dovegreyreader scribbles

The Great British Sewing Bee.

I'm wondering if any of you here in the UK watched The Great British Sewing Bee??

This the recent series where amateur sewers took on challenges as they competed to be named Britain's best home sewer. Ann was a worthy winner but I'll admit I wasn't quite sure how the series would work.

Might it be like watching paint dry...

Can you make sewing as interesting as baking on TV...

Can you introduce some stress and meltdown to add to the viewer's interest...

More to the point could Claudia Winkleman, and her canopy of a fringe, carry it off.

But no matter, I love Claudia, she's a breath of fresh air and clearly not a seamstress herself so brought her usual self-effacing wit and humour to the proceedings, whilst judges Patrick Grant (Savile Row tailor) and May Martin (W.I.) cast a critical eye over the resulting garments. I'd be quaking in my boots if the pair of them turned anything I had made inside-out, so when I get back to it I might impose the discipline of a few French seams on myself rather than let the washing machine fray the raw edges into submission.

I was quickly engrossed and ultimately I think Claudia's fringe might have been the only slightly annoying accessory to the whole series. Was I alone I wondered... half hoping that Patrick would pick up the Fiskars and tailor it just a little...

'Well Claudia...the aim is for a neat and tailored look so we must finish your edges properly.'

The stress was readily induced by giving contestants about ten minutes to make a ballgown. In fact that task was allocated about seven hours, ( I would still have needed a long week at minimum) and it was fascinating to watch the different approaches. Those who spent half the time prepping, tacking and making toiles ( a mock-up in cotton fabric) before the scissors came within a mile of the fabric, versus those who leapt right in and guessed, and the subsequent triumphs and disasters. Those who were calm under pressure, those who crumpled into a heap of tears, and they were hardly in a situation where, if it went wrong, they could shove it in a bag and turn it into cushion covers in five years time. I could feel myself wilting inwardly in spirit as someone unpicked a back-to-front something (oh, the times...) 

I have no idea about the cumulative effect on the nation, or sewing machine sales, but I do know that every Wednesday morning all I wanted to do was get out a paper pattern, smooth out the fabric for cutting and fire up the Bernina. All I would need in that case was...well a paper pattern and some fabric. I fancied making a flippy summer skirt or two, home-made Boden-style, and how easy that would have been years ago, but how impossible it seems to be these days. 

Where to buy paper patterns is the first hurdle. Online, yes, a possibility I discover, but that doesn't feel right at all. I have to go and stand in the shop at the sloping shelf, and leaf my way through the dog-eared corners of the enormous Simplicity, Butterick and McCalls catalogues, and keep an eye on that woman over there who is hogging the Vogue. Then of course I must brave the woman behind the counter with her glasses on a gold cord, and the 'This CANNOT be exchanged' stamp.

Certainly there is nowhere within a reasonable distance from here now, though I had felt sure (wrongly) that John Lewis in Exeter would have stolen a march on all this and stocked up with a little pattern department, and with dress-making fabrics too, so that was a wasted trip. And then dressmaking fabric seems obsolete too, acres of furnishing fabrics but who wants to go out looking like a Parker Knoll armchair. The whole industry seems to have wound down into a sad and sorry decline here in the West Country at least, and may need to crank up again if this series carries on.

But no matter, this is me after all, I have never thrown a paper pattern away, there'd be something in the loft. When I got the box down I realised that I get it from my Mum because she didn't seem to have thrown a paper pattern away either, and I had inherited them.

Just browsing the box was like a journey through a history of my clothes...

To the right, my first ever party frock. Mine was yellow and had that wonderful stiff lining that buoyed the skirt out. 

Then, branching out on my own machine, I made every permutation of this lot, including that rather 1980s Dallas-style dress on the right which required 5 3/8 yds of suggested fabric... Crepe de Chine, Voile, Georgette, Crepe or Lightweight Cotton. I remember I chose something cheesecloth-like and was in a state of advanced and picklish turmoil from the off.

The obvious problems about using them again are style and ...ahem... pattern size. I am not huge but I know I will have altered the Size 12 patterns to a very snug fit forty years ago, and I'm not sure puffed sleeves and flared skirts are ready for the comeback yet.

But its not just my wardrobe. I know the 1980s passed in a blur of childbearing but I was delighted to see that I must still have found time to sew because there are plenty of more recent children's patterns in the box, and does anyone remember Lewes-based company Clothkits??

Quirky chidren's clothes and in days of yore the pattern was marked on the fabric so all you had to do was cut and sew. I wondered what had happened to them and I am delighted to see that Clothkits have been re-born.

I must confess I would cheat horribly back in the day because they were expensive. I'd buy one kit, make a paper pattern from the pieces and then proceed to make loads of them to my own fabric specifications and child-sizes various. Thirty years have passed, I should be let off for good behaviour.

I am no further on with my summer skirt, except that  as I watched the programme I did realise that, thanks to my Mum's tutelage, I could probably have tackled many of the set tasks and so why not draft a pattern from an existing skirt. It has all re-kindled my 'alteration' courage too, so half a waistband completely unpicked on a pair of new Craghopper walking trousers, the firmly entrenched but unwanted elastic removed from the back, and the whole rejoined to make a much nicer garment. Bookhound walked in and said 'You have three minutes left for this task,' which admittedly did phase me momentarily, but I feel sure Patrick and May would be delighted with my efforts.

Anyone else out there making their own...

Anyone inspired to start..

 

 

The Last Runaway ~ @Tracy_Chevalier

Once the Fiction Uncovered judging is completed the plan is that I will be taking a rest from all things 'Public Literary World' and commitments beyond reading what I want and writing dovegreyreader this year.

Much as I enjoy it all and never say never of course,  but for a while no taking part in literary festivals, no speaking appearances, no cross-country blogger meet-ups, no interviews, no panel discussions, no written pieces for anything but here, no publisher parties (where may lurk a rogue prawn tucked up in a canape ...the blood results are back, it wasn't my imagination, I am highly allergic to the critters)  no book launches, no doing a week of Thought for the Day for local radio...

It was very kind of them and I was very flattered and honoured to be asked... but what on earth would I have to say that might uplift the Shire as it embarks on its daily toil. My polite refusal was nothing to do with the fact that I needed to submit scripts well in advance, and would have had to be in the studio twenty miles away for 6am every morning for a week through an icy January either ...no honestly, it really wasn't.

But I did do some very exciting things last year, enough lovely memories to keep me going through this one for sure, and one of those was the opportunity to meet and talk with Tracy Chevalier at Port Eliot Festival.

After some apprehension following Vermeer discussions here I had been nervous about reading Tracy's novel Girl With a Pearl Earring. I needn't have worried, it suited my reading mood perfectly, my sort of book and I loved it, so I have really been looking forward to the arrival of Tracy's new novel The Last Runaway.

'There's slave hunters all over Ohio. See, we got a lot of runaways through here. East to west you got settlers moving for more land. South to north you got runaway slaves looking for freedom. Funny how nobody wants to go south or east. It's north or west that hold out some kind of promise.'

When a proof copy arrived during that week of the Buprawnic plague backalong I was cheered and delighted.

This was the book that Tracy had talked about and read extracts from in the dovegreyreader tent at Port Eliot, as well as showing us the quilt that she had made, both as research for the book but also for the inspiration and for the love it. Tracy now has the quilting bug and we talked and looked at quilts for ages.

In fact we started the event with a Show & Tell. Any quilters out there will be very familiar with this process, (as will any school teachers) and I started things off by way of introduction with the Kayaker's baby quilt...

Unfinished as you can see and there was the 8lb 3oz baby, now large as life twenty eight years later, sitting in front of us taking this photograph, cue much laughter. But I love this piece for its history and what I stitched into it back in 1983, which quilting tradition suggests will be what is happening in your life at the time. Isn't it so of the 1980s moment, Tumbling Blocks, a homage to the fabric of Laura Ashley and English pieced-over-papers hand stitchery. I only need to look at it and I am thinking towelling nappies and two babies under two and no sleep, little wonder I never finished it. By way of mitigating circumstances I can confirm that a friend and I did complete an identical one for another baby born in our midst at the time.

However unwittingly I had segued right into a theme in The Last Runaway which features much about both English and American quilting and their differences, as Quaker Honor Bright sails from Bristol to a new life in Ohio in the 1850s.

Tracy followed my offering with her own very first quilt in progress also hand stitched.

As I am reading the book I can see that something I asked Tracy at Port Eliot will indeed be possible...

"Will quilters be able to make the quilts in the book...in the way that Margaret Atwood Alias Grace quilts abound?" 

Tracy hesitated for a moment, confessing that this hadn't occurred to her .. "Yes.. I think they will," came the reply, and I confirm that this is indeed the case.

'... a patchwork of brown, yellow and cream diamonds pieced into an eight-point Star of Bethlehem, then quilted with harps and the running feather border she was known for...'

'The community has given her a signature quilt - each square made and signed by a different friend or family member...'

There are Grandmother's Flower Gardens and whole-cloth quilts and I am only half way through the book, I feel sure there will be more, but all adding to the plot as Tracy explores the last days of slavery through the eyes of a woman who must decide how far she can compromise her beliefs and defy the law.

If you enjoy Tracy's writing I feel sure you will love The Last Runaway as much as I am, and if you are a quilter you absolutely will want to read it. If you are not a quilter this book may just make you want to have a go.

The book will be published on March 14th but twelve of you lucky readers won't have to wait that long... scroll down where Magnus, who may or may not be awake, awaits with gifts.

 

 

 

 

 

 

O.M.D....

O-H ...

M-Y.. 

D-O-G...

Just this week I had unwisely said to a friend that at last I could knit again because Nell now ignores it. Well yes, when I am in progress, but clearly not when I leave the bag of temptation on the floor. My fault... and Someone Else's for falling asleep on watch when I was out of the room.

There was a bit of a meltdown, I was everso nice and understanding about it.

And it could have been worse, imagine a lovely set of Lantern Moon needles...

However I was on my beam ends with the wool as it was (thank you for it Cheryl, your guilt and donation of the stash is finally assuaged) and the downside is that the clever little critter had chomped up the edges too, so a lot of unravelling of short bits of wool later and it is clear that though I should have enough to finish this final sleeve of the cardigan (Noro Designer Mini Knits Pattern 1 with a bit of length added)  there will probably not be enough for the button bands and the neck. A scouring of the internet reveals not an ounce of Noro Kochoran Shade 55 to be had in the UK, so I am now looking at equivalents that might do the trick as a plain contrast. The wool needs to knit to approximately 12sts x 15rows on 6mm needles, and the nearest I can find is Rowan Cocoon, which does 14 x 16 on 7mm, in shade 813 that might just work, what do you think ...all suggestions welcome. 

And of course it may all have been revenge...

for this...

Colours of Shetland ~ Kate Davies

From this post you may conclude that I don't get out much and perhaps should get out more, but the highlight of my week has been the anticipation and subsequent arrival of Colours of Shetland by Kate Davies.

I know, I know, so much excitement over a 'knitting' book, but I have grown to love Kate's designs... who wouldn't want to make or own and cherish a Rams and Yowes blanket or a Peerie Floooers hat or the Tortoise and Hare gauntlets.

The book arrived on my self-awarded Kitchen Day, when Bookhound is out helping the Gamekeeper for the day and I am home alone and bored and lonely (*ahem*) and force myself to sit in the Aga-warmth of the kitchen, and either 'make' things, or reluctantly wheel the chair up to the oven door and read. The radio trills along in the background, I get the urge to make proper cocoa, the day gets greyer and murkier outside, the animals sleep and I just have to woman-up and cope. In fact this week I was forced out by a 'no milk' scenario, so did the six mile round trip to the village shop only to find it was Swiss Day (yes in deepest Devon...we know about Switzerland) as evidenced by stollen and hot chocolate, so I sat and partook before persuading myself back home to the chair and the warmth and the Aga.

It's tough.

Colours of Shetland was waiting for me, and this home-alone day was good news because had Bookhound seen it he may just have snaffled it for one of my Christmas gifts. You couldn't go wrong adding this to your list (N.B. Listed on Amazon but only available direct from Kate) if you love intelligent knitting, because of course you knew I was going to say it, this is far more than 'just a knitting book.' Admittedly, ten signature hand-knit designs from the Shetlands do form the foundation of the book, but alongside each an essay offering some history and inspiration as well as background for the designs.

Kate Davies has a doctorate in Eighteenth Century studies, was a university lecturer and has written books on a wide variety of subjects including the American Revolution and the history of lace. When some research in Philadelphia, surrounding a group of women's letters, shifted the emphasis in her thinking from women's oppression to the way that textiles enriched their lives and created the bonds of friendship, Kate, remembering that she could knit, went from the library to the wool shop and almost hasn't stopped knitting since.

'Like those eighteenth century women whose letters I was reading, creating textiles enriched my life tremendously, opening paths of inspiration, and connections with people, that I would never have otherwise discovered.'

For me the connection between reading, landscape, history and creativity, and the way it all connects and inspires me and so many others so readily in this online world has felt increasingly seamless, so I felt completely in tune with Kate's observations.

But there is much much more to Kate's achievements than some knitting, some designing and the production of a book...any one of which I would be inordinately proud to have accomplished.

I doubt Kate would wish her readers and fellow knitters to define her by the major stroke that knocked her for six almost two years ago now; that stroke down to a really unique and rare combination of medical and life circumstances whilst only in her mid-thirties. However I would urge you to take a break from Christmas planning, settle down with a pot of tea and read Kate's account of that day, and her subsequent battle to learn to knit again and to challenge and face off off the disabilities with which she was left. I read it all a while back and felt humbled and privileged to have shared in her story, and I can only begin to imagine what some of those dark and dismal days of uncertainty about the future may have felt like for Kate, but I also know that to feast the eyes on colour, and know the tactile comfort of wool would be a tonic I would seek out too.

I often find myself feeling grateful for the solace-giving, restorative powers of sheepy wool and needles. When one is feeling ropey, knitting really comes into its own, I think.

This is a remarkable story of a remarkable woman and the self-published Colours of Shetland an absolute triumph in the light of all that.

The book itself is of the highest quality and production values and the designs themselves things of rare beauty, (all modelled wonderfully by Kate) inspired as they are by the sights, colours and landscape of the Northern Isles, and there I am back in Orkney in a flash and thinking 'Hmm, Shetland next,' as I covet the Northmavine Hap.

The Hap a shawl to most of us, and Northmavine a wild and rugged corner of Shetland, but the colours are those embedded in my mind from the waters around Orkney just a little further south... probably a few inches or so by sea on the map, if I was navigating and Bookhound was asking me how much further to go.

As Kate Davies explains,

'The hap was a garment with a function : to keep the body warm. Wrapped and tied around the torso, or tucked hood-like around the neck and chin, a good hap would effectively insulate its Shetland wearer against the exigencies of cold and wind...beautiful and striking in their simplicity...a timelessness of design.'

I want one of course, who wouldn't, but I have the challenge of Kate's Betty Mouat cowl in the queue too so first I plan to start with 'easy'. More about my starter for ten and Jamieson & Smith the Shetland Wool supplier when my wool arrives from them... and that will probably be my exciting don't-get-out-much highlight of next week.

I go back a long way with J&S ...1980s... knitting machine...Woolly Pullies and this post, written in 2006 when dovegreyreader was but a recently cast-on and very fledgling blog.

 

 

 

 

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a taste of Northmavine

Lan-Downton-hydrock

Kaffe-fessions

So following on from yesterday.

The Kaffe designed Tumbling Blocks jumper seemed the perfect attire for someone like me, back in the days when I ran that little quilt shop and taught patchwork and quilting in the room over Bookhound's interior design showroom in Tavistock (now Cafe Liaison by the Church Green for anyone wondering where). The Quilt Loft was a wonderful moment in my life that would be made complete with this jumper, and all things considered I think I did pretty well to get the ribbing of the front done. Sensing that this jumper might not happen anytime soon I took it to a local and very accomplished knitter for completion, presenting her with two inches of ribbing and a bag of wool scraps left over from just about everything my mum and I had ever knitted.

As you can see Magnus admires the detail too...

 before settling down for a kip the minute my back was turned.

The result still makes me smile as I recall the joy wearing this jumper brought me back then and, though I don't wear it these days, I would never part with it

The second Kaffe-fession might have been so different but for Bookhound's common sense.

Browsing for Christmas gifts in the little shop of the accomplished knitter who had finished my jumper to such great acclaim, Bookhound spied a kit for the Kaffe Fassett Temples jacket. Pattern, wool and needles so he bought it for me. Halfway home he turned round, went back to the shop and exchanged the kit for the jacket ready made which is why I was able to wear it on Christmas day and intermittently ever since, and am not now rummaging around in the loft for the wool and the two inches of ribbing.

He knows me so well.

The design is exquisite, the colours gentle and subtle, and being honest I would never have finished it in a month of Christmases

and of course the minute he laid eyes on it...

