Indigo and a quilt

Indigo is my favourite colour. I love its inky velvet shadows. And I've been promising myself that I'll have a go at a quilt ever since Meg at New Threads at The Fairground in Weyhill near Andover (http://www.new-threads.com/) came and did a really inspiring practical session at our 'young WI' (or as my husband calls it, the Decaf WI. I'm not sure what he thinks those who attend the more mature village WI are on!).

So I am going for a lap quilt based on a very simple design from a book recommended by Meg: Quick & Easy Quilts for Kids by Connie Ewbank. The idea is that I will get to try every bit of quiltmaking, I should finish it and I will be able to do it all by hand.

This will be the centre of the quilt top as laid out on the floor, so that I can remember where the pieces go. It includes a batik and some Japanese indigo shibori fabric. It also includes a bit of an old shirt of my husband's.

For the backing, I'm wondering about using a piece of indigo dyed fabric that I bought in Botswana, cos otherwise those treasures just get put away and never see the light of day. Anyway, a long way to go yet!

I made a note in my sketchbook, too.

My plan is to quilt it using kantha stitching - just a simple running stitch all over, running vertically, following the layout.

Bacon & Moore - more, more!!

On Thursday we went to the Ashmolean in Oxford, before the Bacon & Moore exhibition finishes on 19th Jan. I had high hopes, mainly for the Bacon, but it was the Moore that blew me away. In the first room, his drawings and then in the second room, his sculpture. I guess I used to walk past it in Battersea Park and not even look.

First, his drawings in shelters during the Blitz, like this one below.

The Three Fates - Henry Moore (1948)

He seems to have incorporated a wax crayon resist and a lot of black scribble, and the figures really look as though they are emerging from darkness. Although it's hard to see from this, the one on the left holds a baby and the figure in the middle is knitting.

Then the sculpture. Again, I don't think that this picture really shows what I saw - such a friendly sculpture, a classical head, quite cycladic, I thought. And a lovely rounded handful of a belly. I just wanted to crawl onto her lap!

Woman - Henry Moore (1957-8)

I came home and ordered the book London's War - The Shelter Drawings of Henry Moore.

I got different things out of the Bacon. Funnily enough, the piece that made the most impression was pretty ugly and scrubby even for Bacon, I thought. But a FIERCE composition, so a huge tick!

A massive foreground and a two fingers of a calligraphic green line right across the middle. Take that!

Papercuts - a very Happy New Year's Eve!

What a lovely low key way to spend New Year's Eve! A few friends and an hour's playing with the girls before midnight.

A friend brought round a book of Japanese papercut projects and with a sheet of tracing paper, some origami paper and a scalpel each, we were set.

We were so busy, we nearly forgot to rejoin the guys as the clock struck.

Happy New Year!

Sketchbooks & Christmas

I suppose I'm still working out what I want my sketchbooks to be. They seem to be places where things that inspire or excite me get noted, where ephemera from my life get somehow incorporated and where the odd idea gets noted, or if I'm really lucky, worked through, and quite importantly I am finding, all with a dash of guilt if there isn't some original drawing of some sort included.

This was the result of Christmas: amongst other things

collaged bits from: the local butcher's receipt for our chicken, a woeful joke from a cracker, sections from the most splenetic round robin that dropped onto the map, stamps from a card from Japan

and my scribbly drawings of chickens. I wanted to have a go at a turkey, but we didn't eat one so...

And another couple of recent sketchbook pages while I'm at it:

I think there may be a theme here: the more outrageously patterned the more I ooh and aah.

I laughed out loud when I saw the A/W 13 Celine pictures in a magazine at the hairdressers (I always seem to make lots of notes when my roots are cooking). The photographer is Jurgen Teller and the model is Daria Werbowy. 

And my mind was obviously still in that mode when I saw the Breviari d'amor pic in the Guardian or Observer review section a few weekends ago. I loved the background patterning again and as for the subject: the weighing of souls... There are lots of other images from this amazing book, begun in 1288 and purporting to deal with the 'reconciliation of love for God with the erotic amours of the troubadour lyric' (Wikipedia). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matfre_Ermengau

The Wellcome Library has just bought another interesting little item, once owned by Edith Sitwell. A medical almanac which they are going to digitise and make available. I can't wait!

http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2013/dec/29/wellcome-library-medieval-medical-almanac

For me and my world I think this all means: love pattern and go for it!