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drawing breath

Life always gets away from me in the summer when time away (lovely as it is) means twice as much work to fit into the weeks afterwards – and it’s not long before we set off again, this time heading down to Cornwall. In between, a little space to draw breath and share what I’m up to.

Our visit to Tiree was momentous, to say the least. Alan’s on sabbatical next year and we’ve decided to seize the day and do something we’ve been thinking about for years – to live and work in a small community on a remote and windswept island. So we went there looking for a home – and found one! We’re now jubilant and terrified in about equal measure. The move won’t be till November but there’s going to be plenty to do before then. We have two daughters starting uni this autumn too, one moving from Cornwall to Liverpool, and one just moving round the corner in Birmingham, but both will need help with their stuff. I’ll need to work hard to keep time for art among all this excitement!

While we were on Tiree I at last joined in with the World Beach Project.

And I did a bit more sampling of gathered fabrics while I was away. The ones in the middle will end up being dyed, I think.

I got fascinated by the effect of visible stitching…

and tying…

Tomorrow I’m going to a short workshop with the intriguing title “Kendal Green meets Shibori Dyeing”. I think I’ve mentioned before that Kendal’s town motto is Pannus mihi Panis – “Cloth is my Bread”; and the arts centre is having a festival to celebrate the town’s heritage with lots of textile events. Kendal Green is an old dye colour mentioned in Shakespeare, but I think we’re going to use a modern version! It should be fun, anyway. I’m just wondering if I can take my gathered samples along and throw them in too!

And these are some pics of Tiree I’ve put on Flickr, colours of sea and sky, rust and sand, light and water.

1. Gunna Sound, 2. rocks at Caoles, 3. light and waves, 4. Balevullin, 5. light, waves and seaweed, 6. fences at Balevullin, 7. cows on the beach at Balevullin, 8. rust and lichen, 9. Crossapol beach, 10. oystercatchers, 11. rusty machinery on Crossapol beach, 12. sunset, 13. clear sea, Gunna Sound, 14. rusty metal at Hynish, 15. Crossapol beach, 16. Balevullin

visiting Scotland

I only live about 60 miles from the Scottish border but I don’t often cross it. Last week, however, I went twice! Tuesday was a visit to the Gracefield Arts Centre in Dumfries to review Ruth Lee‘s exhibition, Reading Between the Lines, for the next issue of Workshop on the Web. It’s an excellent show of Ruth’s work and well worth seeing, if you are anywhere nearby before 3 November. There was also a preview copy of Ruth’s new book Contemporary Knitting for Textile Artists, which has gone on my wish list! I’ll post a link to the exhibition review when it’s published in December.

Then on Saturday I caught the train up to Edinburgh to visit my friend Lee and her husband Andy. Lee is a fibre artist who creates wonderfully vivid images in felt, like this "Sheep Number 12".

Lee took me on an eclectic tour of the city. First to the Elephant House – not the zoo, but the coffee house where JK Rowling wrote the Harry Potter books. I have a passion for elephants so I was overwhelmed by the sight of so many in one place – models, photos, books, hangings, furniture… this one was given to the Elephant House by “Linda Greer, on behalf of her brothers and sisters, in memory of her father Jimmy Ferguson”.

After delicious coffee and cake we took a circuitous route through the city, via the delightful Dean Village and along the Water of Leith to the Museum of Modern Art. In front of the museum is the stunning ‘Landform‘ by Charles Jencks – a landscape of banks and curved pools that you can walk on and around.

(The tall slender shadow is Lee and the small round one is me.)

We ended up sitting in Lee and Andy’s pretty garden, drinking more coffee and enjoying the late afternoon sunshine. A beautiful day in a beautiful city.

day out and colour mixing

Tuesday sounded as if it was going to be the last fine day for a while, so Alan suggested we went into the Lakes for a few hours. We drove up towards Keswick and over Honister Pass, then on to Whinlatter (a favourite haunt when our girls were children). I had fun taking pictures from the van window on the way, one or two turned out to be quite interesting combinations of blur and focus.

The range of autumn colours in the mountains is incredible.

This is the spectacular metal sculpture of an osprey outside the Visitor Centre at Whinlatter. (Real ospreys nest in the area). I’ve uploaded some more images to Flickr.

I have been working on colour mixing exercises with stitch for OCA Textiles 1, using dotty stitching – French knots in a pointillist style. This calls for good primary and secondary colours, and I soon discovered that I actually have very few of those in my stash – mostly variegated threads and random bits and bobs. I started a very small sample in some red and yellow threads I dyed a while back, and ran out of those, so today I went down to town and bought a small rainbow – well, two rainbows, one in stranded cotton and one in wool. That should keep me going for a while!

I was in the library too and saw this dramatic, enormous knitting installation in the foyer. They said I could take some pics to share with you. Kendal is a town whose history is intimately connected with wool production – its motto is ‘pannus mihi panis’ – ‘cloth is my bread’, or as people often interpret it ‘wool is my bread’. We even have our own breed of sheep – the Rough Fell. This project celebrates that heritage.

photos from Aveiro

I finally managed to upload my photos of Portugal to Flickr. We had a lovely time in Aveiro staying with Palexa and she took us to some beautiful places. Some of the photos are mine and some are by Alan. I tend to focus on details and he on vistas but occasionally it’s the other way round… Looking at them makes me want to be there again! Such wonderful sun and light. Thanks Palexa for lending us your camera 🙂

weekend’s work

I’ve been painting some colour wheels for OCA Textiles 1 – they didn’t turn out quite as I expected, though. I was using Brusho inks and I don’t know if it was the way I mixed them but the lemon and the golden yellow were so similar in hue that I didn’t get all the variations I was expecting. I’ll have another go with some gouache paints. Then I spent a bit of time mixing tints and tones in acrylics and experimenting with mixing in touches of a complementary colour. I could do this kind of thing all day long – I just love it.

mixing colours

I’ve also been painting silk organza and pongee for my appliquÃ© hanging for City and Guilds – one piece of each in reds, one in greens and one in purples. These are fronts and backs to go with these felts. The next stage is to machine quilt the three layers, incorporating shadow applique, then cut back into it to expose some of the felt. The organza will be the top layer.

silk

I found this picture on the camera as well – it’s the sky from my office window, one evening a few weeks ago when it wasn’t quite as wet as today!

Kendal sky

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