 

 

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Fassetting my inner Kaffe...

Dreaming in Colour: An Autobiography ~ Kaffe Fassett

Dreaming in Colour: An Autobiography ~ Kaffe Fassett

The theme at the Endsleigh Salon book group a few weeks ago fell right in step with my reading plans.

I'll confess it doesn't always happen like this. Sometimes I am very lastminute.com and trying to make something I have read fit the theme at 5pm that afternoon, but on this occasion, with the theme of 'Colour' beckoning, there was no way I could let the side down.

I had read in preparation Dreaming in Colour by Kaffe Fassett, a sumptuous autobiography by the man who I now realise we owe a huge debt of gratitude in this country at least, for bringing his sunny Californian outlook to bear on our very English reserve where colour is concerned.

For anyone within reach of the showground at Shepton Mallet this coming Saturday (December 1st) Kaffe Fassett will be talking about the book and signing copies at the West Country Quilt Show.
 
Born in 1937 in San Francisco and named at that time Frank, Kaffe's parents bought a log cabin and twelve acres of land on the Pacific coast from Orson Welles. At Big Sur in California the family built the famous Nepenthe Restaurant which opened in 1949 and quickly became a mecca for the Hollywood set. These were interesting times, a post-war world rebuilding its confidence in preparation for the new and the different that would surely evenutally come. Kaffe's ongoing education and artistic talent was nurtured at the Happy Valley School, one of whose founders was Aldous Huxley. The atmosphere was predictably enlightened and unconventional, and I think for that we must be grateful too because personally I think it needed an unconventional and enlightened man to do what Kaffe did next.

Travelling to England in 1964 Kaffe immediately felt a sense of 'belonging'. for which we must also feel blessed, because he stayed and then casting his eye over our decorative traditions here in the U.K. Kaffe saw room for 'improvement'. He doesn't say that... but I do because surely there was, and looking at his prodigious design work since it is clear that he has been able to create a fusion of our English heritage of fussy delicate florals with something much more expansive and colourful.

It was on a trip back from Scotland with designer Bill Gibb in 1968, and with a bag full of wool in those glorious colours that we all love under his arm, that Kaffe did that fateful life-changing thing and asked someone on the train to teach him to knit.

Now I am thinking back and I suspect that 99% of the world would have looked askance at the sight of a man knitting on a train in 1968. I am not even sure the percentage would be that much lower nowadays even though it is now an accepted thing...men knit and are allowed to.

In fact I seriously think the Inverness to London line should be dedicated to Kaffe.

Doesn't the Kaffe Fassett Line sound so much more enticing than the East Coast Line??

Kaffe rapidly graduated to Fair Isle and the technique of weaving many colours across a row of knitting... so let's cheer the sub-editor in the Vogue office who explained and demonstrated the intricacies of all that to him, because what followed was surely the equivalent of painting with wool for a man with a unique and instinctive eye for colour and an inner sixth sense of what works.

It would be twenty-five years before the knitting revival could truly be said to have happened and along the way came those business partnerships and collaborations for Kaffe that those of us who follow these things slavishly will know well... Hugh Ehrman for the needlepoint and tapestries, Rowan Wools and more recently...and another huge cheer for Liza Prior-Lucy who persuaded Kaffe in the direction of fabrics and quilting. 

My recollections of Kaffe's designs in the 1980s are of a riot of colour and original design in an otherwise slightly muted world. That may not be the same memory for everyone but we were still stuck with beige and brown curtains, carpets and walls as I recall, and colour was never going to infiltrate to the extent it has without the impetus of bold and different influences. Kaffe Fassett was most certainly at the forefront, making domestic arts fashionable again and wrestling them from the clutches of hidebound tradition.

This is a real treat of a book, lovely to have and hold and read, awash with colour, a fitting acompaniment to a fascinating life, and finally here is a wonderful anecdote about the famous Kaffe Rooster needlepoint, one of the first that the Tinker did (and yes, of course he finished it) when he took up needlepoint years ago...

' When it came time to launch Glorious Needlepoint, I was invited onto Woman's Hour on BBC Radio 4, so I rushed around the studio to find a small item from the book to show the host, Jenni Murray as she was interviewing me. I settled on my needlepoint Rooster Teapot Cozy and plunked it on the chair beside me in the studio as I waited to be interviewed. As Jennie started to introduce me to the listeners, I suddenly heard her purr in her silky English voice, 'And today we have with us Kaffe Fassett and his lovely cock." ...'

 

So come on then...who like me started a Kaffe jumper or needlepoint and never finished it??

Because they are quite an enticing challenge and so I was bound to be a victim wasn't I.

My Kaffe-fessions to follow.

 

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Fassetting my inner Kaffe...

Buckfast Abbey

Kaffe-fessions

Buckfast Abbey

Towards the end of our day Barbara and I headed across from Dartington to nearby Buckfast Abbey. I have been there many times but have never visited the Abbey, or the chapel with its glorious stained glass, without hordes of people milling around and services and personal devotion in progress...it is what it is for after all, so to visit towards the end of a wet and drizzly day, as the place was about to close, proved to be a good move.

The Blessed Sacrament Chapel was empty so for the first time ever I felt able to take photographs..

Stunning isn't it, and even on a dull day, which this was, the light refracts through the glass beautifully, radiating a sense of well-deserved and very well-received glory. All made by the monks at Buckfast, and for the first time I was also able to see it in close up.

I was fascinated to read this about the construction of the windows...

In 1968 Dom Charles completed his most striking embellishment of the church ­ the huge east window in the Blessed Sacrament Chapel. This employs the technique known as dalles-de-verre in which ‘tiles’ of coloured glass are chipped into shape and laid, mosaic-fashion, in a matrix of resin. 

So, that is what I had always seen from a distance ...large chunky pieces of thick glass, chiselled and bevelled into shape, and then held together with resin rather than lead, creating a structure with the supporting strength of a wall.

It all reminded me of my dazzlingly bright Kaffe Fassett quilting project currently in progress at home.

Clearly the monks of Buckfast are the Kaffe Fassetts of the Benedictine world.

Fassetting my inner Kaffe...

I think I mentioned before how thrilled and delighted I was when Brandon Mabley made contact with me earlier this year on behalf of the Kaffe Fassett studios. He and Kaffe had been on a photo shoot at Port Eliot when the subject of dovegreyreader arose, and when the subsequent offer of some books came in I am afraid I was hard-pushed to wait a polite twenty seconds or so before dashing off a reply of the effusive affirmative variety.

I can't tell you the infinite pleasures to be had from a stack of books by Kaffe Fasset. I keep one open on the bookstand in the kitchen at all times for a constant stream of colour and inspiration in my eye, the others are always to hand, but I will admit that until now I have baulked at the idea of making a Kaffe quilt. I would stare at the colours and try and figure out a system... get some sort of control of the patterns and the combinations so that they would 'match', but it is only since reading Dreaming in Colour (more of which soon) that I realise why. This may all be down to my British reticence and fear of flamboyance, coupled with unwittingly allowing myself to drop anchor for far too long in the safe harbour of the colour wheel and small-scale prints. 

I have engineered one or two plucky escapes from convention... the Emily Dickinson quilt 'The Inundation of Spring' now safely stowed chez Kevin From Canada...

and then the little quiltsuke I made for Port Eliot guests in the dovegreyreader tent this year...

A sort of mini test excursion into Kaffe-land, perhaps a limbering up for the big one.

As each successive rural Devon winter looms large, I always make time to sort out my creativity for the months ahead and get some projects on the go, as well as dragging out all the unfinished ones....and putting those away.

This winter I have established Craft Thursdays.

Bookhound will be out helping the Gamekeeper on his shoot every Thursday between now and the end of January so Nell, Magnus and I will be home alone. There is of course absolutely nothing to stop me being creative when I am not home alone, but somehow it is easier when I am. I have the house to myself  and can spread the fabrics and the cutting mat and the iron all around the kitchen, switch the radio on and work away at it all sans interruption whilst the weather invariably lashes down outside. Magnus is the first of our cats in all this time to truly embrace the art of patchwork and always arranges himself for a good snooze amongst the fabrics.

So, a bit behind the times, I have been slowly plucking up the courage to Fassett my inner Kaffe.

I have been slipping a few large-scale fabulously blousy flower fabrics into the stash now and again, going so far beyond my colour comfort zone that I am now not really sure what that is. Then adding some really zany polka dot combinations when I saw them and putting it all in the mythical Kaffe Quilt pile... for one day... eventually.

Anyone out there who understands the principles of the stash will be at one with this purchasing policy.

So wedged in the rut of tradition have I found myself, that I feel sure it is the endless borders and lattices I create, and the huge amount of quilting they require, that has stymied me in the past, leaving me at the moment with that Great Unfinished Millenium Quilt hanging over me like the Quilt of Damocles. Every time I decide to try something new a great cloud of guilt descends and gives me a stiff lecture, telling me I really should finish that first, it is now 2012 after all....some Millenium Quilt that's turning out to be.

Friends have suggested I machine quilt it, or even send it off to be finished by someone else and pay the going rate which both feel like heinous crimes.

One day I'll get it finished...one day.

But succumbing to that guilt can cut off all other avenues of inspiration too, and I for one have settled for the wall-hanging as a sort of finishable allowance in the meantime, yet so much of the fun of full-size quilt-making is in the thinking. Then follows the real planning... choosing the design and the colours before letting them wriggle around in my mind a while before I finally decide, and then the gathering of fabrics from everywhere. It is never cheap when you buy fabric in quantity but with Cowslip Workshops just across the Tamar I head there regularly and have been adding to the stash gradually. 

Eventually it seemed I might have enough to fire up the Bernina and progress, just dip in a toe and see, because the next thrill is the cutting...and the piecing... the pressing of the seams...watching the pieces start to come together and the sheer size of the thing, along with the sense of achievement when it is done. Once I really got into just putting one great big dazzly colour next to another big dazzly colour there was no stopping me and I have hit on Kaffe's Diamond Quilt as the one for me.

Of course, by this time my modest stash is running low so I scoured the internet for more fabrics...even wondered about buying from the U.S....coveted the stock in a shop in Kew in London ... until eventually Bookhound and I took a Sunday trip back to Cowslip Workshops. As I walked in the door, to be met by Jo the owner saying 'Have you seen the gorgeous new Kaffe Fassett fabrics??', I knew I was in the right place...on my doorstep for once, and at £3 per fat quarter, the cheapest by far... and good news, they have an online shop now too.

And how excited am I about these new additions...

British reticence be gone..

 

and one more thing...

As a novice lino-cutter,  i.e. one done at the age of seven and another done last week, I am not yet aspiring to wallpaper but that doesn't stop me dreaming and drooling over everyone else's, so I was delighted to read this email from St Jude's. If any of you felt moved to vote, please do...

Having won the Best British Pattern Design with Emily Sutton's Curiosity Shop in last year's awards, St Jude's are delighted that Mark Hearld's Harvest Hare wallpaper has been nominated for this year's Elle Decoration British Design Awards.

Based on an original linocut print by Mark, Harvest Hare is a single colour wallpaper, printed in the UK using water-based inks and paper from sustained forests. Available in 3 colourways: blue slate, corn and chalk white.

The awards take on a slightly different format this year with no specific categories - the six nominees with the most votes will be announced as winners at the end of October.

These awards do make a difference to St Jude's - if you have a minute or two spare, please do vote for them online.

And as this has been virtual Orkney week here, I have to share this picture of the very first hare I have EVER seen, they just don't happen here in the Tamar Valley ...

And apropos of no connection whatsoever...is anyone else watching and coming over all emotional at the Paralympics?? 

 

Saturday afternoon...

Another Bank Holiday weekend here in the UK and the lino-cutting stuff is arriving; just the basics to see how I get on, given that I haven't done this since I was about seven, and I find it hard to believe that we were entrusted with such lethal tools at such a tender age, but we were and no fingers disappeared. I have a wooden handle with five interchangeable weapons of lino destruction at my disposal, along with a pack of ten card-sized pieces of lino to practise on and three larger, more expensive ones for 'best.' I am up for Nancy's idea of floor tiles but am currently trying to figure out how I can sneak the tool into B&Q and do a test gouge.

Anyway, I sat down yesterday afternoon and had a go.

Sad but not unexpected news came of the death of a very dear friend and health visitor colleague at lunchtime. I had spent some time with Jeannie earlier in the week and the comfort of knowing it was a peaceful end helped a little. I listened to Vivaldi's Gloria, soaring music which always sends my thoughts up and away, while I tried my hand at some lino cutting for a couple of hours.

Here's the end result via a bit of computer editing and flipping over so that the letters read the right way round, because I am still waiting for the paint and the roller to arrive.... but I couldn't wait to see how it might look.

Bookhound drew the outline of the cat and the letters for me, because the book on how not to draw like a six year old that Curzon recommended hasn't arrived yet, and I was feeling a bit wimpish. If it had been down to me that would have said SUNGAM when I finally get to press my first effort, and may not have looked much like a cat. But what therapy, I can see I am going to love his.

I just chiselled away contentedly remembering happy days when Jeannie and I had laughed together like drains. Jeannie wrote a brilliant blog about her brush with breast cancer called Getting it Off My Chest which I have mentioned here in the past. I have been reading it again and am reminded, as if I would ever forget, how great Jeannie was at finding the funny in the difficult (health visitors seem to be very good at this for some reason.) Who can forget the wig she christened Heidi, and what a laugh we had at that coffee morning.

Having faced down the breast cancer and received the all-clear it was time for Jeannie and her family to properly enjoy her retirement, so it seemed desperately unfair that she should be diagnosed with a completely unconnected primary brain tumour this time last year. While we all wailed 'That is SO unfair,' Jeannie would say 'Well, why not me' and took on the surgery, the radiotherapy, the next round of chemo with her customary courage. She made us all promise that we would let her know if she lost her marbles, but of course that needed all of us to have ours there in the first place which we all agreed might be tricky these days.

Always a keen reader, Jeannie had read voraciously in the last year so it was a pleasure to keep her furnished with bags full of books and she came along to the Endsleigh Salon just two months ago in June, knocking the rest of us for six with her intuitive and spontaneous debate about a wide range of books on our theme The Seven Deadly Sins. I had gone to collect her and we had agreed that the minute she felt tired I would take her home again, by 10pm I was yawning and Jeannie was still having a whale of a time. Having read Good Evening Mrs Craven by Mollie Panter Downs in preparation, Jeannie talked lucidly about one story, Miss Burton, with its undertones of greed, envy and jealousy and we had a wonderful debate, enough to make me hope and believe that Jeannie would just go on for ever. Sadly we all knew that wasn't to be.

It was a privilege to sit at Jeannie's bedside this time last week and in the company of another lovely friend. We massaged her hands and feet and chatted to her in the sure and certain knowledge that she could hear us as she prepared to set off on her next journey... at one point we saw a flicker of a gentle smile. RIP Jeannie, we are all going to miss you dreadfully, but we will never forget you and wherever you are I know there will be laughter.

Hoxa Tapestry Gallery

Talk of creativity and 'flow' on Monday reminded me that I went to a weaving day at Cowslip Workshops years ago and still have the table loom to prove it, carefully strung and holding an unfinished morsel of a masterpiece with which I was well pleased... and then the usual thing... I haven't picked it up since. The fun of the day was learning a new craft with an inspiring teacher in a room full of other learners whilst being so in that moment that the world oustide almost ceased to exist. Suddenly, when faced with my solitary loom, propped up on my solitary kitchen table, the attraction didn't seem so exciting, the piece not quite such a masterpiece and so there it has stayed, for about the last six years or more.

Now I look at it again I can recall the immersion of that day and the enthusiasm flickers again anew. I could probably turn it into something Orkney-ish I'm sure, and so I am going to revive it and weave onwards and upwards. The biggest danger might be to spy a proper table loom...or even a free-standing one down in the sale room for £10ish. I wouldn't be able to stop myself, this I know.

So a visit to the Hoxa Tapestry Gallery at St Margaret's Hope on Orkney was very high on my list of priorities while we were there. I had dispatched the Tinker there on his last island visit and he had brought me back a copy of weaver Leila Thomson's book which has been a treasure ever since...

 But there's no substitute for the real thing and in such an inspirational location too...

We were a bit early for Sunday afternoon opening (I told you I was keen, we'd barely been on Orkney a day) so we all trooped up to the very well-placed and very welcome Hoxa Tea Rooms for lunch and just sat and stared at the most amazing views from our table...
 
Whilst it was 'No  Photos' in the gallery itself I did ask if I could take one of the shop for you..

and it was lovely to meet and talk with Leila while I was there.

Not suprisingly I came away laden with cards and prints, and with the images of the 'real thing', giant tapestries, etched in my mind's eye and replete with the most glorious array of colours.

In the end I think Echoes was my favourite, sadly not available to see as it now resides in Australia...

