Rainbows

There’s a wonderful notion here in the UK, in response to the epidemic. Folk are creating rainbows and pinning them up in their windows so that passers by can be cheered. I love the thought, but at the moment people are, in theory, not going out except for essentials. So I though I’d share some of the rainbows that I live with.

They can be made by the sun, briefly captured by the wall

Or gently illuminating cloth stitched in India

They can be woven in Peru

They can have little birds flying across them

Or they can be made of cloth or glass and shine in the window by sunlight or lamplight

Because when the clouds are dark, if you can see a rainbow you know the sun is behind you. Sometimes we need rainbows to pull us through.

dyeing thread

Is not the same as dyeing fabric as I am discovering. Lovely daughter bought some yarn, bamboo and linen, very cheap, in white, for dying. And so, an experiment.

The first test wraps were bound with elastic bands and included some fine crochet cotton as well. So a small bundle, with all three types of thread, band wrapped, soda soaked, left to dry, dipped in dye and left to dry again

clear white divisions with some shading

After dyeing they were variously woven - this a test for something else, used to demo the dyed thread

And  crocheted to see how the effect translated, bamboo first then linen.

The second batch has yet to dry, bound with strips from plastic bags - unecological raffia. This is how ikat warps are tied prior to dyeing, but obviously with much more skill, planning and understanding than my efforts

They werent as effective at keeping out the dye, but have resulted in some interesting shading and some broader white spaces. The next step might be to re bind leaving some of the white unbound, then add a third colour, blending into some of the blue and petrol green but finding some of the white for the pure tone.

 Now where's that crochet hook?

Mesopotamia still being discovered

Flowing down the rivers Tigris and Euphrates, we've come to their point of closest conjunction until they reach the sea. So we've floated past Tell Asmar, Khafajah and Sippar and find ourselves at Jemdet Nasr and the wonderful Babylon, city of legend with it's blue Ishtar Gates, heaven scraping tower and hanging gardens

Obviously I can't create all those wonderful things in the small space allotted to me in this work, but I am trying to give an impression of increasing complexity given that here, lower down on the great alluvial plain, the serious business of irrigation, cultivation and specialisation really took off. Jemdet Nasr, here marked by a dark red-brown piece of agate, became a "type site", that is a site where a specific collection of artefacts are so distinctive that they mark some sort of change in culture: in this case, painted pottery, proto cuneiform tablets and cylinder seals.

And below I have marked Babylon with a triangle of turquoise for the Ishtar Gate and the high ziggurat, but I've also tried to evoke a sense of a city surrounded by gardens, cultivated land and waterways bringing that all important source of life.

Meanwhile, further north, up in the highlands I have added a new city, not on my original list. This is Mari, founded in 2900 BC as a nexus for the various trade routes which were developing and expanding as civilisation spread, goods moved across land and water, and supply and demand became the way of life. It was connected to the Euphrates by a canal, giving access to the major trade route, but protecting the city from flooding. It may well get more stitching, though I am keeping cities to the north relatively simple as a contrast to the luxuries in the south.

And in entirely different but still stitchy news, I am still working on the crewel work piece that I started in Fay Maxwell's workshop with the EG, back in November. The branches are coming along nicely; combinations of fly and feather stitch with raised chain band and French knots for texture.

The design is loosely based on the piece of fabric below, a sketchbook cover I made in a wonderful Sandra Brownlee workshop (at Studio 11). The fabric came from one of Ganna's cushions, the imagery on the fabric inspired by motifs from crewel embroidery

It amused me to take a crewel work inspired design and translate it back into crewel embroidery, but now with a modern twist.

I've played freely with the design, not least because freehand cutting of the felt pieces dictated a broad brush approach! It is amusing me, and is stitching on a totally different scale to Mesopotamia, which really requires a good light and plenty of magnification!!

Hope your stitching is going well wherever your creative spirit lies.

Keeping up - just

When I was young and still lived with Mum, she was always in a panic by Christmas Eve, with cards still undelivered and preparations still to make. She regularly sent out 100+ cards to friends and family near and far, and all the cards she received in return would be carefully stuck to the back of the sitting room door with minute pieces of sellotape so the paint remained undamaged. The resulting mosaic of colours and imagery would flutter and rustle gently every time the door was opened. So, with local cards in hand, off we would go on Christmas Eve delivering to friends who lived in our town; she would drive, I would "just hop out and pop it through the letterbox", a task which frequently involved a flight of steps in our hilly locality. Being young of course, I knew that when I was grown and in charge of my own life, I'd not be so tardy, I would be far better organised, I would be on top of things.

