i didn’t even get round to doing this until yesterday, but since bank holiday mondays = sunday hours round here i reckoned i might just get away with it. but sleepless children kept me from uploading it till gone midnight, so tuesday it is.

this is part of a playdough toy where you squeeze the dough through and it makes tubey shapes, it’s scaled about 2:1 and that gave me a bit of trouble getting everything to match up properly. i don’t know exactly how long it took, but it was aaages. i didn’t realise until i stood back from it to take the picture quite how bendy i’d made it. oops

there’s been lots of crafting going on here recently, just no time to blog it all, will hopefully catch up when the kids go back next week, but in the mean time there’s pics on my flickr

just a fragment today, not even a direct observation, more an impression, to remind me of what i liked about this quilt by claire higgott (again, no link, please let me know if you know her website). i figure i can just about get away with it thanks to my brownie points for a) taking my sketch book and b) actually drawing. i did try a couple on the journey, but people/the train moved too fast for me.

i had an unscheduled day out yesterday, thanks to our last minute decision to cancel our planned festival because of the weather forecast. i know loads of people with young kids left this particular festival early last year because the weather was so dreadful and i didn’t fancy being part of the action replay. the promised rain did materialise and on balance we’re happier to be warm, dry and relaxed at home than we are disappointed to be missing out on festie fun.

my added bonus was that i got to swap one kind of festival for another and headed off to birmingham for the festival of quilts. i’ve not been before and i have to say it was pretty overwhelming. there’s only so much embellishment one woman (well, this woman) can take in one day! there was a lot there in the way of both quilts and shopping that was not to my taste. there’s so much exciting work going on online – in both modern and traditional styles – that i tend to forget the things that put me off the idea of quilting before i somehow fell into doing it. those things – notably fabric and colour choices – were visible in abundance at the festival, although considering the average age of the audience i shouldn’t be surprised that i found a lot of it rather old fashioned.

but that’s not to disparage the time, skill and effort that went into all the work on show, i can still appreciate those things even though i don’t necessarily share the aesthetic. in particular there was some beautiful hand quilting that was astonishingly accomplished and patient. and thanks to the size of the show there was still plenty to inspire even this picky bugger although i think that seeing so many quilts en masse dilutes the power of the individual pieces somewhat, which is a shame.

i did take pictures but i’m wary of publishing them here, not least because i didn’t spring for a show guide so i can’t properly credit many of the competition entrants, so i’m limited to namechecking some of the better known quiltmakers who merited a place in the whitewall galleries, although i think i was actually most impressed by some of the entries in the children’s classes, particularly the under-9s, which showed real originality along with surprisingly skilful use of tools and materials.

a few recurring themes emerged in what caught my eye; texture, printing and limited colour palettes being the main ones. it was the printing that really appealed to me in chrisine restall’s persephone quilt (you can see work from the same series under “gallery 3″ on her website), and i noticed a lot of text scattered around the festival. i find it can be quite jarring to be addressed so directly, so explicitly, through the work (as opposed to a title, caption or description posted alongside) since i’m in a different, nonverbal, mode when looking at quilts or pictures. but that arresting quality can be used to good advantage if used sparingly i think.

i found susan brandeis‘ use of layering computer-printed fabrics to produce an almost hologramatic sense of depth totally mesmerising. her imagery is that of encyclopaedias, landscapes, aerial and satellite photographs, which had me hook, line and sinker. i just glanced at her work as i was passing by, but it drew me back to look closer, then to take in the whole from a distance, then back up close, i literally couldn’t get away!

if anyone knows of jacqueline heinz’s website please let me know, i can find odds and ends of her work googling, but no homepage. her work reflects her background as an aspiring feltmaker (no surprise that it appealed to me really), the use of raw fibre along with her restrained palette and wonderful sense of movement provided a welcome oasis of calm in a visually frenetic show. i also found lesley alexander’s strongly textural work – inspired by that perennial student favourite peeling paint – incredibly refreshing, plus she loves pintucks as much as i do! (actually, i’ve never sewn a pintuck in my life, but i have the feet, the needles and everything, i really must get round to playing with them). it was great to have a chat with her about going to art school as a mature student, it’s strengthened my resolve yet again, just in case i was beginning to waver.

as for shopping, i was reasonably restrained, i should just be thankful i’m on more of a spinning/weaving kick right now. i bought some of the japanese yarn dyed fabrics i noticed on a few of the stalls – neutral, textural, interesting weaves, and something i would never have bought online, i can’t imagine how they would translate on screen. also a book on hungarian indigo dyeing from the hungarian patchwork guild. i just love blue and white fabrics, i’m irresistably drawn to them, but this was a tradition i was utterly ignorant of and the fabrics themselves (which were also for sale and i think i deserve a medal for resisting) are just beautiful. ooooh look! you can buy the fabrics online

i couldn’t bear to post something this long without pics so i’ve included some shots from another day out. my always-temperamental sx-70 gave up the ghost a little while ago. my always-wonderful fella got me a new one for my birthday.