And on the subject of weaving, I hear news this week (bless the Twitter and thanks to @stjudes and @PineHillNotes for the heads up) of an excellent exhibition, Weaving the Century at the Dovecot Studios in Edinburgh. This is the largest collection of tapestries ever exhibited in the UK, the Knit Angel has already been and waxes lyrical. I am just going to have to visit vicariously for now and perhaps try to catch it at Compton Verney later in the year because how I would love to see Edward Bawden's Farmyard tapestry.

Any weavers or would-be weavers out there ??

 

A Ravilious & Bawden gallimaufry...

I have been slowly acquiring books on Eric Ravilious to add to my growing collection of...two, and this little book Design had been catching my eye everywhere recently...

 In museum bookshops, at exhibitions, and book fairs, until by the time I succumbed and bought it I had actually read it cover to cover, just in three instalments and in three different places. The book is light on text beyond an introduction by Peyton Skipwith, before transforming into a wonderful microcosm of the work of Eric Ravilious and his close friend Edward Bawden. Firm friends after meeting as design students in the 1920s, Eric and Edward proceeded to create a style recognisable and unique to themselves, cleaving to the highest of artistic standards.

In a way perhaps I now see this happening amongst St Jude's, the group of artists whose work I am admiring wherever I see it at the moment...Angie Lewin, Mark Hearld, Emily Sutton, Ed Kluz et al.

The word 'gallimaufry' seems long overdue for a renaissance so I think I will start one...please use it at least once today and if you can't think of a context then just say 'that dovegreyreader scribbles...it's a right old gallimaufry' and you will be on song for its interpretation as a jumble and a muddle of things. First used in 1556 when someone presumably woke up one day and thought that the word in Middle French for stew, galimafree, would do to describe plenty more too. So it seems fitting that the first illustration in Design is a cover designed by Eric Ravilious for a magazine of this name...


And though what follows in Design could hardly be called a jumble, it is an eclectic mix of book jacket designs, textiles, wallpapers, lino cuts, all distinctive not only for their delicacy and lightness of touch but also for a contrasting robustness of style, design and use of colour. This seems to be a particular quality of the lino cuts, a medium I have not forgotten I want to explore... except the last time I looked the lino was about £5 per six inch square which feels prohibitive for the amount of damage I am likely to do before arriving at something presentable.

Books like this definitely serve a purpose for me, though that purpose quite hard to define when I try. But there is something about having a visual selection of ideas and inspiration to hand when I am pondering a creative binge. I am always amazed at what can leap from the page into my head and reshape itself as I delve into the fabric stash and head for the cutting mat and the Bernina.

I am dipping into another fascinating book at the moment, Weaving Lives Back Together - Using Textile Arts and Handicrafts in Therapy With Women by Ann Futterman Collier. I am intrigued and excited by the growing recognition in the clinical world of the potential for the therapeutic use of creativity in people's lives.

I was often tempted to try and set up knitting or patchwork groups for patients with mild to moderate depression when I worked in a GP surgery, but nothing can happen these days without an evidence base and until now there just hasn't been one. Thinking or 'feeling sure' it would help isn't good enough, but it would seem that finally the evidence for something we probably do all know anyway is finally appearing, and to my surprise, with an endorsement on this U.S. book from Peter Aitken, a consultant psychiatrist here in Devon. It would seem this could be a therapy the UK is exploring too.

The concept of 'flow' is discussed...

'Flow is a mental state in which a person is fully engaged in an activity, has mastery yet feels challenged by the activity, becomes completely absorbed, feels an energized focus, and finds the activity to be intrinsically rewarding..'

I'll bet plenty of you get that buzz too, because I know I do, that could be ME they are talking about there, I identified with that feeling immediately. Apparently you are a textile-coper if you use that flow constructively in moments of negativity. How many times do I think to myself, when life is is stacking up a bit, that I need a day of creating things. With so much else waiting to be done I might be tempted to think I don't have time to spend a day 'playing' and creating mayhem at the kitchen table, but it is rarely the case that I deny the urge. I just get on with it and emerge on the other side of that day feeling re-energised and ready to deal with the stack. 

Sorry that's gone off weft a bit from where I began, but this is a gallimaufry after all. Sometimes I never quite know how I get from first line to last and make any sense, but I know there are sufficient like-minded creators out there for whom this may all chime... if so please do add your thoughts in comments. 

 

 

 

My Knitting Olympics...

Knitting at Port Eliot was huge fun again this year. So much so that I barely strayed far from the tent thus completely missing the Graffiti Grannys yarn bombed tree, but thankfully the well-trained Kayaker caught up with it and gave it a hug on my behalf...

Everyone seemed to enjoy the relaxing combination of knitting whilst listening and conversing with the authors in the tent, and a last minute and very fortuitous contact with Kaffe Fassett studio manager Brandon Mably gave me a contact at Rowan Yarns who very kindly sponsored us to the tune of a generous amount of wool. Thanks are also due to Rosie at Bridport Yarn in Dorset, a small shop with a huge heart, who sent us a basketful of very beautiful Noro...

It was lovely to meet so many different knitters in the tent and also to witness my first proper sighting of Scandinavian knitting. For those who don't know this is a completely different style of knitting to my own very ploddy and ungainly peasant method (needled tucked under arms, laborious wool-over technique via right hand). An hour of knitting whilst listening and the Scandinavian knitter had produced this..

A traditional Nordic baby scarf and a thing of such simple beauty that I am still marvelling at it. It's all about feeding the wool via the left hand and index finger rather than the right, and then somehow flicking it effortlessly and at lightning speed over the needles. I need to learn this.

No sooner was all that over than the Olympics were upon us and I quickly realised that the road to intolerable stress and over-excited insanity would be to sit and chew my nails through all this with no knitting on the go.

Except what to knit??

In the end I settled on some sample squares using stitch patterns with an element of complexity that might somehow come together into something, who knows what, but which would forever remind me of this wonderful, amazing and truly memorable fortnight. This is the state of the table that divides me from the TV..

But I have also had this pile of books awaiting my undivided attention and huge thanks to Brandon Mably for arranging for these to be sent my way from the Kaffe Fassett studio.

I am desperate to pore over the quilt books in the wake of the little quiltsuke I made for several of the guests in the dovegreyreader tent this year... tiny hand quilted homages to Kaffe's colour palette.

But in keeping with my current role as tricoteuse to Team GB this is the one I am focussing on...

A couple of my squares perching a bit cheekily there, but just wait until you see the treasures in waiting inside this one. Colour Guys thank you, this is a stunning book and I hardly know where to begin, but I think it might be with the deceptively simple but oh so very clever diagonal scarf.

Right must dash... we have just won a gold in the Dressage and I am now a complete expert on passages, half passes and piaffes, and the Cycling beckons where I need to brush up on my Omnium and gain the Cycle-ogical advantage (that was Bookhound's pun I can't take the credit).

 

Laura Knight in the Open Air ~ Penlee House Gallery, Penzance

"Dame Laura Knight painted the series of canvases of clothed figures in the open air on the cliffs near Lamorna, either all in 1917, which seems unlikely even with her extra-ordinary compulsion to work, or more probably in the period 1916 to 1919 and possibly up to late 1920...

and I'll bet many of will know the paintings even if you may have been unaware that they were by Dame Laura Knight.

Dame Laura Knight The Cornish Coast, date unknown Oil on canvas, 65 x 76 cm Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales © Reproduced with the permission of the Estate of Dame Laura Knight DBE RA 2012 All Rights Reserved.

These are the paintings that frequently grace the covers of To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf...



and if you happen to be in the West Country this summer be sure to take a detour to the Penlee House Gallery & Museum in Penzance and spend a few hours at their latest exhibition... Laura Knight in the Open Air which is open until 8th September. I can promise you won't be disappointed, not least because the most stunning painting, unseen in this country for 102 years, is on loan from a gallery in South Africa for this exhibition.

Flying a Kite, Dame Laura Knight 1910 Oil on canvas, 150 x 180 cm Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town © Reproduced with the permission of the Estate of Dame Laura Knight DBE RA 2012 All Rights Reserved.

Flying a Kite, painted above the hilltop in Newlyn in 1910 and shown to great acclaim at the Royal Academy that year, was immediately purchased by Sir George Clausen for the National Gallery of South Africa (now Iziko) in Cape Town where it has been ever since. Tipped off that it was no longer on display there, a year of painstaking negotiations have secured the loan of the painting which will tour with this exhibition, before heading to the Yale Centre for British Art in America, returning to Cornwall for display at Penlee House until at least spring 2015.

The exhibition, hung through four separate galleries and covering wide-ranging themes and subjects, from landscapes to gypsies at the horse racing at Ascot, also includes another painting, a true juxtaposition to the idylls of Cornwall, that had us transfixed.

Dame Laura Knight, whose husband Harold was also a respected artist, was engaged as a war artist and depicted the Nuremberg War trials; The Dock, Nuremberg is on loan from the Imperial War Museum for this exhibition. It is a remarkable and perhaps one of the few visual records of those events, with each prisoner viewed sitting in the dock and looked down on from above, whilst to the left blends in the devastated, war-torn landscape of a country still burning from Allied bombings. It is a painting that makes you think on many levels...clearly visible and recognisable are many of the prisoners, including Goering and Hess, listening or in conference with their legal representatives. So you wonder what they are discussing... is it professions of innocence or confessions of guilt... and then you wonder how many of those carefree kite-flying children in 1910 may ultimately have become victims of the wars to come.

The hallway linking the galleries houses a display case of Laura Knight-related books and photographs as well as some wonderful etchings, all confirmation were it needed of this artist's talent and versatility with both subject matter and setting.

Then be sure to head on upstairs to view the museum exhibits as well as a further gallery hung with some of Penlee's resident paintings. These include works by Samuel 'Lamorna' Birch, Stanhope Forbes and Walter Langley... much-loved Newlyn artists all, and many more including Dod Proctor who lived in Tavistock as a child before heading off to art school and thence to Cornwall. If you then decide to head off to the Newlyn Art Gallery just a mile or so around Mounts Bay in Newlyn itself, be prepared to find a modern and innovative exhibition space that, as far as we could see, holds none of the traditional paintings but nevertheless a pleasure to view along with the fine views of St Michael's Mount.

So Bookhound and I spent a very happy few hours exploring the delights of  Penlee House last week (great cafe too) and came away enthused about the artistic skill and the perspectives, the colours (Laura Knight uses blue like no other) and the landscapes, and with ideas fermenting away for our own respective areas of creativity. I was home and onto the fabrics within minutes... Bookhound is threatening to get his watercolours out again after many, many years of  'being very busy' and not...and please will you all shout loud enough and MAKE HIM DO IT because I am now going to officially out him on here as a very good artist.

So while I deal with the fall out from telling you that, here are the details from the exhibition press release...  

Penlee House Gallery & Museum, Penzance  

16 June – 8 September 2012

The redoubtable Dame Laura Knight (1877-1970) was a great celebrity in her time and her work is loved as much today as it was at the height of her fame.  From her earliest days in Nottingham and Yorkshire she wanted to paint in the open air, which blossomed when she came to Cornwall, where she embraced the county’s wonderful light, its seas and rocky coast, as well as plunging into the colourful life of the artists’ colony.  Her long and successful career included becoming both the first woman ever elected as a Royal Academician and the first artist ennobled as Dame Commander of the British Empire.  

This summer, Penlee House Gallery & Museum in Penzance is staging the first ever major exhibition of Laura Knight’s paintings to be held in her beloved Cornwall.  Called In the Open Air, the show looks at the paintings she executed in the landscape, including her iconic views of women on the Cornish coast through to the wide and beautiful panoramas of English farmland spread out below the Malvern Hills from her golden years as a painter....

Flying a Kite alone is probably worth coming to the exhibition for, but other treats make it a truly unmissable show.  As well as Cornish works such as The Beach (Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle), Spring (Tate London) and A Summer’s Day at the Rock Pool (Private Collection), the show includes the evocative paintings of gypsies that made Laura Knight famous in the late 1930s, such as Gaudy Beggars (Aberdeen Art Gallery) and Ascot Finery (Dundee Art Gallery). 

If you can't make it West then fear not, the exhibition will be heading out on tour to both Nottingham (Djanogly Gallery 22nd September to 4th November)  and Worcester ( City Art Gallery 17th November to 10th February 2013) And if you can't get to those venues either check out the Dame Laura Knight website which catalogues all the galleries which hold her work around the world, so perhaps there is one near you. If you know of any works anywhere not listed then John Croft ( Dame Laura Knight's great-nephew) would be thrilled to hear from you I'm sure.

After my last lot of dithering over whether to buy or not to buy books at the recent Eric Ravilious exhibition, naturally I caved in and bought the book of the this one, which I have now read and can also highly recommend, and which the gallery have sensibly priced at £5 off the retail price and just 54p more than Amazon.

Elizabeth Knowles gives a good account of the life and work of this gifted and versatile artist whose work I have loved for many years, and the reproductions of the paintings are predictably splendid. The book makes a welcome addition to my Newlyn artists' shelf which also includes the book which first set me properly on the trail The Shining Sands - Artists in Newlyn and St Ives 1880 - 1930 by Tom Cross

I mean what's not to love about paintings like this...

Dame Laura Knight In the Orchard Oil on canvas, 61 x 51 cm Private Collection, courtesy the Fine Art Society

As for the Virginia Woolf connection, I would love to have discovered that they had met... or that Virginia had viewed the paintings and thought 'Gosh, one would love to see those on the covers of one's novels one day' but sadly I am to be disappointed, as this extract from Virginia's diary for December 19th 1938, and a discussion about the possibility of Honours to be bestowed, reveals...

'John says that 2 cabinet ministers are in favour of giving me the OM. The other candidates are Clemence Dane and Dame --- the painter who does circuses. So the compliment is not as high as I should like: though it is true I was chosen... I mean, preferred; but its only lunch party gossip at Kenneth Clarks...'

Kenneth Clark was at that time the 'brilliant young director of the National Gallery, and the 'Dame' was indeed Laura Knight. In the end none of them received the Order of Merit so gossip it was, but I fear Virginia might not have been as pleased about the book jackets as I had first thought.

 

My thanks to Katie at the Penlee House Gallery for providing these pictures and permission for me to share them with you. 

Creativity Corner

Just in time for a kitten to come in and cause mayhem...and had I known I may not have decided that I absolutely needed a creativity corner in the kitchen, in the vacant space left by the £8 Poang chair which the Gamekeeper had poached within minutes of its arrival with us. Actually its more of a Plague Your Conscience corner as you will see.

But I didn't know that Magnus was out there waiting and I had spent a happy weekend 'making things' because Port Eliot Festival is on the horizon, I have a great line-up of authors coming to the tent so we have knitsuke and quiltsuke to prepare, which has all involved the customary takeover of the kitchen table.

Please don't ask what any of it is...it's supposed to be a secret and a surprise so I know you won't tell anyone and all will be revealed soon.

But in the process I had walked miles finding the right ingredients all scattered far and wide around the house, in cupboards and drawers and boxes so I decided it was time to gather everything into one place again... my mum's treasured Singer sewing machine cabinet, the Bernina, the books, the cutting mats, the rulers, the threads, and there with the kitchen table at my right hand what more could I need for this lovely summer of creativity I have planned.

Well actually I needed a design wall, that's what. So two hours and one trip into town later I had sourced two meters of cream fleece in Tavistock Market and between us Bookhound and I then figured a way of hanging it without too much bother.

'I think I need an old curtain pole...'

'They are up in the shed and it's pouring with rain...'

Fifteen minutes later I have stitched a hanging hem on the fleece...

'Yes...a curtain pole would be just perfect...'

'That wall is solid granite and the drills are up in the shed too and it's raining even more now...'

'We wouldn't need to drill the wall or anything...'

Eventually using said curtain pole and a Heath-Robinson system of cup hooks and screws and string we have avoided drilling the wall and the fleece is up behind the sewing machine, and I start unearthing ancient unfinished bits alongside new things and pressing them on the wall. This bit always reminds me of Fuzzy Felt and those felt story boards at Sunday School.

Perfect because now I have all Works in Progress staring me in the face rather than tucked away in cupboards, so no excuses not to finally do something with that Mariner's Compass or those black and white blocks made for a wall hanging to be entitled Multi-Media, supposedly a sample of different types of patchwork.

It was all started as a gift to congratulate Offspringette on her graduation with a First in Film & Media from Stirling University, and if I tell you that was ...er nine years ago and since then she's been through a traineeship with and worked for the BBC, done half a Maritime Studies degree, a PGCE, half a Masters Degree which she is about to complete, spent a year in Christchurch, New Zealand living with earthquakes, done six months of gruelling supply teaching around just about every secondary school in Plymouth City and now starts her first proper teaching job on Monday at the school she has loved the most (hooray) ... well I am a few congratulations behind the times. She will actually be teaching English and History as well as taking on responsibility for implementing the innovative use of media in the classroom across the whole school, and I'm sure won't mind me saying that she is brilliant in the classroom, has found her niche and we are all very proud of everything she continues to achieve.... so good luck for Monday Offspringette x

And the minute that kitten scales that design wall he's in very big trouble...saint or not.