Hmmmmm ... it's Christmas Day and I have only just finished the composite gift for Darling Daughter. Fortunately she isn't with us until Boxing Day, so, just in time! It comprises a rather nice origami folded project pouch, simple to create with just two squares of fabric, you can find patterns all over, the one I followed was here.

The square of fabric is magically transformed, with a little bit of machine and hand stitching, into this, in a rather gentle pattern of branches and berries

Two vintage buttons (from Mum's button box of course) make the closure

Open up and splash of colour comes from the inner fabric, a vibrant batik

fold that inner flap up and you begin to see the pockets, and another little flap, decorated with beads to give a little lift

in all there are six pockets of various sizes, made to enclose

a little scissor case from a Sue Hawkins kit, and a needlecase from Clothkits, designed by Corinne Lapierre. The colours for the pouch, as you can see, chosen to match those of the contents. Even the scissors, peeking out of the pocket, have toning colours. These were started up in the Lakes in October, but took a back seat to a small quilt for a new small person, and a couple of other Christmas creations that needed to be finished first. In fact, it has all been a bit of a scramble!!

I do hope she likes them.

Oh, and sorry Mum, I was wrong - I seem to have inherited your last minute tendencies!!

Ambushed by events

I have had a small project on the go - a cot quilt for the first child of the next generation to be born in my husband's family. He nicknamed her Flopsy when she was on the way, so Flopsy she has become to us. She was due to be born on the 20th November, but snuck in two weeks early. Her quilt (Flopsy's quilt) had been designed, planned, all parts cut out and ready to go, but not quite assembled. So now I am hurrying to catch up with events.

The quilt is just about finished - with Mrs Rabbit and, of course, Flopsy, Mopsy, Cotton-tail and Peter being tucked into their winter coats to go out and play. There are lovebirds to chat to along the way

And trees in the surrounding gardens and woods to run in and out and roundabout; they might frolic in fields of blue and yellow flowers and have busy chats with the bees.

Layered together with wadding and a snuggly brushed cotton backing, there is some hand quilting, but mostly machine. The binding is one where the backing is brought forward to the front, so the soft brushed cotton folds round the edges for little fingers to grasp.

There is just a little bit of hand quilting left to do (Flopsy must be highlighted of course), then the finished article can be tucked into a squishy parcel, along with a lovely soft blanket which darling daughter has crocheted for her, and a book from her great great uncle to amuse her as she grows. We hope she enjoys both snuggles and book for many years to come.

She does, of course, have her own name - in fact three of them and very lovely names they are too, but I won't be so indiscreet as to launch them into the ungoverned spaces of the internet.

In between times I have been doing other things too. I'm not sure you saw the finished "One Over the Eight" quilt that I have been making in our monthly patchwork class. We have, since then, moved on to several other things, all of which need finishing, some of which are not yet started

We had a lovely crewel work workshop at the Embroiderer's Guild with Fay Maxwell, a delightful and patient teacher - you can hear her talk about her crewel work in the linked video. She adds an extra element to the traditional crewel work by cutting out felt shapes for the basic design elements, which are tacked onto the backing cloth and then embroidered.  Freehand cutting of felt shapes was quite a challenge, especially as I was basing my design on fabric that once covered some cushions of my grandmother's; fabric that echoed crewel work designs itself. I think I managed OK. Now to finish the embroidery!

and finally, from last weekend, this little fox is gradually appearing, poking his nose through the bluebells, He was designed by one of our branch members for us to try out some bead embroidery during a half day workshop

So, quite a bit has been happening, just not in Mesopotamia!!

Helpmeets for stitching

Because my good friend and fellow Embroiderers' Guild member Steph and I are running some supported stitch sessions locally, I have been thinking more about how we use aids to stitching and why; I thought I'd share them with you here. 

First and foremost is comfort. Most of us have aches and pains of some sort or another, having reached the age where we have the privilege of doing our own thing, following our star to some extent, rather than being subsumed by the rest of the family's needs. Then of course there is light and the ability to see.

