reluctance in their daughters to approach computing and computer science. But #techmums has increased confidence and self-esteem that sets them apart from people who haven't completed the course."

All this in two hours a week, over a six weeks. As the saying goes, "show a man how to catch a fish and you feed him for a lifetime."


The Tate has a series of videos called "Unlock Art" using celebrities to demystify things a little. They include Frank Skinner on performance art and Sally Phillips on the razzamatazz of the art market.

"The relationship between art and money is almost as old as art itself"

An interesting list of "art ingredients" (via) -

This week's sewing kits

Week 2 of The Big Effort - amid a lot of going out to exhibitions/cafes, the quota has been reached -

Here's a glimpse of the inside of some of them. The pix are intended for my website (and eventual Etsy/whatever shop) and need considerable editing - or maybe it would be simpler to rephotograph them after the craft fair -

Also I've started making small needle books using the "travel" screen-printed fabric. The tiny samples are perfect for this; they came in two main sizes, small and larger. The needlebooks are lined with silk or linen, and have "pages" of wool or felt -

The need for tweed

Harris Tweed is the must-have item of the moment - and hurrah, a bit of clever marketing is reviving this little corner of the weaving industry.

Harris Tweed cases for just about everything - each with its label

Harris Tweed ("a cloth that rises above fad and fashion") has a rich history - in 1864 Lady Dunmore, the widow of the Earl of Dunmore, had the Murray tartan copied by Harris weavers in tweed. The resulting cloth proved so successful that sales spread from the local area to a number of the major towns in the UK. The process was improved and new looms developed - the Hattersley domestic loom, introduced in 1919, was soon found in 1000 Hebridean homes. By 1911 the Harris Tweed Orb stamp, a mark of certification, could be seen on genuine products.

In 1966, peak production was 7.6 million yards of cloth ... and then came a period of decline, despite the industry's attempts to transform and modernise. The recent revival is due to "a market return to quality workmanship and value placed in artisan products but mainly thanks to the faith, perseverance and sheer hard work of island business men and women who refused to allow their precious local industry to die out."

It's not genuine without the label

The crucial requirement is that it must be handwoven in the home of the weaver. The company that has been working to revitalise the industry since 2007 now has 130 home weavers - and the cloth is used not just for clothing but for "technology accessories", scarves, and footwear.

On Lamb's Conduit Street

After the annual visit to the Small Publishers Fair, a stroll along Lamb's Conduit Street, in and out of the pleasant (but pricey) shops. Some street scenes -

Window of menswear shop

Put that panel in a frame and sell it for £££

Taxidermy is the flavour of the month - tweedy rodent in menswear shop

Urban transporters outside the cycle shop

Does your screen ever look like this?

Somehow, the collection of photos for the blog has slithered out of control. Once photos have been "maximised" for colour balance etc and cropped, I do a "save for web" which puts them into a folder named "blogging". The next step, once they're used on the blog, is to save them into monthly "archive" subfolders.

But things go wrong. There's no reason that used photos shouldn't be moved (except laziness) and no reason that other files, destined for email attachments, should be in this folder at all ... except laziness ... this is the folder that comes up automatically with "save for web". And the folder includes pix taken from the web, labelled only sometimes, source lost mostly ... and source must be mentioned.

The result - lots of files, in no particular order, some used on the blog and others not.

Easy solution - put everything in a subfolder, named Miscellaneous (or Backlog; or whatever...) and the date. Start afresh ... clean slate ... do it better this time.

Repeat as necessary - unless you get conscientious enough not to let it happen again!

Meanwhile, here are a few photos from among all this lot -

by Claire Gimber (via)

You get these kind of shadows in an eclipse

A medieval (?) woodcut rather like one I used for a hooked rug, long ago

Poetry Thursday - a commendation by Ben Jonson

The photo is of a section of the artwork at Charing Cross underground station (Bakerloo line southbound). It shows the Droeshout engraving on the title page of the First Folio - the 1623 collection of Shakespeare's plays, published seven years after his death.

The poem is by fellow playwright Ben Jonson:

To the Reader.
This Figure, that thou here seest put,
It was for gentle Shakespeare cut,
Wherein the Graver had a strife
with Nature, to out-doo the life :
O, could he but have drawne his wit
As well in brasse, as he hath hit
His face; the Print would then surpasse
All, that was ever writ in brasse.
But, since he cannot, Reader, looke
Not on his Picture, but his Booke.