 

Banksy

I just think I must have been hiding in a dark hole or something because on our recent trip to Bristol the Kayaker said..

'Come on, I'll take you to see a Banksy,'

and I was the lemon who said,

' What's that then?'

It wasn't that I didn't sort of know, but it is a name and an art form that has hovered just out of reach of my interest, sufficiently over there for me to ignore it, and for those of you who may be wondering too, Banksy is a Bristol born graffiti artist of some considerable worldwide reknown.

Well I have now seen my first Banksy...

and sadly this one has been paintballed...honestly, someone defaces a wall and it's alright, and then someone else does it and we all have to go 'Tsk, hooligans' which all makes me wonder at which point any of it becomes acceptable art.

Now have I got this right... is Banksy still anonymous??

In which case how on earth did anyone paint this, high on a seemingly inaccessible wall in one of Bristol's busiest streets and no one noticed... or said 'Excuse me, what do you think you are doing?' or thought to see what he looked like.

Anyway I am now very Banksy aware now, though still likely to make an idiot of myself in any in-depth conversation so I will rely on all of you to fill me in on the detail...

 

A colourboration...

I hope you see what I did there, all will be explained.

In amongst all the other books I am still reading Colour - Travels Through the Paintbox by Victoria Finlay, albeit at the speed of a snail, and you are probably all so fed up with me mentioning it that you'll be glad when I creep to the final page, but with the Red chapter pending I had an idea.

I have a very lovely friend who is doing a very lovely thing right now. Ellie and her partner Adrian have set off on their journey of a lifetime and this is really serious travelling, no messing, because Ellie has put all her books in storage.

Thus far they have driven across Europe, through Italy down to Sicily, across to Africa, back to Sicily, Italy again (they like Italy) and now Albania, Macedonia eventually heading east, and they have very kindly taken me along with them. I have been no bother at all, I have a little virtual seat in the back of the camper van thanks to their blog Wherever the Road Goes which I have been following with much pleasure and enthusiasm. They have promised to be ready for visitors and there's loads of room on the roof rack if anyone wants to tag along. Inbetween visiting every ruin between here and Albania (they research diligently and miss nothing) we have had one or two dodgy moments with the old camper van, but Adrian is Mr Spark Plug and seems able to right most wrongs, while Ellie goes out shopping for local food. 

En route the photos have been tremendous as I knew they would be. Ellie has been to stay chez dovegrey and took some beautiful pictures while she was here, so I had this idea that perhaps Ellie and I could do a collaboration colourboration (new word) on the subject of Red. Ellie knew of Victoria Finlay's book, she owned a copy and in fact even knew of its approximate whereabouts in a blue box in a yellow warehouse in England, which I thought was impressive. But I also thought that whilst I scrabble around here seeing Red and thus far my imagination has only noticed the pillar box along the lane, Ellie could be doing likewise on her travels, and we would sort of bridge the geographical divide between us thanks to the internet (which they find on intermittent campsites) and with the inspiration of the paintbox and a collage each.

So Red will be our next challenge and I suspect Ellie's pictures will be a darn sight more exciting than mine if these are anything to go by.

Seen any nice patterns I asked...Cue a bridge in Porto, shadows and arches in Segovia, a gas shop in Tunisia, octopus pots in Tunisia, salt piles in Sicily, dried mud in Vulcanelli, salt pans in France, Porto again ...

Chillies in Sicily,  a bread stall in Kairouane, pears in Palermo, vines on Etna ,sundried tomatoes in Sicily, a roof in Monreale...

We will be simultaneously posting our Seeing Red collages soon and I hear Macedonia has already been fruitful so I had better get my skates on.

 

Eric Ravilious at the Royal West of England Academy, Bristol

'A Ravilious does not jump off the wall to greet you. But pause a moment to reflect - resist the impulse to rush from one picture to the next - and you may find the way you see the world, in all its everday glory, subtly and irrevocably changed.... James Russell 

It was Mothering Sunday and the plan was to meet up with the Kayaker, now working in Bristol, and head to the Royal West of England Academy for the Eric Ravilious exhibition which had been pencilled in my diary as must see for weeks. On the way into the city, the Clifton Suspension Bridge against leaden skies always makes quite a sight.

The RWA is something to see in its own right too if only for the intriguing statue outside, and as we approached the main entrance we kept coming across these strange coins on the ground...

Except not ones you could exactly pick up and spit on for luck...

In fact you were more likely to trip over them if you didn't watch your step because they were scattered everywhere, old fashioned money and the significance was lost on me. Even when I saw this statue, it still didn't dawn...

Then, as we went up the staircase towards the main gallery suddenly the penny dropped..

En route to Eric Ravilious we meandered through the exhibition celebrating the Penguin books archive, so by the time we arrived at Eric, what with the coins and quick run through the book covers that seemed to span my life to date, I was nicely in tune for some quintessential English artwork.

Except to label Eric Ravilious 'quintessential' is somehow to diminish and categorize an artist whose work somehow defies all that in my mind, demanding to be seen and interpreted differently.

Entitled Going Modern / Being British the exhibition of paintings by Eric Ravilious (1903 - 42) was a revelation. The work of a once marginalised artist as he attempted to paint modernity, whilst retaining the essence of English life, and how wonderful it was to just sit and stare and 'be' in a room full of this. 

Enough to make Bookhound snaffle my notebook and capture the moment as the Kayaker and I sat and stared...

Our visit was ably fortified by an infusion of coffee and cake first, and a read of an article by James Russell on Eric Ravilious in the RWA magazine. You may have seen James Russell's books, I know they are looking very temptingly at me in just about every bookshop I go in at the moment.

And if you too are stymied by the cost and like me have them on your Christmas list, then you could do no better than head to James Russell's blog here for a regular fix in the meantime.

I have also just finished reading The England of Eric Ravilious by Freda Constable and was struck by her observation that his working life was spent between the two world wars - Eliot's 'twenty years largely wasted', and at a time when the mood of the era contained both extremes of  gaiety and its accompanying melancholy. And in retrospect I see too something I had noticed but not fully realised... the way that Eric Ravilious often pitches his paintings above ground and normal eye level, but not 'so divorced from it as to be flying over the landscape.'

As James Russell points out, Eric Ravilious was always looking for 'a good place' and I can see that his choices, often unshowy and ordinary, become something else at his hand. I hadn't realised quite what an impact the arrival of the car had made on the art world in particular either. Suddenly previously inaccessible locations, perhaps no train route nearby, became explorable and paintable, and topographical painting in watercolours became the fashion once again. With no need to follow a timetable the freedom of movement seems to have translated into a strangely contradictory sense of control but with freedom of expression too, and we all spent an age looking at each picture closely and several times over.

In many ways that freedom a victim of its own popularity perhaps, because the nations artists pretty soon had the country covered, thus finding new and even more unusual locations became essential. But Ravilious by all accounts was not a showy man, definitely one who ploughed his own furrow, refused to join groups or movements or really publicise himself, and though his subjects may have been timeless and old-fashioned, as James Russell elaborates, Eric Ravilious's approach most certainly was not.

Committed to the war effort as a war artist, and tragically a passenger on a plane lost without trace in 1942, Eric Ravilious's war paintings were fascinating. The distinctive style translated into something so time-relevant and of the moment when he painted them in those early years of the war, and capturing a unique essence of the conflict. Bookhound was that child of the 1950s whose bedroom ceiling was draped with airfix models of Lancasters and Spitfires, so he was as happy as larry in the war painting corner.

I can't remember if we saw this one, and I shall probably be hung, drawn and quartered for putting it here, but how could I not. We are returning to Orkney with the Tinker this summer and Scapa Flow will be on our list of places to visit, because how many times did the Tinker do this during the war too... so a little glimpse of what he may have seen for the rest of us as well.

Leaving Scapa Flow 44.4 x 57.2cms c. 1940. Bradford Art Galleries and Museums

Going Modern / Being British - Eric Ravilious is open at the Royal West of England Academy, Bristol until April 29th 2012.

 

 

 

Spitalfields Market

If you are in London I can certainly recommend a visit to Spitalfields Market.

A feast for the eyes if you love bric-a-brac, or if you have run out of pigeon-racing certificates and rosettes or hanker after a Bakelite wireless...

or perhaps you have run out of knives, or are most annoyingly missing that one crystal drop from your chandelier, or you fancy a rummage around some old photos...or you want to create your name out of old print blocks..

or perhaps you want to add a new song to the repertoire..

or you have felt for some time that life is just not complete without a cat on your head...and I'll admit I did a double take and had to give this a gentle poke just to be sure (yes, dead)

or perhaps you are just browsing without purpose as I was, and soaking up the atmosphere and the colour.

A note for anyone who is Pinterested or for anyone who may be wondering what is this thing called Pinterest... it is a pin-board style photo-sharing website where you can create and manage theme-based image collections. You can find my embryonic pinboards here or by clicking on this button which is also on the sidebar over here >>>>>

Currently you can add and share any pictures you may particularly like from here to your own pinboard using the pin-it button at the base of each post (keeping in step with the zeitgeist) and dovegreyreader will automatically be acknowledged as the source. Though Pinterest is not about self-promotion I do take far more pictures than ever make it onto here so it might be my repository for some of the excess, a sort of virtual version of the suitcase on that stall. But already I am seeing a few pictures extracted, re-shuffled and gathered together under new headings like Patterning and adding more form elsewhere, and thinking it might make me look even more keenly through my camera lens.

Meanwhile to see how it should be done check out Kate, who I know visits here sometimes. Now Kate really does know a thing or two about this Pinning lark, and if you are a Pinner too please add your link in comments and this novice will trail around after you to pick up some Pin-tips and nab some of your pins.

And if you think the last thing the virtual world needs is somewhere else that demands your attention, and eats away at your time, then please just ignore all that.

 

PS The Pinterest button now reduced to this because the larger one just didn't suit my decor...

My "Colour, Travels Through the Paintbox" challenge...

All that talk of colour, and fabrics and quilts we shared last week was inspiring and bound to end up in me having to make something. I haven't made anything for at least a week after all, in fact since the Debbie Bliss baby boots went off to their new home...

Miraculous that I only made one mistake given that I was watching Call the Midwife at the same time, talking of which brilliant news that there is to be a second series, it's official Miranda Hart helping to deliver babies as popular as James Herriot doing an All Creatures Great and Small calving. For anyone who is interested in the pattern for the baby boots by the way, it appears in several of Debbie Bliss's books and magazines, I used a variation of the one in The Knitter's Year and Baby Cashmerino wool which is heaven to knit.

So our conversation in comments here on Sunday was all sufficient to kindle that little flame telling me to make something, because go on you know you want to... even though you have plenty of things waiting to be finished. Nothing like succumbing to a bout of Startitis, and Harriet's mention (thank you Harriet) of the Kaffe Fasset quilt design Indigo Points was all it took. Out came Kaffe's book (thank you for the gift of it last summer Cheryl) Simple Shapes, Spectacular Quilts and my imagination was on its way.

I am having to stop myself racing through Victoria Finlay's book Colour, Travels Through the Paintbox. It is a perfect February read, many journeys in search of colour history and natural sources, but I have decided to linger a while and let the colour of each chapter filter through my mind and my eyes and look around me for traces. So I am currently on the lookout with camera to hand, for Ochre, wherever I can find it.

The first port of call whenever I am feeling colour-full and creative is my fabric stash because embarrassingly it is now so extensive after about forty years of quiltng that I know I will find whatever I am looking for there, and of course I wasn't disappointed...

The Indigo Points design is simple enough not to detract from the effect I want. A 6" square nine-patch block of half triangles with careful postioning of light, medium and dark fabrics using a different colour range in each, which could be hand pieced if I felt that way inclined.

and the design reminds me of the cubes of paint in a paintbox ..this is Bookhound's.

So perhaps my wallhanging will be paintbox-shaped.

But what a nice time I have had drawing around my template, leaving a seam allowance, then careful pinning and some precision hand-piecing after so many years of rotary cut machine-piecing. So relaxing as I sat and watched the most perfectly themed film as I stitched..at last I have seen Girl With a Pearl Earring.

Am I allowed to say that though I loved the music, and the colours, and the paint-mixing, and Colin Firth and the perfection of Scarlett Johansson's bone structure... yet I didn't think it was a patch on the book. So little dialogue and everything achieved by gazing and pouting, most of which I probably missed as I was trying to keep my stitches straight.

 

 

Plants and Places ~ Angie Lewin

I discover we are having ourselves an arty week this week...sometimes it works like this, posts that have been under construction for a few weeks as I gather my thoughts and think about pictures are then ready to go 'live', and suddenly seem to fit like a nicely themed jigsaw.

Do you find an artist’s work can creep up on you almost subliminally??

Out of the corner of my eye I kept seeing a style I loved, which slowly became recognisable and increasingly familiar. Then I would seek it out, spot it a mile way and home in. It’s happened with Orla Kiely and now, over the last year or so, it has happened with Angie Lewin’s distinctive and much-loved images of plants and grasses, leaves and seed heads.

Initially a couple of book jackets…

Some notelets spotted in the Tate Gallery shop…

A small piece of Liberty Tana Lawn from Erika in Delaware which said Angie Lewin to us both but some investigation proved perhaps not…but still that distinctive style. Then the armchair (which I no longer covet because....) upholstered in Mark Hearld’s fabric design, but which led me to the St Jude’s website,

Then that discovery about Random Spectacular which brought the designs and my love for them sharply into focus in a journal which I have read and studied cover to cover and will continue to do so…

And now the book…Plants and Places which in the end I just had to buy, and how inspiring it is proving to be.

I have always felt that I am rubbish at drawing. This goes back to school art lessons and those days when an accurate reproduction on the paper of a vase or a cup was the bench mark. If you couldn’t crack that first you were sunk and you sank quickly, right to the bottom of the class (because you were going to be a nurse so art didn’t matter) while the art college potential rightfully took their place on the display boards around the room, in the school magazine and through the corridors of the school. There was little manoeuvre for offering something impressionist, or cubist or Mondrianish until you had passed that first hurdle of proving you could draw, and I never surmounted that one.

Victoria Finlay touches on something similar in my other very inspiring book of the moment Colour...

'...my school did not offer the kind of creative environment where children without drawing skills were encouraged...' 

And I couldn’t and still don’t think I can draw… ‘not for toffee’ as we would have said, and then we’d add ‘can’t be good at everything’ and go and get changed for hockey.

And perhaps that’s a fine example of how a door closes on an un-nurtured skill very early in life that you never quite have the courage to open again.

But what to do with all that creativity??

I think my mum sorted me out with sewing, embroidery and knitting so I have probably poured it all into being creative in other ways, textiles and wool as my mediums and generally making things just because…  because something is begging to be adorned. Witness my £1 book-sized hot water bottle received as my Christmas gift from Offspringette, in line with the Simple Gifts Christmas we have just enjoyed. Well it had a cover on it by Boxing Day and it is wonderful for keeping hands warm..

But I have browsed and read and browsed and re-read and studied Angie Lewin’s book very carefully, and I can feel the stirrings of some art coming on. Now Bookhound will tell you this is a very dangerous time because I tend not to do these things by halves and will want a set of Cotman Water Colours and some sable brushes of my own before the week is out...

In fact, as you can see, it didn't take a week.  

But I love the lines and the shape of the drawings, seemingly simple but of course detailed and complex in their own way. In Angie Lewin’s words the focus is on ‘plants that are often considered weeds’ so I’m onto a winner with our garden for a start, and the plant’s depiction…

‘not with botanical accuracy but by capturing its distinctive characteristics… scale is not important. I rarely draw plants in flower, but instead look at the framework of the stems and shapes of seedheads and buds…concentrate on the features that I see as unique…’

Now that really cheers me up, because this accuracy thing has kept my artistic hands firmly tied and dormant. And perhaps it is that uniqueness that Angie Lewin talks about that has quietly filtered into my consciousness and made this seem possible, representation of so much that I see around us here as I walk and as I look closely… the umbrels of the cow parsley as it fades into autumn, the oak leaves, the curled ferns…well I could have a go.

And then there’s the wood engraving.

I was sensibly talked out of that after I had read Frances Spalding’s wonderful biography of Gwen Raverat, so I haven’t gone there, but I’m looking at Angie Lewin’s lino cuts and thinking… yes, did that at primary school, surely I could have another stab at it?? Somewhere there must be a copy of my legendary scarecrow. Remember how we’d sit there with a piece of brown lino… remember the smell, and we’d be armed with a selection of weaponry that would be banned for health and safety reasons now, and we’d carve out our pictures. Then there’d be all the ink and the roller palava, heaven knows what sort of a mess was waiting for my mum at the school gates.