By preference my favourite spot is here, in my grandmother's chair ("that's the Bergere Chair Kath" I was always told, though I suspect it isn't!). I have cushions and a quilt for comfort, south facing natural light, a warm radiator nearby and Cecil's tables to my right and left. I have the magnifier with it's ring of light, and my "giraffe" - the floor stand which holds my embroidery frame, I love this, though it can be a bit picky about whether it stays put in terms of its neck and knees! When you look at the frame, you can see it is one of those with clip over half tubes of plastic on a tubular plastic frame.

On the fabric held within the frame I have a needle park, held on by a magnet on the back of the cloth,  and a thread card (excuse the unintentional advert), recycled biscuit packaging. On the back the number and brand of thread is noted on each hole. This way the skeins can stay at home, or in the basket - less likely to become a tangle then.

If you were looking over my shoulder this is what you'd see, Mesopotamia under magnification, though not quite at satellite image detail. You can see here the way the frame can be used to hold fabric that is wider than the capacity of the frame. Not RSN tight by any means, but I'm not working to RSN standards.

And close up we have Sippar, the twin cities each with it's own temple, tucked in by the Euphrates to the left, downriver from Khafajah and Tell Asmar (Eshnunna). The Tigris is there too, coming in from the right. We are coming down from the rain fed alluvial plains of Upper Mesopotamia, where to a large extent there was enough rain each year to support agriculture. Now we are nearing the southern plains where no agriculture was possible without extensive canal systems for irrigation,

I love the way the thread yet to be couched drifts across the landscape, as though the water was looking for a way; flow not yet determined. And the cities, yet unstitched, lurking to the south, awaiting my attention.

Struggles

My darling girl is going through a difficult time at the moment, so needing lots of support and help with life while she is signed off work. This of course means that creative pursuits tend to take a back seat, though we do sit and stitch/crochet together in the evenings. We've spent the past week cleaning her flat, which she and her husband haven't really lived in for the past three years for reasons that would take far too long to explain. Her Dad has been living there however (again for reasons that …..), and so the place is reminiscent of student digs crossed with an ageing hippy bachelor pad. Much floor sweeping, several packs of anti bacterial wipes and liberal amounts of hot soapy water have helped bring the flat back to a habitable (by normal humans) state, along with an entire afternoon (and almost a whole can of oven cleaner) just to make the oven useable again. The plan is that, once she feels on a more even keel, she will move back into the flat and, hopefully, her Dad will learn a bit more domesticity. Her husband should be able to rejoin her in December, but at least she will be there to get things back to normal again for them before he arrives, and negotiate the domestic routines with her Dad who will remain there for the time being.

All this activity meant that I missed two sessions with Christine at Studio 11. However, I had forgotten I'd put my name down for a catch up session yesterday. As Jen is feeling a bit better, I toddled off to Eastbourne with a box of "stuff" in my boot to have my first session in the Poetry of Decay class that Christine is running this year. She has taught this several times before as a stand alone workshop over several days, and will be doing so again in Italy this October, but she is also teaching it as a one day a month class at Studio 11.

So, having gathered together mark making tools, tissue and other papers, and the aforementioned stuff, along with 100 6x4 pieces of weighty cartridge paper and six photos for inspiration, I spent the day yesterday working on 50 of the cards with:

white primer manipulated with mark making tools to add texture;

matte medium (similar to PVA glue) with various things scrumpled, crumpled and otherwise stuck onto the card;

distorting the card itself by folding, scrumpling and distressing or embossing in various different ways.

I came home with a stack of 50, 50 more to go.

The next stage is to add layers of colour with various media; walnut ink, rust powder, oil pastel, dyes, to evoke aspects of decay, using our photos as starting points. As with the Eszter course, I am rather outside my comfort zone, I've not done a great deal of mixed media work in the past, being rather a "cloth and thread purist", but I really enjoyed just messing about with sqidgy, scrumply, sploodgy stuff yesterday and am really looking forward to the next stage. Another student who is on the same course was also doing a catch up, but of day two, so I know what to expect - it looks like great fun.

And the photos I took for inspiration? I couldn't decide on six so there are twelve - here they are

Rusty bolts hold sea defences together

The wall in Hastings underground car park. Built by Sidney Little and completed in 1931 it was the worlds first large scale underground car park

 Rusting structures at the end of Eastbourne Pier

Lichen on wood

Patterns of rust on Hastings seafront

ancient decay in Istanbul

barnacles clinging to sea defences

more sea derived rust

some Lake District mushrooms

a Venetian door

and Bhutanese rooves