Ben Jonson (1572-1637) is best known for his play Volpone, which satirises the merchant classes. At the age of 45, he set out from London for Scotland, the home of his ancestors. He made the journey entirely by foot, in spite of dissuasion from Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626), who "said to him he loved not to see poesy go on other feet than poetical dactyls and spondæus." 

Jonson was buried in Westminster Abbey, under a plain slab on which was later written "O Rare Ben Jonson!".

Out with a bang

The Lord Mayor's fireworks, seen from the classroom at City Lit, marked - quite serendipitously - the end of the storytelling course I've been attending for the past four weeks. These sessions followed on from two Saturday afternoons in the summer ... and the reason I was there goes back to my first winter in London, a traumatic time, during which I attended quite a different storytelling course that happened to be running in the community centre near my new home.

In that long-ago course we did ... not very much, not a lot of story telling; but we sat in a circle and I was unforgetably self-conscious about my feet sticking out in blue and yellow shoes, adidas trainers, back in the day when trainers were still a relatively new thing.

Fortunately the shoes - and the agony - are things of the past, but for some reason I was still interested in story telling. In the final session of the current course I finally got a glimmer of why.

The two courses, run by John Eastman, included warm-up exercises and "easy" tasks - like mingling with other students to figure what the order of the single sentences we had been given should be, so that they made a coherent story. John worked with fairy tales, so anything could happen - for instance, we each told of how we got to class - with as many fantastic events (dragons, donkeys, helicopters) as possible in the time allotted. Working with partners and pictures we made up stories on the spot. The class atmosphere was supportive and comfortable - and fun.

For the final session, we brought along a bedtime story to tell. I'd been looking at Grimm's fairy tales that morning, and found my story that way - and also my interest in learning how to tell a good story.

Trying to choose between my favourite (Mother Hulda (Frau Holle); rather long) and one of the short tales I'd found, I vividly remembered my grandmother reading from her "magic" black book, a book I couldn't myself read, not only because I was only just learning to read in English (it was in German) but also because it was printed in blackletter, not roman type.

So my story, pretty much made up at the last minute (ie, as I went along - but I knew the beginning and the end before starting), was about a little girl whose grandmother read stories to her at bedtime, and how magical the stories were. That I could provide the details as I went along, rather than having memorised and rehearsed, shows just how far this course has taken me, not just in use of voice and gesture and eye contact, but also in trusting that "it will be ok".

Two-thirds of the participants did not have English as their first language, and seeing them rise to the occasion is making me consider trying to use German (which we spoke at home during my childhood) to tell the tales I heard from my Oma. First efforts reveal that I need to improve my vocabulary - and to read, and listen to, the tales in German. At the same time, the idea of using autobiographical memory, and the way objects contain stories, are also floating around, waiting to be grabbed and brought down to earth. Perhaps this will feed into a project for the museums course?

Button, button

It is a truth widely acknowledged that any woman who owns a sewing machine also has a button collection. Those of us who are averse to collections happily call our button collections "repair tools".

In the search for buttons for the sewing kits currently in production, out came the button boxes. Some are chaotic, others vaguely organised and even labelled - "green buttons" for example -

I love getting them out - and putting them away -

Here's a selection for use in the sewing kits. Only singelton buttons are acceptable for this (sub)collection -

Riverside treasures

On a beautiful November Sunday, a walk across Waterloo Bridge -

Changing views of the strange collection of buildings that is London's 21st century skyline -

Tide out = foreshore accessible = must go look for clay pipes ...

But we were on the way to the Oxo Tower to the preview of Dazzle - lots of wonderful jewellery - I was most taken by the bold stuff made out of non-precious materials -

"Metamorphic" collection by Rhona McCallum - interesting materials

Many-planed wood  meets metal in Cristina Zani's work

I also really liked (= wanted to buy) Chie Mannami's patterned resin brooches -

or a bangle (or the mismatched yellow earrings?) by Kaz Robertson -

Fortunately I already had a pocket full of treasure -- old, broken, Thames-washed clay pipe bits, "sea glass", some broken pottery - and some animal's tooth -