And of course I am never going to produce anything that will remotely worry Angie Lewin’s reputation, but aren’t books like this about being inspired to have a go; perhaps about seeing something with your mind’s eye that you recognise as ‘very you’, and that you would like to try for yourself??

Don’t watch this space because this isn't about display, I doubt I’d have the courage to put anything on here… blame Miss Richardson the art teacher for that and laughing at my attempt at a picture drawn according to the laws of Golden Section (remember that) but I think I am going to have go, just for me.

 

 

Liberty of London

I don't know about you but, though I don't suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder beyond craving warmth and sun, by the time we hit February my eyes are in need of colour. If it's a sunny day I get out and stare at the sky but we have had plenty of pewter skies of late so I am prescribing a nice visual dose for today, and after several weeks of reading A.S.Byatt and all those luscious descriptions I am very colour-minded right now.

I wonder if that is that happy factor element of my current ASB winter reading roll, the wealth of colour and the visual cues that trigger my imagination off on a frolic of its own perhaps... and talking of imagination how interesting to read ASB somewhere saying how much she hated the covers of her books to have photos of actual people on them, to the potential detriment of the reader's imagination....which might explain the aversion many of us have to film and TV tie-in editions.

There is a nicely romantic scene towards the end of Possession when two characters are sitting in a restaurant... he is wearing a dark peacock cashmere and wool jacket (which I'm not sure Bookhound would be seen dead in actually) whilst she is wearing an ivory silk shirt with an amethyst necklace on a 'smooth throat' and a purple skirt (none of which is me either come to think of it) but I did have a wonderful bask as I imagined that colour combination, and I am very much looking forward to reading Colour: Travels Through the Paintbox by Victoria Finlay which is already feeding my mental palette nicely....

'The first challenge in writing about colours is that they don't really exist. Or rather they do exist, but only because our minds create them as an interpretation of vibrations that are happening around us...'

Currently we are on the trail of Ochre in Australia.

When in London I often try and schedule in an hour at Liberty of London in Regent Street for a tread on the Ianthe rug...

before making a beeline for the fabrics and a wander along the bolts of cloth, especially the Tana Lawns.

Designs that seem to have been around forever and are part of my visual memory leap out and remind me of projects past.

I'll bet you a whole bolt, that fabric might do this for you too...

I can be transported back years by the sight of some of these.

Then I do a quick appraisal of the latest ones. 

I could actually be tempted by this, it's just begging to be made into something...

And I have really been playing far too long with Picasa Collage creating this little e quilt, but the colours are too gorgeous not to...

But I really do have enough to be going with.

Every so often I get the Liberty box out...

and have a play...

This is one of the many legacies of running a little quilt shop (The Quilt Loft) for a few years and having the Liberty account for the area. I was blessed with my own set of Liberty sample books from which to choose the fabrics we would stock.

I have already made several colourwash wallhangings a la Deirdre Amsden out of these, this one about 18" square, machine pieced and hand quilted...

And so I play some more...

...but now, some twenty years on, they are a little archive of Liberty designs and getting more precious as the years go by. So much so that I end up spreading them out like this (these are some of the Tana Lawns) thinking of a hundred projects, none of which feels quite worthy of such an incredible range of fabrics...

...and so I put them all away again.

Daft isn't it...any creative suggestions, or do I just horde them??

 

Effie : A Victorian Scandal, From Ruskin's Wife to Millais's Muse ~ Merryn Williams

'Victorian scandals don't come much more intimate and revealing than a wife seeking annulment from her famous husband because their marriage has not been consummated...'

Effie Gray was the wife of two distinguished Victorians, John Ruskin and John Everett Millais and that was about all I knew as I read the opening sentences of Merryn Williams's excellent book, Effie : A Victorian Scandal, published by Book Guild and sent to me by them some time ago. I get there eventually and I think it was a prompt from 'someone' in comments here over Christmas ( thank you...whoever it was), coupled with the tempting sight of the biography I am planning to take a leisurely stroll through this year, that all led me to find the book on the shelves.

The biography in case anyone else has a copy and is interested in reading along is The Last Pre-Raphaelite Edward Burne - Jones and the Victorian Imagination by Fiona MacCarthy more of which soon, but I fully expect the reading and looking trails to be meandering and colourful, involve some lovely visits and to be conducted at a snail's pace, there will be plenty of time to admire the scenery and talk as we walk.

But back to Effie.

Poor Effie I think may be a verdict others will share after reading this book. Young and sexually naive, pretty, fair-haired and intelligent, well-educated and very happy, and it was at the age of thirteen that Effie found herself staying with the Ruskins of Herne Hill. Mr and Mrs and their son John, accommodated Effie during the summer holidays of 1841, rather than allowing her to go home to Perth where scarlet fever was decimating her family. The families were distant friends, John born in 1819, the same year as Queen Victoria and George Eliot and now an undergraduate at Christ Church, Oxford and a great friend of Lewis Carroll...

'...tall, thin, narrow-shouldered...a beaky nose, intense blue eyes...attractive smile and charming manners...'

John and Effie soon became great friends. John write her stories (does that sound familiar?)  and over the next few years they would meet on occasion. After one or two misunderstandings and a great deal of Ruskinian parental meddling agin the union, the marriage would eventually come to pass in 1848. John Ruskin now approaching thirty, Effie almost twenty-one. A honeymoon in Europe with Mr and Mrs Ruskin Senior was on the cards and only avoided thanks to a bit of revolt around the continent, so the couple set off alone (but for Ruskin's manservant, whilst no maid for Effie) for a tour of the Highlands.

What really happened on the wedding night at Blair Atholl, and what didn't has all become legendary... did Ruskin blanche and 'fail' at the sight of a naked Effie... if exact records exist they are lost, though Effie was to write six years later 

'that he had imagined women were quite different from what he saw I was, and that the reason he did not make me his Wife was because he was disgusted with my person that first evening...'

What does remain is a vast collection of letters, along with legal documents surrounding the divorce which Effie eventually sought from the church on the basis of non-consummation, and it is these that Merryn Willams uses to great effect as she plots the dire years that were to come.

There follows a catalogue of emotional abuse and hints of violence perhaps as Effie becomes John Ruskin's possession, legally 'owned' by him ... his 'foolish little puss' , there to serve the needs of a complex and seemingly cold and heartless man. Whilst Merryn Williams makes a plea in her introduction that the book is not seen as an attack on Ruskin, it is very hard for the book to follow any other course when the evidence of the letters is so compelling. 

The arrival of Pre-Raphaelite artist John Everett Millais on the scene is fascinating, propelled into Effie's company by Ruskin who encourages Millais to use Effie as his model in this painting, The Order of Release, and going out of his way to ensure that they are able to spend time alone together. Millais suspected a trap, perhaps Ruskin paving the way for a divorce on the grounds of adultery. What is without question is that Millais was a diamond, the perfect gentleman who did nothing to compromise Effie's situation, steered clear until the dust had settled on the divorce (prior to which Effie had to submit to an internal examination by two male doctors) before marrying her and raising a family together.

And it's hard not to cheer at the way that Effie eventually makes her actual escape, or to feel the heart sink when it becomes evident years later that, should Ruskin actually father a child, the divorce on the grounds of his impotence would be annulled and Effie and Millais's children would become illegitimate.

Villified at the time and since as something of a harlot and snubbed by Queen Victoria despite the enduring popularity of her second husband's paintings, it is heartwarming to read a book like this that redresses the balance and restores Effie's tarnished reputation...

'The real Effie Gray was a brave, gifted and essentially decent young woman who wanted with all her heart to be respectable...'

And forgive the indulgence but any excuse to get one of the my favourite Millais paintings on here... Mariana, not modelled by Effie but I'll bet she knew the feeling.

Everyone will draw their own conclusions from  Effie : A Victorian Scandal. I am not quite in the 'Ruskin as paedophile' camp, and nor I felt was Merryn Williams, even though when considerably older Ruskin set eyes on a fifteen-year old girl and the same disaster beckoned. Ruskin's relationship with his parents is complex, especially intense with his mother, and anyone with some Freudian analysis at their fingertips would be able to explore the Oedipal connotations at play here.

But I'm thinking too that Ruskin for all his flaws was also gifted, and a great and single-minded lover of beauty, whether that be in landscape, paintings, architecture or young girls, though nothing can excuse his behaviour towards Effie. Like Charles Dickens though possibly at the opposite end of the 'lust' spectrum, Ruskin also played the mental illness card in an effort to discredit his wife, but perhaps to his credit he did not allow ensuing events to cloud his critical judgement, continuing to both praise and pan the work of John Everett Millais accordingly.

So Team Middlemarch. It is early in the day and we have most of the book ahead of us yet but I wonder if you are already spotting the similarities??

The young woman marrying the rather dry and dusty self-absorbed older man...the appearance of a young artist on the scene, we have just had a glimpse of Will Ladislaw in Miss Brooke, so it will come as no surprise to learn that there may be connections which Merryn Williams also explores...

Millais knew George Eliot slightly and attended her funeral.

The Girlhood of St Theresa painted by Millais was based on the Prelude to Middlemarch.

George Eliot admired both Ruskin and Millais and would have been living in London at the time of the scandal and doubtless considering her own position with G H Lewes. Her sympathies towards Effie, though there is no evidence that they ever met, may well have been of the woman-to-woman variety. George Eliot hardly in a position to judge other women harshly given her own ostracism, and whilst she can't have known as much as we do now from the letters, we do know that there was, as much then as now, a huge appetite for 'celeb' gossip, so who can tell how much filtered through the novelist's sub-conscious as she wrote.

So a really fascinating book that has paved the way in all sorts of directions for my planned reading this year, and I hope this has put you all in the mood for the first Team Middlemarch Brougham stop this coming weekend. I will post on Saturday and let discussions then begin.

 

Bookish Delights of 2011 No 5 ~ Random Spectacular from St Jude's & The New Artisans by Olivier Dupon

If you recall that chair I was coveting from Angie Lewin's design company St Jude's a while back, then it was a fortuitous wander around their website that also alerted me to the forthcoming limited edition of Volume One of the St Jude's design journal to be known as Random Spectacular. I had already spent ages coveting the fabrics on the site before very naughtily cutting off a virtual yard of Mark Hearld's 'Doveflight' fabric in grey as the obvious and only suitable background for my Twitter page, and I am grateful to Mark for designing it especially for me. (I'm sure)

But I can rarely resist a design-based journal, though finances dictate that I really should. I adore Selvedge and buy a copy whenever I see it and have the £10 lurking and unspoken for and it all segues perfectly into a book from Thames & Hudson that I have been enjoying for a while now.

'Looking' books are on an equal footing with those 'journey' books we were talking about on Monday I think, and in terms of value just keep on giving, and The New Artisans by Olivier Dupon is a treasure trove for anyone who warms to the notion of restoring noble status to the very word 'artisan'.

'Highly talented crafters around the world have been working laboriously and passionately, experimenting with techniques and materials, to produce high quality, modern, desirable, one-off objects of creation...History, vision and feeling are incorporated into each and every piece, and that clearly distinguished these products from mass-produced goods.'

Sounds (and is) poles apart from my selection of home-made Christmas gifts this year (can't reveal for obvious reasons) but there was nothing I was going to dislike about a book whose production values are stellar and which shares page after page of inspiration with me. I plan to share much more of this book and the designers, their goods and their websites on here through next year... in the meantime, it's obvious I would love Andrea Williamson who had stopped me in my tracks by page ten.

 So I could see no harm in at least enjoying the first edition of Random Spectacular and giving something back to assuage my guilt for making off with that yard of virtual fabric, whilst getting some inspiration and wonderful colours and designs for the back of my eye in these dark and chilly winter months. I instinctively knew I wouldn't be disappointed; Angie Lewin's designs have really come to my attention on book jackets this year and they sit very comfortably with my gaze....

and talking of artisans, my thanks to Fran H-B for those hand-crafted snowflakes in with the card...yes indeed, move over Kirsty Allsop:-)

Published in a limited edition of 750 copies and with profits being donated to Maggie's Cancer Caring Centres, I signed up for the St Jude's notification e mail and then kept a track on Twitter for news of publication, because I had a feeling these would sell very quickly indeed. Up came the tweet last week, my order was placed within minutes and as I had thought Random Spectacular No 1 had sold out by the next day. News spread quickly that this was indeed spectacular and disappointed buyers gnashed their teeth, whilst I held my breath hoping mine would arrive...which it did last Saturday.

It's a journal that engages at every level, what I would call a 'looking' journal with writing which, measuring 14" x 9.5" and with 104 big pages, offers sufficient space on each to achieve something true to its name. The contributors have donated their time to the project and include...sorry in the end I thought I'd better name them all.... Hugh Aldersey-Williams, Richard Ardagh, Simon Beckmann, Graham Bignell, Paul Bommer, Adam Bridgland, William Brown, Chloe Cheese, Ellie Curtis, The Gentle Author, Jonathan Gibbs, Peter Green, Hand & Eye, Jonny Hannah, Mark Hearld, Ed Kluz, Justin Knopp, Angie Lewin, Ceri Levy, Maggie Li, Markus Lloyd, Jon McNaught, Alex Malcolmson, Simon Martin, Emma Mason, Joanna Moore, Justin Partyka, Tim Rich, Rob Ryan, Neil Sentance, Emily Sutton, Jake Tilson.

This is clearly a wonderful collaboration showcasing a wealth of design, artistic and writing talent that creates a truly spectacular and very harmonious whole. But one to single out... to my pleasant surprise Ed Kluz, the artist whose illustrations first drew me into A History of England in 100 Places.

So here are just a few sneak pics from my copy to share with you, a feast for your winter (or summer for those in Oz) eyes too and on or around the Winter Solstice.

 

Security knitting alert... start casting on everyone.

My thanks to the Tinker, I don't know where he finds these things but I just had to share this one, and with apologies to anyone who logged on earlier and saw no pictures... I couldn't see what my hands were doing.

Given the current climate and concerns for computer data and security, please take this message seriously. This is for your own safety and security.

If your workplace has been assessed and determined to be at low level of risk, the following method is recommended to ensure that no one can see your passwords or what you are typing...

For a moderate level of risk, this method ensures no on can see your passwords, what you're typing, or which website you're visiting...

For a high level of risk, this method ensures ultimate security:

Be safe...you know it makes sense.

 

The Light, The Dusk, The Dark - John Caple

We have a busy week ahead on here so you might want to get the kettle on.

I think you will see that our theme this week is going to be the Great Outdoors, and with the emphasis later in the week on the Birds and the Bees...the actual rather than the euphemistic ones. I'm partaking of another blog tour which I couldn't resist and which will involve a bit of tweeting and twitching and with a great big prize draw on Wednesday, Team Middlemarch finally sets off on Thursday and then I know you'll get a real buzz from the other prize draw that will come on Friday:-)

But if December is approaching then it must also be time for John Caple's annual art exhibition, and though I am unlikely to make it to London to see this one, I have been spreading the word to those who might be able to go, whilst drinking in the pictures for myself via the catalogue...and my thanks to the John Martin Gallery for sending it. You can download an e catalogue here.

This year's exhibition (at 38 Albemarle Street, London W1S 4JG from 2nd - 22nd December) is entitled The Light, The Dusk, The Dark and features another beautiful selection of John's trademark work from the Somerset Levels.

I know I repeat this every year, but for those who don't know, I first discovered the paintings of John Caple via Nell Leyshon and the original cover for her novel Black Dirt,

and a copy of John's book Somerset, still a permanent feature on a bookstand near my desk and periodically I turn the page and gaze at a new painting.

Something twanged a huge and very harmonious chord in me the minute I set eyes on these paintings and I never tire of them

So I am loving the latest collection for its traditional Caple feel but also for John's description...

'...The meeting place for these two worlds is in the landscape at dusk, a place where the two worlds cross over, blend and blur, bringing meaning and enchantment to our lives...'

There is 'alchemical intertwining' here as John explores his timeless landscapes and 'real,metaphorical or spiritual journeys'.

I'm still doing a lot of walking, and getting out for at least two brisk miles a day but often it is late afternoon before I can finish work and get out along the lane. So with winter afternoons dusk-walking is becoming the norm, and thank you to Bookhound for the day-glo reflective waistcoat he bought me for fear I was going to get mowed down by the one car/ tractor/ school bus likely to pass me en route. I cut a dashing figure, somewhere between a lollipop lady, the Dyno-rod man and a refuse collector, but everyone thinks I'm the Police, and if I carried and pointed a hairdryer and pretended it was a speed camera ultimate power over the lanes would be mine....though I might look even more daft.

But dusk-walking is good at this time of year and John Caple perfectly captures the atmosphere in his paintings.The last notes of birdsong are fading as I walk and the night shift are taking over, much hooting of owls and if I am very fortunate I might catch a flash of white as the barn owl glides around the fields. The sky might be doing this as I set off...

and the moon will be rising soon...