it’s a bit of an understatement to say that i’m more of a starter than a finisher by nature. most of the joy i get from finishing a project comes from clearing the way to start the next thing. and tbh that’s generally tempered by the fact that i’ve usually already started on the next thing my little room has become a veritable shitheap treasure trove of WiPs at various stages of completion recently.

so today when i was given something wonderful – a whole afternoon to myself – i decided to get round to a bit of finishing. i feel sooo cleansed and productive. after 3 weeks of school holidays the feeling of making genuine progress, of doing a job and it not being undone behind your back 10 minutes later, is a rare relief.

i worked through my mending pile, sewing buttons, darts and binding, i learned how to kitchener stitch knitting and how to hemstich handwovens, and while i’m not blogging everything just now (which marks a project as well and truly finished) i took pictures which is the time consuming bit. i’ve even done some long-overdue paperwork and i may yet get round to my teetering pile of admin before the night’s out.

i only warped the loom shown in the picture last night and the project is still ongoing, but i did finish the shandy, and a couple more

pen on recycled scrap book paper, done during my break at work.

this has been a long time in the making, it seems like it’s been hanging half-done in my little room for weeks and weeks, although there really wasn’t too much to it. the fabrics are globaltex furnishing fabrics, a little heavy for a quilt but they should be perfect for the matching cushions that are past the planning stage but not yet actually in the making stage… they’re a lot more traditional than my usual taste, alarmingly kidstonesque in fact, but i reckon that’s acceptable – indeed mandatory – for camping/picnic purposes.

i wanted to do something simple, and inspired by recently reading making welsh quilts, i went for a traditional “strippy” top. i was undecided on the quilting until i’d done my practice sandwich to judge tension etc. and realised i wanted to do something curvy that crossed over itself. this pattern is traditionally used on borders, called a welsh trail in the book, although can’t find any other reference to it as that (anyone recognise it by another name?). i ran it horizontally, the chequerboards where the points cross staggered so the curves fit neatly against one another. it’s not too easy to see as the batt is poly and i prewashed the fabrics as i didn’t want it to look too quilty this time. where you can see it’s mostly because my pencil markings haven’t quite washed out (my usual disappearing marker disappeared before i could get it as far as the sewing machine).

the backing is PUL, i got the fabric from a cloth nappy maker, it’s used for making wraps. i looked long and hard at waterproof fabrics and PUL seemed the most fabricy, less rustly than ripstop nylon, more lightweight than cordura. i briefly considered shower curtains etc, but having sewn with them before i thought i’d go for something designed to be sewn AND repeatedly washed. we’ll see how well it stands up to use – i could have gone for a thicker waterproof coating that might make it more stone-proof, but that would have had to come from the states. on reflection i don’t think pale blue is the ideal choice either, but we won’t be looking at that side much obviously, to maintain the waterproofing, i didn’t sew the quilting through the PUL, just the top and batting. since the PLU is stretch (which i didn’t twig until it arrived) there’s a little bagging as it’s only joined at the edges and the blanket is ~120cm by 150cm, but nothing terrible. putting it together was a dream thanks to my new discovery: 505 basting spray. it lasted beautifully through all the hefting about during quilting, and only lost its grip in the odd place on the smooth-surfaced PUL. while it’s not cheap i reckon it beats pins into a cocked hat when it comes to ease of use. kim at spoonflower recently pointed out a study that shows basting sprays are damaging to quilt fabrics in the long term, but whilst the conclusion drawn by the researchers is to avoid all basting sprays, in fact their finding was that 505 was the one brand that didn’t show any difference to the control samples. certainly for this project i had no qualms, and i will use the 505 again, but i may be more circumspect if my quiltmaking ever improves beyond the lets-see-if-we-can-make-it-hold-together-past-the-first-wash stage and moves closer to the realms of heirloom quilting i considered various strap arrangements i could attach to the blanket, but in the end decided to keep it simple with a separate long strap, looped at either end, that slips over and allows it to be carried over a shoulder. the polkadots that proved so elusive on the binding show much better on the strap (i cut along the grain not the pattern, not thinking they would be that far misaligned), although i actually think the now-you-see-them-now-you-don’t effect is rather charming.

this is going for its first outing next week when we go on our traditional music festival summer holiday, i’ll report back on its fitness for duty and whether it floats in mud

sheesh, strike tuesday, it took me this long to get the pics uploaded. sketch wednesday has a lovely ring don’t you think?

we went camping by the beach on the weekend (and had a really lovely time) and i wasn’t organised enough to make an auto post for sunday. so by way of apology here’s 1 1/2 sketches.

the first is M, although it’s only a few lines it’s not a bad likeness and i consider it finished. it’s part of a page of fragments of the girls watching a film, the only time they sit even slightly still enough to sketch and G not even then – the page is full of barely outlined fractions of toddler; an arm here, an ear there…

the second illustrates the problem of trying to find time to draw in the holidays. i briefly had the place to myself with M at a friend’s and G asleep so i thought i’d have a go at a pen drawing. i spent too long trying to make sure everything was in the right place, and before i could get to properly inking in the lines she woke up. this is about 20 minutes’ worth, another 20 and it might have been worth something, it was shaping up quite nicely i thought.