And time and again I imagine the people that used to live and work here. I walk across to the old Methodist Chapel ('Just going across to the Meths') and back, that tiny building in the centre of this glorious summer's day picture.

and ponder what will become of it now that it has finally closed because of dwindling congregations and is to be converted into a holiday let, complete with graveyard which we are assuming has to stay put.

I love it when I get there (this was yesterday morning) and look back across to the white dot that is home.

We extend the boundaries of isolated rural living with 21st century amenities, so our experience can bear little resemblance to our forebears here, but we never forget the people for whom this little corner must have been their entire living and working world, and who may have travelled little beyond it. They would have walked and worked these lanes and fields every day, from dawn to dusk, much as the Gamekeeper still does. On those bitterly cold mornings, or the freezing afternoons as I walk out in my thermal layers, I often think how perishing the cold must have been for those people who lived here before us.

Somehow, with his range and tones of colour, John Caple conveys all that I imagine on my walks and much more. There is unspoken mystery and tradition, a certain atmospheric eeriness but nothing that feels malevolent or spooky. His communities feel close knit, and supportive and warm, doors you could safely knock on perhaps in that Lark Rise to Candleford way we talked about last week, and I wonder too what we will all make of the Middlemarch community we are about to meet.

As I walk back along the lane to home the lights are on, the birds are almost silent and I can smell the dinner cooking. This is the lovely Aga thing, you can't smell it in the kitchen, but it pervades the air outside and I am always filled with gratitude that we live in such a magical place.

So if you are in London The Light, The Dusk, The Dark is an exhibition not to be missed, and I'll leave you with one of my favourites from this year's selection ... Winter Evening (22.5 x 38.5 ins)

That could be me walking up the lane see... though John has sensibly omitted the day-glo reflective jacket.

 

Vermeer's Women - Secrets and Silence ~ Marjorie E. Wieseman

A really stunning succession of books are arriving from Yale University Press at the moment, the art books in particular unsurpassed in their quality, so I will try and share one every so often over the next few weeks. Production values are always high with a Yale edition and that is often reflected in the price of the books, but at £20 in hardback Vermeer's Women - Secrets and Silence feels like exceptionally good value if you like your art. The reproductions of the paintings are sensational for their detail and colours and Marjorie E. Wieseman's text is facinating and highly informative.

Bookhound and I went to the last Vermeer exhibition in London back in 2001 as did everyone else I suspect. It was staggeringly popular selling ten thousand advance tickets and I think the other 9,998 people were there the day we went too because we couldn't get near the paintings let alone spend time looking at them. The atmosphere of quiet contemplation that the National Gallery had hoped for by limiting visitors to a total of 270,000 during the exhibition's three month run sadly wasn't to be found on the day that we piled in. I had also gone armed with little foreknowledge beyond the fact that there are only about thirty four known paintings by Vermeer, most of them would be here and it seemed like a rare chance to see them all at once.

So I was delighted when Vermeer's Women - Secrets and Silence arrived, published to coincide with a new exhibition of Vermeer's paintings currently running at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge until Sunday 15th January 2012. If you can get there don't miss it.

The exhibition has been built around the loan of  Johannes Vermeer's The Lacemaker, the cover art for this volume, the painting on loan from the Musee du Louvre, and with its focus on the theme of Secrets and Silence, and immediately the forward to the book tells me something new... that the longer I look at the lacemaker the more I will see that her wrapt concentration evades any attempt I may try to make to know more about her. Her gaze won't meet mine and all amidst Vermeer's characteristic and deliberate blurring of fine details. Timothy Potts, Director of the Fitzwilliam goes on to elaborate on the cohesive factors surrounding these paintings...women in domestic surroundings, engaged in light household chores, or playing music  whilst offering only a  'tantalizing glimpse' of the subjects and giving the sense that the beholder has inadvertently wandered into the room.

'Vermeer's clear intention is to intrigue us with presences unseen - the things and identities just outside the picture or shielded from view, but alluded to by glance or gesture, or an open door.'

Other Dutch artists also feature in this exhibition and as I'm unlikely to get there, this book is the very next best thing, arming me with sufficient information to at least start appreciating more fully what I am looking at, whilst the essays it contains will expand on that understanding.

I did a year of Art History as part of my OU English Literature degree in the way that you can with the Open University. In fact that year proved that I knew even less about art than I thought when at the first tutorial I was asked to list my three favourite artists and I couldn't even think of three, let alone my three favourites. Shocking and I ended up having to read twice as much than in any literature year, but Bookhound and I went to masses of exhibitions and have done ever since.

So I don't feel quite as a clueless as I might have done when opening a book like this which may well be doubtless gracing plenty of coffee tables this year and I hope is read too, because the commentary and the essays look fascinating. 

I'm finding my eye is particularly drawn to the textiles in the paintings too, something I may not have taken in when seeing these paintings separately before, and certainly not on that London exhibition visit. But gathered together in this way it's possible to focus on themes of my own and follow them through... the curtains, the bed drapes, the tableclothes, the clothes and the casually placed shawl and the richness of colour and detail in the rugs and carpets.

The description and explanation of this picture A Maid Asleep, painted in or around 1656, Vermeer's first painting of a domestic interior and a woman alone, and the story that all the elements reveal is utterly fascinating. The maid dressed as well as her employers, and asleep where she shouldn't have been and in combination with the objects on the table could be interpreted as a

'housemaid who has succumbed to the sloth and melancholy brought on by lovesickness whether from unrequited love or just plain lust,'

Technical analysis reveals that a man and a dog had originally stood in the doorway but had been painted over, and it is this in depth detail, the sort of thing you would probably get on the guided tour headphones that you can hire and which I never do, which is making my sedentary visit to this exhibition so appealing.

Vermeer uses a particularly pleasing shade of ultramarine blue... would that have been lapis lazuli I wonder?? And I'm off looking for answers...yes it was and Vermeer uses it in copious quantities.

The Lacemaker herself is wonderfully analysed in the commentary... the quiet concentration giving rise to a beautiful product, but women's work all the same and therefore considered less of a craft or skill than that of the artist's. By privileging his subject perhaps Vermeer is giving her work and herself credence and respect.

Much more to see and read so whilst the book will be on the coffee table, I'll be reading it on those lovely winter afternoons when the fire is lit and I fancy a wander around the Vermeer exhibition.

And now you are all going to ask and I might as well tell you...no I haven't read Girl With a Pearl Earring by Tracey Chevalier, I really should have done by now shouldn't I.

 

 

 

A Woolly Weekend...

Accustomed as I am to driving miles and miles to get to a woolly event ... I mean these things are usually in Wales or Cockermouth or across the other side of the county, imagine my delight at discovering one almost on the doorstep,

A Woolly Weekend at Kelly House,Lifton

Kelly House recently featured in the Channel 4 TV programme "Country House Rescue"

Kelly House is a Grade I listed building and has stood overlooking the mists of Bodmin Moor since the 1740s. But years of neglect due to lack of funds mean that behind its crumbling façade lie walls plagued by dry rot, ceilings bowed by damp and a roof that desperately needs replacing. Having survived countless wars and family tragedies, the Kellys are facing perhaps their toughest challenge yet, saving Kelly House from total dereliction and finding a way to somehow keep it in the family.

I checked on google maps just to see and I have a massive 6 miles to travel and it will take me all of thirteen minutes to get there in the car. I'd walk but for the fact I might have to carry 'things' home.

I found this card at the last one I went to..

The Wool Shop by Kate Lynch from the book Sheep - From Lamb to Loom.

Today is...

National Wear a Tea Cosy on Your Head Day...so I hope you are..

Dorothy C.P. Ward

Unless you have lived in Tavistock in Devon or the surrounding area for several decades you could be forgiven if the name Dorothy C.P. Ward means nothing to you. I feel sure those of us who know of Dorothy and her paintings are in the minority, and it seems sad that her work is so little known even here in the town. In fact to my knowledge, and to date, the Town Council have not recognised Dorothy's life or her work in any way.

Dorothy Cordelia Phyllis Ward was born in Plymouth on 17th November 1909, the daughter of an eminent and respected doctor and his wife who were sufficiently well-off to move from the city to one of Tavistock's grander houses, in Whitchurch on the outskirts of the town, in about 1930.

In January 1930 Dorothy started a Diploma in Design at the Royal College of Art in London, she served in the WRNS during the war returning to Tavistock and taking up the position of art teacher at a little private school in the town. Dorothy died in a local nursing home in 1994, she never married and lived all her life in the large family home in Chollacott Park with her sister Claire, also unmarried, who died in 1992, and with them perhaps has gone much of the vitally important history. The house and contents were auctioned and dispersed years ago and thus far only two photos of Dorothy herself have come to light.

Bookhound, with his usual eagle eye, had been on the DCPW trail for many years, buying a couple of pictures when he saw them for sale and more recently snapping up a collection of Dorothy's Royal College of Art sketchbooks from a market stall here in Tavistock. So when Jane Miller's letter requesting information about Dorothy appeared in the local paper he was soon on the phone, Jane came to call and we shared all our treasures with her.

Jane first saw this remarkable 1933 gouache painting Map of Plymouth and District (190 x 121 cms) in Plymouth Museum (currently not on display and to our dismay we now hear it has 'gone missing') and like the rest of us fell in love with Dorothy's work.

I've had a postcard of this near my desk for years, and we have since discovered a page of working drawings for it in one of the sketchbooks. These were the days when Plymouth still had its pier (destroyed by bombing in WWII and never re-built) but it's the cleverest most intricate and uniquely proportioned 'map' of the pre-war city and the surrounding area, and with just a glimpse of the Brunel Bridge across the Tamar over to the left. Even more unique considering its aerial perspective which Dorothy seems unlikely to have sighted for herself.

It is since her first meeting with this painting that Jane has worked diligently and steadfastly (for example we had no idea Jane had no car and thus came to see us by bus and then did two miles on foot) to try and reclaim and bring to public attention the work of Dorothy C.P. Ward. So when the invitation came to attend The Tavistock Group of Artists annual June exhibition in the Town Hall, a group co-founded by Dorothy in 1953, and also to see a small retrospective of Dorothy's work we were there.

We have a couple of paintings, one is of the North Cornish village of Boscastle dated 1962 and which I've always felt was a bit  'twee'. I'm reliably advised that I know nothing about perspective, which we know to be true, and should appreciate this egg tempura painting for that if nothing else, but I'm sorry to admit that it has spent some time in the loft at my behest. I've now eaten humble pie and it has been rehabilitated to a wall spot in the sitting room, because I can see that though not to everyone's taste, Dorothy Ward is an artist whose work needs to be viewed in the context of the time when it was painted, and as part of her entire oeuvre.

The entire oeuvre is another question entirely because it must be scattered to the four corners. By all accounts Dorothy was a prolific artist who gave a great deal of her work away so there must be some gems tucked away in houses somewhere.

So we went to the exhibition back in June and one painting stole my heart. I was camera-less on the day we went ( a first) and when I got home was so worried by the thought that I may never see this picture again, that I went back the next day and made sure I had, with permission, recorded it and a few others for my own enjoyment and yours.

It's entitled Washing Day 1934 and I spent ages looking at it, fell in love with it and would have happily tucked it under my arm, brought it home and decorated a room to match if I could have done. The setting is local but with some artistic licence and demonstrates Dorothy's fine art skills and attention to the most delicate details, and all combined with her happy knack of telescoping a view to encompass distance whilst always maintaining perspective and proportion.

The close detail is incredible...

More from the sketch books to follow, Dorothy was an accomplished calligrapher too and also wrote and illustrated her own children' books. They were never published and, though very of their time, the pictures are quite exquisite.

How sad it would be if all this had just disappeared, and congratulation to Jane for all her hard work in ensuring that hopefully it won't.

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Canada Day...

Well Canada Day dawned in Devon, probably not anywhere else as it's not July 1st, but after weeks of atrocious weather I had put in an order for hot sunshine for yesterday bearing in mind that I would be spending half a day with the Canadian walking party.

So good to meet up with Mrs KFC Sheila, and friends Gill and Sally, who had been walking strenuously all morning.

I found them holed up in the Drewe Arms.

No really they deserved a rest, they had already walked miles having visited the Lutyen's designed Castle Drogo that morning, and I can tell you these Canadians (Sally on the left is from Chicago so honorary Canuck status granted, Gill and Sheila the real deal) well they trek at a fair old lick, no slacking.

Incidentally, did anyone hear Great Lives on Edwin Lutyens (BBC Radio 4) a few days ago?? Ned to his friends and if he'd known us he would have given us nicknames (Gertrude Jekyll was 'Bumps' apparently) It was fascinating and as a result I was well up on my Drogo info, and NB above my short-sleeved faith in the weather.

So after a catch up over lunch we set off with the organised party, my faith in the weather vindicated and as you can see Devon was wearing her very best frock and looking resplendent in her late-summer-almost-autumn glory.
Absolute perfection...

 
We stopped en route for a really fascinating visit to Abey Smallcombe Earth Art, cob-makers extra-ordinaire Jill and Jackie. If you see a thatched cottage in Devon the chances are it is made out of cob, a sub-soil/straw and water mix that will very surprisingly withstand all weathers, and last for centuries as long as its boots (foundations) are solid, and its hat (roof) stays in place.

Hearing the wonderful story of traditional Devon cob maker Alfie Howard (pictured here) who died this year, it was a lovely surprise to discover that Mr Howard's working model of a cob cottage is now in Jackie and Jill's tender care, and it was an amazing creation to see in close-up...

The walls of a cob-built cottage, often two to three feet thick, will keep a home warm in winter and cool in summer and Jill and Jackie are keeping alive this ancient and traditional craft. They talked with so much genuine enthusiasm about their work that I think we would all have happily done some mud-slinging come the end.

To my surprise cob can also be used to make tiles, the colour of the sub-soil dictating the colour of the finished pieces, which are not fired, just sealed and polished with beeswax. Unsurprisingly solid and weighty and very strong, I'm now worryingly interested in all this 'new to me' information, coupled with the fact that the raw materials are freely and readily available if only I can persuade Bookhound to dig a hole in the garden; a skill not beyond his capabilities as we all know.

We trekked on and came across a dovegrey dovecot which necessitated a picture...

as did this waving of the maple leaf on Devon's soil

So eventually, once  Sheila and I had used up all the available oxygen in Devon talking and walking we made our farewells and I waved everyone off to their hotel, an evening of Dartmoor Broom dancing in store and which I hadn't actually heard of, but suspect could be a ruse to get the floor swept,and then onto the next leg of their journey today, but of course not without an exchange of gifts.

Kevin I'm *waving* and thanking you for the books you sent, I am truly thrilled with them all but especially A William Maxwell Portrait, and my thanks to Sheila who had put them in a Jimmy Choo cloth bag. There's no other way I will ever own a Jimmy Choo cloth bag, I shall flaunt it shamelessly.

In return it was more books of course, why ever not, and my thanks to Susan Hill who very kindly arranged for me to have three copies of the gorgeous new edition of The Woman in Black to send back to Canada. It's published by Profile on September 29th and includes a set of commissioned wood engravings by Andy English which add something very special indeed to this edition. The book not set on Dartmoor of course, but nice and spooky enough to read while you visit, and we all await Daniel Radcliffe in the forthcoming film version with bated breath, I hear from the oracle herself that it is f-a-n-t-a-s-t-i-c.

And of course having set the precedent last year with these...

How could I not, so I came right out of the village show last week with three gifts to stitch, so a busy weekend getting the miniature Liberty Tana Lawn 'windows' quilted and ready for their journey... and I had to remake this one because the binding wasn't right. I'm getting as meticulous as my mum these days which won't do me any harm.

All in all a perfectly lovely gorgeous Canada day.

and the Blatchford Cup goes to...

for Best Exhibit...

Placed into my hands by the Worshipful (apparently) Mayor of West Devon.

and I shared the WI Trophy for Most Points in Handicrafts thanks to...

and...

plus a second for the felted picture.

The Tinker gained two seconds for his tapestry and his picture, and we'd best not forget Bookhound and his Cox's Orange Pippins.

Or his highly successful, Guess the Weight and Length of the Atlantic Salmon, given that the theme of this year's show was the Tamar Valley, and a fly fishing demonstration may have resulted in casualties.

Roll Up...Roll Up...go on have a guess, what do you reckon, weight and length?

Sorry the prize has already gone, it was a lovely hamper of goodies.

And we won the local cider yet again in the raffle.

Meanwhile, our neighbour, as the crow flies, took a massive eight (or was it nine) trophies home in the fruit, veg and flower classes which serves him right because that's a lot of polishing, and also explains where all the goodness in our soil has leeched away to... even if his house is a mile away.

Right, you'll be very pleased to know that's an end to this shocking bout of bragging and boasting..oh  apart from one more little 'thing' tomorrow that is, and then we have an autumn of great reading coming up, and I am very much looking forward to settling down with it all.

 

Village Show entries

I hope you are not getting a bit sick of all this because I'm sorry but now it's the Village Show entries, and the hive has been very industrious this year.

The Tinker has entered that lovely railway viaduct in Class 74 Embroidered Article (we'll see if the WI judge lets it through...it looks more like embroidery than tapestry to us) and his William Morris wallhanging in Class 74 Tapestry Article. It was done some years ago, hangs in our sitting room but as yet un-entered in any competition.

I've gone for a whopping, most-ever entries this year, five classes in handicrafts and have had the loveliest time making...
A Hare With Amber Eyes of my own.. (Class 77 Any Handmade Article)

The stained glass piece now called 'April 27th' as that is the day we have agreed that the sun sets right in the 'V' of the bit of the Tamar Valley that we can look towards and down into Cornwall (Class 75 A Sewn Article)

Now the wet felting. Well the experimental pieces have ended up mounted on a machine quilted linen backing as something of a first attempt and I fancy I might just call this 'Edward Thomas' and think of that red flower as a poppy, because it was certainly the book in my mind as I made it. (Class 79 An Item of Felt)

As if I could pass up Class 76 A Knitted Article, and finally these socks are finished, using the ball of hand-dyed wool someone sent me, and the wool Offspringette (currently in Atlanta, Georgia after a very long Greyhound bus journey from Iowa) brought me back from her trip to Shetland. I have to admit these are a little unusual so who can know what the very strict WI judge will make of them. And the time lapse was so long between one sock and the next I had completely forgotten how I'd done that pattern around the top..

And lastly, and my goodness I have only just squeaked this one to completion, Class 72 Any Item of Patchwork.

Even though is is just 30" square there was much more hand quilting left to do than I had first thought,but I love hand quilting and I hate to skimp on it so I'm hoping I have done a proper job.

All was going well until I had a bit of an insurgency over the border. It did have a 3" wide calico border which I marked up with a chain design and had quilted half way round in brown before I woke up one morning and realised it ruined the whole thing. Out of proportion for the size and delicacy of the piece. I unpicked and thought easy, just trim the white and stitch it round to the back as binding.

Rubbish. Half stitched and it looked terrible, so I unpicked again and holding my breath, because this thing is getting smaller by the day, I took a rotary cutter to it, trimmed all layers back and machined on a much narrower coral pink binding. To my complete relief I woke up the next morning as happy as larry with it and strode onto to the finish line.

I'll tell you what it is called tomorrow. for reasons that will become clear.

So that's us entered, let battle for the Blatchford Cup commence, it's the taking part that counts

 

 

The Tinker's Tapestries....a few more

Ah yes the trains. The Tinker likens this to painting with wool.


and this one of  the Ribblehead viaduct which was my mum's favourite sight as she travelled on the Settle to Carlisle railway, from Liverpool to the Yorkshire Dales, for childhood holidays at a little place called Countersett Hall near Askrigg. The Tinker took my mum back there to visit in the year before she died, it was a place that brought back special and very happy memories for her of a past that had remained so vivid, whilst the near present had sadly started to fade. I love this picture and am always reminded of my mum telling us how she'd count the arches with great excitement and know she was getting nearer.

Then we must move onto the Ottoman empire because the Tinker did two lids for ottomans and one footstool for me (currently beneath my desk with my feet and a cat curled up on it) in this design which we all fell in love with

I think you've all seen this and the next one several times over but I could and do look at them all day so I'll add them here for completeness. The Elizabeth Bradley done in a single very large piece

and another piece also very large

and here is the Tinker with the coveted village show Blatchford Cup for it, which he won a couple of years ago.

The spin offs from all these are cushions various, smaller versions of the designs because I always love them so much and to use up the wool.
Coming next... all our entries for today's show which have to be staged by 12 o'clock so I've timed the post for then, plus a glimpse of the Tinker's new work in progress, because I had noticed some idleness which will never do for an 86 year old as talented as this, as I'm sure you will agree.

Clever Tinker xxx

The Tinker's Tapestries.

I promised you an exhibition of the Tinker's tapestries and as it is village show day today I thought you might enjoy a little exhibition of your own here with several posts through the day, whilst the Tinker and I fight it out with all-comers for Most Point in Handicrafts and The Blatchford Cup for Best Exhibit. The Tinker has won the cup before... I haven't, we are usually beaten by a galleon made out of three million matchsticks or similar.

So I took myself around his little apartment with my camera and we should probably start with my mum, because I think we all caught this love of needlecrafts from her... the Tinker made her these

My mum's embroidery was meticulous and exquisitely detailed, from The Wise Men..

To Widecombe Fair (incidentally, it's Widecombe Fair next Tuesday)

My mum then bought the Tinker this kit in a sale for £16 and in effort to keep him awake in the evenings after he retired. He calls it his early work and finds fault, but I'd be pleased enough to finish anything to be honest.

He moved swiftly onto this Glorafilia Doll's House and then did one for me as well...no that's a lie. I liked his so much I bought one for myself, did three roof tiles and he finished it for me.

Then it was time for some Kaffe...

Coming next, the trains and the Ottoman empire...

 

Finishingitis...

Happy Bank Holiday weekend to everyone here in the UK, and I hope any of you in the path of hurricane Irene are safe and well.

Offspringette rang from the U.S. last week and was extolling the virtues of not worrying about an earthquake, this after several months in Christchurch when she thought of little else, only for there to be a serious quake in the US the next day, so I hope anyone who was caught in that is fine too.

The swallows gathered yesterday morning and we think they have made their farewell, two new broods raised this year and now on their way to sunny Africa. Cue torrential rain and cold enough for us to light the fire, though we live in hope of our usual fair spell in September and October.

This is the best holiday I've had at least since the last one, and whilst a prolonged bout of startitis is all well and good, and so far I have succumbed to four new episodes, it has to be matched with some much-needed finishingitis too. So in between new things I have been working away on my entry for Class 73 Any item of patchwork, and this has been sitting unfinished for so long I can't actually remember when I started it.


These things always look a mess while I am working on them, creased and crumpled and tacking threads everywhere but all will be perfectly lovely gorgeous in the end. I have a feeling the blocks all had bookish associations via their names, and in connection with books I was reading at the time, so thank heavens for the search box on here because eventually I found its inception and...

Shock!

Horror!

It was 2006... and here I am making some blocks

Anyway look, no matter, there's nothing like a deadline and the secret is to parcel it into bite-sized chunks; quilt one block a day and some border marked up with air-soluble pen, so I know if I don't do it I'll only have to re-draw it all next time. Then I have to be ready for the final push on the big border design so it doesn't ambush me, and I then waste a day trying to decide what to do, so I have settled on this cable...


It will be finished this time around I promise because I have already paid my 20p entry fee.

 

 

April 27th

'I-have-to-make-things' fortnight continues and is now blended with Whim-is-me, Not-a-lot-of-internet and Listen-to-the-radio, so having staked my claim on the kitchen table there's no telling where the creative muse will lead.

In fact it took me back through all my old class folders from the days when I taught patchwork and quilting, and specifically thinking Village Show entries I suddenly had the urge to do some stained glass patchwork....as you do.

For those who aren't familiar with it this involves replacing what would be glass with fabric, and using bias strips for the lead work. It's a bit fiddly but if you make the bias strip properly (I have a Clover gizmo thingy, you feed it in one end and it shoots it out the other end folded and straight under the iron) all will be well and the results are always very satisfying, though the amount of mess scattered around the kitchen belies the size of the finished thing (about 9.5" diameter)

Cutting mat, iron, fabric stash all over the place just looking for exactly the right colours, then making the very tiny bias strip, next cheating with the spray mount to hold the pieces in place on the backing to save the bother of tacking, you know the sort of thing. Then appliqueing the bias strip around the pieces before adding some wadding and backing and doing the quilting. Final touch a bias strip around the edge.

All this while listening to everything from Woman's Hour to The Archers and some Proms thrown in until eventually..

The theme for this year's Village Show just two weeks away, is the Tamar Valley and there is one single day in the spring when the sun, on its annual return journey across the sky, sets in the 'V' of the valley that we can see from the house, so this piece is called April 27th, and will do a turn in Class 74 'A Hand Sewn Article.'

 

Knitspiration

Sorry if you were expecting books as it's Monday but FibreFest was predictably inspiring yesterday and I've lived off that sense of new inspiration all day.

There was an amazing knitted installation...

Absolutely every single thing knitted including the Devon coastline...

I have no plans to knit a beach but I do seem to have come home with half a sheep in various guises on the basis that there's no point in taking along a large Orla Kiely bag if you don't put it through its paces.

 I resisted most of this ...

...in favour of things called 'tops' and 'rovings' in an attempt to further my felt-making career. This is the wool in its pre-spun phase, a whole new world for someone who has always neatly sidestepped the world of spinning on the basis that it's quicker to buy the finished thing... but I can see the allure.

I picked up some Wensleydale and Shetland, some Merino, some Alpaca bits and various dyed odds and ends.

So with two weeks off work and time to indulge my inner person-who-has-to-make-things I am planning to teach myself some new skills. I have spent the day wet-felting and I think I am going to like this, it's like painting with wool and I can think of a thousand and one things to make.

Softest of soft wool with that faint but pleasant scent of sheep, and the special accessories of soapy water, bubble wrap and a rolling pin and I have managed to go from this...

to this, now about 12" square but only after a great deal of rolling, mashing, beating and general rough treatment.

Then  a little polka-dot sample to try and gauge the thickness you need to start with and then how much it will shrink by, and what a blessing an Aga is at times like this. It's August and it's supposed to be switched off but we only lasted a week.

Meanwhile the second slipper is in progress and I am also knitting one of these..

What do you mean you don't know what it is..

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BO all sole sts with I-cord BO??

I love blogweekends because we can have a rest from books and talk about knitting and things and I have been a woolly cordwainer this week making felted slippers. I know it's not as if I don't have enough to do, but this being the start of a week or two of WhimIsMe after a heavy few weeks at work, well I just saw the pattern as I was doing that fatal thing of browsing on Ravelry, and had to make them.

This is what the finished articles may or may not look like.

In fact the pattern isn't a free one, it has to be ordered from Blue Moon (Felted Kicks) and be advised it won't open in Vista PDF but it will open in Adobe and I'm very happy to pay from something as good as this.

I'm trying new and different with my knitting this year and am consistently amazed at how daunting something can look until you break it down, row by row and then *ping* suddenly it starts to take shape in your hands, and subsequently in your mind, and hats off to Marilyn Kaleikilo for designing these, they really are lovely..hopefully.

I've had to master 3-needle BO which was a new one on me and then each slipper involves knitting two identical pieces for each which then have to be slotted inside each other and knitted together around the upper. This proved to be a fiendish tussle which I only just survived, feeling as if I'd done ten rounds with Henry Cooper when I'd finished, and then there was the I-cord BO to come.

I think you can see this does have the look of a slipper about it but we have a way to go.

Isn't the interknit internet amazing.

I mean how on earth would I have figured out this...

Using backward loop method, CO 3 I-cord stitches. Turn work so yarn is attached to needle in left hand. BO all sole sts with I-cord BO

My thanks to Judy's knitting tips on youtube for the I-cord BO assistance because I think she knew I was sitting there with my eyes tight shut saying 'Can't...can't...can't' and when she held up her needles and in her calm and dulcet tones said

'Now what you are going to do...'

Well funnily enough my anxiety was contained and I immediately could.

It looks a right pig's ear now I've cast it off to be honest with you and I can't wait for the transfomation to occur.

Once I've finished the other one we move to the ruining felting process and I'm in two minds about this.

So all you felting experts... should I try and 'agitate' these by hand in very very hot water or use the machine for ten minutes at a time as the pattern suggests??

Because I'm not sure how you can do this controlled felting in a front-loading machine when the door stays locked because it has water in it, am I being stupid or do I need to go out and find an old twin tub?

Or do I just throw it in with the Lakeland dolly balls that I am assured work like magic, pace around for a while and hope for the best??

Talking of which excitement of the week, it's FibreFest this weekend, Devon's own woolly gathering at Bicton College. I'm going to be meeting the KnitAngel there today and we plan to talk wool and slippers all the day long.

 

 

 

Thanks Kath & Gillian...

Making a start on a tapestry by me, is I can see not like starting a tapestry for the Tinker.

Me - see in book start an hour later with little or no preparation...it goes wrong... I stop

The Tinker - studies the chart for several days... gets it enlarged... marks it up as a grid...gets the right sized canvas (13 to the inch) ... does a lot of counting and transfers his grid to his canvas ... orders the right wool...  switches off the TV and swaps to radio and audio books... sorts out his light and his magnifyer... settles into a daily routine of so many inches done per day... something most worthy of village show entry follows.

In fact we have several to choose from so this is not the one that has been entered today.

So although I have gone for very easy mickey mouse tapestry by numbers I have taken the sage advice on preparation offered by my guru and spent an afternoon at the kitchen table getting this Ehrman kit thing properly set up.

I wonder if Kath and Gillian really do pack the wool or is this a ploy to give it all the personal touch and make you feel a little more involved in the whole thing?

Because really I'll be letting Kath and Gillian down if I get this next bit wrong, to say nothing of the Spirit of Rocky who can't wait to be immortalized in a cushion, so I have made up my shade card as instructed and it took me ages.

Who knew beige and khaki came in quite so many shades? But thanks Kath and Gillian, it was all there, no queries or discrepancies so I shouldn't need to contact you at this early stage but please do stay on the end of the phone in case I need you at a later date.

Then came the stitching to the frame and I'll admit in the past I may just have hoped that one edge would stay in place with a prayer and some judicious rolling, but not this time because this has to see me through an entire series of Strictly. I sat and diligently stitched both ends to the rollers whilst listening to that nice little afternoon play on Radio 4 yesterday, about Sherlock Holmes and starring Richard Briers and Stanley Baxter.

So now I'm framed...

...and wondering if I dare do as Erika suggested in comments yesterday and go off-piste with the white to make it more Rocky-like??

But best not to run before I can walk because rather embarrassingly I had completely forgotten how to do tent stitch, or petit point as I think it might be known. I worked a row that looked really flimsy and according to the  instructions was half cross-stitch and not to be recommended if one requires substance. For the life of me I couldn't make sense of the picture of the stitch and I don't know who packed that so I can't ring them to ask, and short of getting in the car and going to see my guru I have resorted to a book and now have it sorted.

So I'm launched, may god save this tapestry and all who work on it.

 

The Tinker's Tapestries...almost

The plan was to do a post on the Tinker's Tapestries, and I promise you it is on its way, but when I nipped over to see him for a cup of tea yesterday, and to take some pictures of them all, it would really have helped if I had taken my camera with me.

Suffice to say he is busy tapestrying again, two beautiful panels from the Ehrman book and I will update you soon.

Meanwhile I was idly looking on the Ehrman website and noticed they had a sale...

and a bit of me thought how nice it might be to have some tapestry on the go through the winter...along with the knitting knitsuke and the endless quilts, so I was talking myself out of it but kept browsing because they really are so lovely.

Have you had a look yet??

I don't see why I should keep this den of temptation to myself.

And then I saw this...

My heart melted as I thought of the dear old fella sitting quite illegally on the kitchen table as if he owned it..

And what a lovely way to immortalize him, so only a couple of clicks before all this arrives...

I have received much encouragement and advice from the octogenarian expert given that this is pre-school level to his phD standard, and I also think he took one look and thought

'Bet I know who ends up finishing that..'

No, no no, I really am going to do this one.

Lamerton Produce and Craft Show this weekend. Not our village but the one right next door who are resurrecting their village show after many lapsed years, we have defected and have entries, well we can just enter all the stuff we've been exhibiting in our own for years can't we, just a shame we've eaten every last scraping of Bookhound's Champion Chutney.

Book coherence returns here next week. I have already read one off the Booker longlist that I would love to win.

 

 

 

Raising bunting awareness...

I promised we would slow the pace down a little over the next few weeks on here so the day before we leap on the Team Tolstoy troika tomorrow I thought some 'looking' would be nice.

I take my camera everywhere these days and have been known to make Bookhound turn round at the end of the lane and drive back home if I have forgotten it.

Beyond the end of the lane I have discovered I am onto a loser, past the point of no return and wasting my time asking.

But it's always good to slot the memory card into the computer and see where I've been because I've usually forgotten, and this weekend I have had a lovely revisit of our trip across to The Devon Guild of Craftsman for a relaxing lunch (and trip to the wool shop of course) in that week after Port Eliot.

I have become increasingly bunting-aware since we spent a day making about three miles of our own for the dovegreyreader tent, recycling a huge stack of fabric samples which came from who-knows-where and who-knows-when but have been in my stash for years. So my eye immediately noticed the bunting decorating the Devon Guild in celebration of their 25th anniversary year.

This has all been made as part of a community project in Bovey Tracey and just look how much effort has gone into this, knitted and attached to the tape with buttons...

The summer exhibition was perfection as always and the favourite thing to catch my eye this year was this lace pillow with some very dovegreyreader-appropriate work in progress, and with a wonderful collection of lace bobbins.

Any lacemakers out there??

Yes I have tried lacemaking, and yes I do have all the gear and yes I will return to it, because once you have the knack it is incredibly soothing to do. My entire output to date is a bookmark so I have a way to go, but give me time and I have promised that I will pick this hobby up again properly.

There's always a feast of colour to be gorged on around the Guild of Craftsmen, gluttony is permitted and I can never ever resist drinking in the display of Penny Simpson's pottery. No purchases on this day but I do still have my three treasured pieces..

and more colour...

And after a bit of a busy week at work last week, and another one pending, here's some advice I might have tattoed on my forehead, or perhaps my arm because I do need to be able to remind myself of it on a regular basis.

We had lunch in the Guild cafe and as we looked out of the window this little chap sat like this for the entire time, he didn't move a muscle, so clearly it's etched on his memory too, unless he's stuffed of course in which case he forgot.

Knitting @PortEliotFest

In bringing a virtual space like dovegreyreader scribbles into reality for the festival it was clear we would need to embrace our creative side and have some knitting on the go and I wasn't quite sure how this would work, or whether we would get more than a few desultory rows done between us sitting in an empty tent.

Well how very wrong can you be.

I had gathered together a bag of wool from the stash and thanks to RevCheryl offloading her guilt stash onto me it included some posh bits too, Noro, Rowan and Colinette all feature and we had done some casting on to get people started, but nothing could have prepared us for how popular this would be. As people (men, women and children) arrived for one of our author conversations they headed to the basket to pick up some wool and needles and happily clicked away and chatted with the authors through each event. This has to be the fulfilment of my wildest dreams to be honest with you...to be allowed to chat with a favourite author and like-minded people and knit. I mean how many times have I sat at more formal literary festivals, all eyes glued on the platform and found mine own eyes drooping whilst thinking if only I was 'allowed' to get my knitting out.

Knitting is being used in therapy groups now after all, it relaxes the hands and allows people to talk more freely and it most certainly created a wonderfully informal atmosphere in the tent.

Then when each event finished there would be an influx of people ready for a sit, a knit, a natter and a cup of tea, and here I think we must laud the efforts of the tea boys...Bookhound (on the left) and the Weatherman.

Both married to health visitors and therefore the most tolerant of men who intuitively know the right moment to make a cup of tea. And what a great double act they were, as to and fro to the kettle in the cuddy behind the greenhouse they trotted, and hey presto trays of very welcome Earl Grey miraculously appeared. They reckon to have made several hundred cups of tea between them and washed up each time too so KnitAngel and I think we're missing a trick here and may hire them out with their own bunting for other events... weddings and Bar Mitzvahs no problem, we can train them accordingly.

I must therefore also mention Mrs Weatherman, the KnitAngel who as well as knitting the knitsuke and responding instantly to light-bulb moment requests for a butterfly, a gaggle of geese and a hare about a week before the festival, also displayed the infinite patience with which I know she is well-endowed as she taught people of all ages to knit as did Fran H-B, also part of the dgr crew.

So now we have this...

 

Watch this space but perhaps not drekkly.

 

The dovegreyreader knitsuke @PortEliotFest

The dovegreyreader knitsuke (please pronounce as knitski) are born thanks to the incredible KnitAngel who was part of Team dgr, and a few have been sent to their new homes at this year's Port Eliot Festival. Most importantly the very first one had to be placed in the care of Edmund de Waal...

I'm hoping better pictures of the inaugural knitsuke will emerge because in my festival haze I completely forgot to take one before we sent him on his journey.

But for Edmund de Waal there was no question, it had to be a hare with amber eyes and he was absolutely delighted (a picture will appear from someone I hope)

For Patrick 'Butterfly' Barkham we made a special trip to the very secret Site X in Devon to capture a Large Knitted Blue, with food store..

And Patrick was delighted with his knitsuke (with holes in the lid so it can breath and he's promised to look after it) because this brought his Port Eliot sightings tally up to eight species.

And our final guest of the festival, William Fiennes, and unbeknown to us word of the knitsuke was spreading. How fortunate that we had made a baggle of snow geese...

and I think we might just have made William's day too.

The Goosey Quilters 25th Birthday.

Back in those baby-laden days of the early 1980s I used to meet every Tuesday evening with two equally baby-laden friends to sit and drink tea and quilt.

This may not sound very exciting in this era of yummy mummies who may be much more likely to go to the wine bar and then clubbing, but this was the 1980s, we just didn't and in a rural Devon market town back then there were few child-friendly places to meet by day either. The idea was that we would create a sticky-finger-free oasis and the evening was sacrosanct. The preceding day was all geared around it. Chores done, nappies washed and on the line, children up on the moors for the afternoon to wear them out, tea at 4pm, baths at 5pm, bed at 6pm, no messing. Men left in charge and we would rotate around each other's sitting rooms and give vent to our creativity and attempt intelligent conversations about more than who sold Milupa baby food the cheapest. It was here that I first heard of Susan Hill's book The Magic Apple Tree for example, I should probably make a quilt about that book for that reason alone.

It is true, you do stitch what is happening in your life into a quilt and we could all remember what we had made in those years. I was working on a pastel pink and green Dresden Plate quilt (weren't we all in the 1980s) to celebrate our tenth wedding anniversary, which is about right as this year we celebrate our thirty-fifth, and I had suitably named it Tin Plate. Stitched over papers I could usually manage a couple of petals while the spuds boiled and the children were watching Blue Peter. I really should be working on something 'coral' now.

After about two years of Tuesdays and several quilts later we suddenly wondered whether anyone else might be interested and perhaps we could start a group. We hired the Guide Hall for the evening, put posters up around the town and an advert in the local paper, and when the evening arrived the three of us sat in the Guide Hall and waited nervously. We didn't have to wait very long. Soon the place was heaving, one of the three of us had a six week-old baby who slept in his carry cot on the windowsill and thus became the youngest member, but on that night Tavistock's quilting group, The Goosey Quilters was born.

The three of us belonged to the group for several years, organising visiting speakers and curating exhibitions until like all things it was the right time to let go and leave it in new hands with new ideas (that sounds ominously rancorous, it wasn't) and as friends we drifted apart as the children went to different schools and we all picked up our hard-won careers again. We've done Christmas cards and stopped to chat in town but that's about it.

Last Saturday the group held its twenty-fifth birthday celebrations and the three of us were invited back as the Founding Mothers to share in the party over at Cowslip Workshops in Launceston. There was lunch followed by the traditional show-and-tell that features at any gathering of quilters, and one of our three produced the tumbling blocks baby quilt that we had made for her right under her nose on those Tuesday evenings, making some flimsy excuse that is was a for a tea cosy ( heck of a big teapot but she never suspected).

It was really lovely to catch up with old friends and you realise how easy it is to lose touch, but also, having shared those years of small babies together, how easy it is to pick up where you left off. We agreed that it was definitely time to thread a needle together again, and that the value of those friendships as you get older just can't be quantified or over-estimated, and nor should they be allowed to lapse into non-existence.

There was  birthday cake with candles which the three of us were asked to cut...


and plenty of inspirational quilts to marvel over. One of the legacies of that group will be the hundreds of beautiful quilts that have been made as a result and quilts will feature large in the dovegreyreader tent at Port Eliot next weekend. I owe a great deal of that lifelong love of it all to those years and those friends.

Spring Cleaning...

Happy Bank Holiday weekend (yet again) everyone. To explain for those outside the UK, none of us seemed to have worked a full week for ages now what with late Easter, Royal Weddings and then May Day, and now look, it's half term already, but even so I am a very long way behind with e mail replies (about 180 last time I looked) so my apologies to someone who wrote me a lovely one talking about books and the blog but also asking for a craft activity update.

It's been a bit lean to be honest, probably connected to hours in the day (lack of) and the fact that at this time of year I hardly watch any television which is my most profitable time for cracking on with some knitting or quilting. I am indebted to RevCheryl, a regular around these virtual parts, who very kindly shifted the burden of owning too much Noro & Rowan wool, that was not knitting itself into anything, from her house to mine. In return one day soon I will send her a knitted Archbishop (every Vicar should have one) and I have a RevCheryl box of books filling, but meanwhile I am now staring down the wool bounty and waiting for the return of Strictly when I will cast on and sit forth and knit.

Cheryl might want to look away now because she had already put in some marathon knitting hours, but I have enough trouble remembering where I'm up to with my own knitting let alone figuring things out with someone else's. So I had a massive frogging afternoon, a huge skein wind-up, a whopping great big dunk-it-all in the sink session and then an enormous dry-athon over the Aga...this isn't the half of it and now I'm poring the books for ideas.

I have been busy with a bit of spring cleaning though.

My mum was a stalwart of the winter-summer curtain swap. Down and in the wash went the winter ones, up went the summer ones having been carefully put away clean the previous autumn. I manage a very minute fraction of this with winter and summer curtains in the bedroom, and of course if only I'd bothered to put them away clean how much simpler it would all be, but no. Beyond that it was to my horror that I realised last year that several sets of curtains around the house had been up and untouched for a rather embarrassing amount of time... ten years worth of embarrassment to be truthful. I mean where does the time go, and the problem is I would normally have wearied of them and made new long before. I got fed up with the last lot (patterned) after about three years, but plain colours complement our surroundings and if you choose the right colour then that curtain-fatigue just doesn't set in.

But all the same ten years .. I can't believe a single one of you has curtains that have been up that long unwashed, so I set to on a mammoth laundrification. Far too expensive to get six sets of curtains dry cleaned and so three days later please don't ask how many acres of double width, triple-pleat headed curtain and lining I had de-hooked, ungathered, washed, hung on the line to dry and then ironed, re-gathered, re-hooked and hung, but it was obvious when it came to the re-hang I would discover Sod's Law of the Drape.

The ones you don't want to shrink are bound to...

The ones you really do want to shrink refuse to.

A year on I can verify that the Law of the Drop is also rubbish, when you want them to drop they will have none of it, when they have no need to they do so exponentially.

No plans to go through this again until 2020 (Deo Volente)

 

Knit Your Own Royal Wedding ~ Fiona Goble

Alright, I'll own up since someone has asked... of course I have a copy of Knit Your Own Royal Wedding on order, though I am a bit worried about the timing. The book isn't published until later this week so that leaves just four weeks, probably sufficient unto a corgi or two, though I may cast on the Queen for good measure and I do think a knitted Archbishop of Canterbury could be just the thing.

The only way I can see to get good mileage out of all this effort in the years to come is for it double as a Nativity set so I may have to add in a knitted tea towel for Her Majesty and lamb substitutes for corgis, and then there's the headache of deciding who should double as the Three Wise Men. Archbishop Rowan's in, and possibly William and perhaps Philip.

In fact I am a sea of indecision with my knitting at the moment. All jumpers finished, socks chugging along as always and having visited a friend and sat amongst her knitted mermaids, border collies and mice I opted to knit some 'things' for a change and sent for a few books.

Books with patterns for flowers, fruit, vegetables and cakes arrived and so the dilemma was between knitted cup cakes, victoria sponge or a pumpkin, but then Knit and Purl Pets by Claire Garland turned up. Twenty  patterns for "little pets with big personalities" and now I'm torn between Itty the guinea pig or Socks the lop-eared rabbit, but then the knitted chickens look really must have too.

Please don't ask why, or of what use, because I have no idea but have no fear the minute I cast on Rowan Williams you will be the first to know.

 

All is not Bliss with the dovegreyknitting...

I haven't mentioned knitting for a while which of course doesn't mean I haven't been doing any.

I have been ploughing on with the Debbie Bliss Shawl Collar jumper which I think I might have been about a year in the doing of, and here's what it should look like when it's finished...

I quite like it when the basket of wool has been replaced by a basket of knitted bits, and though I can't get the colour right in this picture you'll have to take my word that it is a very nice pea green and the wool is Debbie Bliss Donegal Luxury Tweed Aran.


So I had finally reached the collar stage, and having talked myself into a 'you-can-do-this' upbeat mood about picking up 188 stitches on a circular needle and setting up the rib properly, I then had several attempts at getting it right and a few weeks later I'm still not really sure I have.


The picture does make it look much worse than it is but puckers have riddled the front edge and my stress levels have risen to distraction accordingly but at least I remembered the buttonholes this time. There may need to be some judicious leaning on the iron over a damp tea towel to try and ease out these crimps and perhaps it will look better when it's on, but this won't be going anywhere near this year's village show... the WI judge would spot those puckers from Land's End.

Things are looking up a little now that I have stitched down the front overlap seams and set in one sleeve, and one more episode of South Riding should see completion....and this picture captures the colour more accurately too.

But still to come, that awful moment when you finish it and try it on. I know it will go over my head but beyond that it's still a bit touch and go... all is not bliss with this creation yet awhile.

So tell me what knitting is going on out there... I need something to do next and currently I'm a bit tempted by the Knit Your Own Dog idea, which would make a change from socks.

 

Hats on...

I have long been of the opinion that I don't suit a hat and I think you can probably see my point...

So for the last however many years a hat has not been an essential item of my core wardrobe...until this winter that is. I just about survived last winter hatless and not wanting to look ridiculous, but this year I couldn't care less. I have suddenly reached that point in life when I'll wear purple if it's warm especially as my head seems to have reverted to its neonatal state and started to lose vast amounts of heat.


I think the error of my hat ways has obviously been about style, with a misguided adherence to the form of the cloche, combined with wishing I had at some time in my life had the thick long blond hair like Mary Hopkin or the  bone structure that would make me look like Twiggy. That's clearly not going to happen now either but suddenly I wondered about a beret.

However having grown up with this picture I had been understandably reluctant to return to the genre, if you look carefully you will see those ears are folding under the weight of that beret and I do remember it being the size of a dinner plate.

So a new knitting book arrived which seemed to offer some hope. It's written by a new convert to the ancient art and is aimed at the novice knitter and Purls of Wisdom The Book of Knitting by Jenny Lord is replete with some fashionable language and attitudes.

'... it's fun, relaxing, gives you the excuse to watch crap telly...'

'...knitting is no longer relegated to the happily retired.'

Apparently it's all about connecting us with our ancestors, though I'd have to disagree with the suggestion that women's lib made us all put our knitting away. Some of us kept the faith and were libbed and egged on by that Twiggy pattern and Fiona wool at 2s/6d a ball...

...so we never actually stopped, and we weren't knitting two piece suits to wear with our pearls either.
No we were knitting those His & Hers Patons Husky jackets weren't we.

Nor do I think that knitting in the 1980s was the 'byword for skint and failed to make the grade', at least not here chez dovegrey. Yes admittedly the knitting world was waiting for Kaffe to come along, and yes we were skint because the interest rate on the mortgage was 15%, but skint wasn't ever going to stop me knitting. Anyway that all probably says far more about me as a knitter of a certain vintage rather than being any criticism of Jenny Lord's encouraging clarion call to the modern-day knitter, so I was delighted, having set off on the beret trail, to find a Classic Beret pattern in the book.

Having acquired some lovely yarn, Katia Azteca, half way between Aran & Chunky weight I was all systems go. It knits up nicely on 5mm needles and gorgeous colours which, though 50/50 wool and acrylic blend and thus normally against my religion, looks and feels soft and warm and affordable at £6.75 per 100gms for an experiment that might end up on Etsy.com. So I set up the KnitPro circular needles, cast on with glee and  immediately replaced the ordinary rib with a springier offset one to cope with any largeness of head. I was on the increases in no time...*K9 Inc1; repeat from * to end of round and the number steadily increased with each row as I knitted the brim.

Now I don't know about you but if I increase I always do it with a nice tidy M1 stitch, picking up the loop inbetween the stitches and knitting into the back of it, so off I went gaily on a beret frolic of my own until several rounds later it was patently obvious I wasn't supposed to have these spare 7 stitches at the end of each row. I had been telling myself that this beret perhaps had some clever and increase-less chunk at the back or something.
Isn't it amazing how long you'll carry on knitting knowing full well it's wrong but hoping for a miracle?
Thinking you know best when in fact you don't and expecting any minute it will all come right?
Finally I look at the instructions regarding abbreviations or 'Skills' as Jenny calls them...
Increase one (Inc1): p 70
I turn to p 70 with a heavy heart...
Knit into the front and back of the same stitch... big difference, my M1 has thrown the numbers out entirley, cue frogging.
So still no beret to show for it and in the meantime I've bought one, on the basis that if this works I'll need several, and which I'm experimenting with in the privacy of mine own home and all before I hit the streets wearing it. So far things are looking hopeful...no wild guffawing as yet but no pictures either.

 

 

I think I want one of these...

My thanks to Ruth for sending this link ...