Dreaming Spirals

While we were away at Easter, I saw lots of crows and seagulls.  I think they were attracted by all the food scraps around, but I took the opportunity to get a bit closer than usual.  Crows, especially, seem to be particularly suspicious and will fly away as soon as you get close enough to take a picture with more than a black dot in it! 

This crow’s profile looks quite scary

But from a distance it’s not so bad…

This seagull looks quite at home in an urban environment…

And I quite like the effect of this one.  It would be better with a total background of blue sky though. 

And I include this because I like the effect of footprints in the sand:

Golly, where does the time go?  I can’t believe it’s 2 weeks since my visit to the West Midlands, where the Black Country Museum is based.    It’s called the Black Country in that area because of all the mines and industry which abounded in the 19th century. 

This is the house which my great great great grandparents, Benjamin and Elizabeth Meredith, lived in in the latter half of the 1800s.  It is called the Tilted Cottage because of the effects of the subsidence caused by mining in the area!   Apparently the Museum took great care to rebuild it that way when they moved it brick by brick to its new home.

Benjamin was a bricklayer but I don’t know if he built this house.  Most of my other ancestors were coal miners, potters and farmers, though the butt filers listed on several of the census returns amused the kids!  Typical male teenage humour…

The main part of the museum consisted of a reconstructed village – here are the ‘back to back’ terraced houses typical of a lot of Victorian workers’ buildings.    They are two houses put together only one room wide.  I used to live in a terraced house till I was 11 and it felt strangely familiar, although it wasn’t a ‘back to back’ type.  Click on the link if you are unclear what I mean – I was a bit vague about it and looked it up on Wikipedia!

I liked it because you could wander around all the back gardens and yards and see exactly what was there, the washrooms and coal houses and chicken coops…

The museum also links up with the canal system and going down there I saw these geese with their goslings:

It reminded me of the train journey up there, where the train driver stopped for some geese and their young family who were crossing the railway track!

This was the view from my cafe table when I was eating my lunch:

You could also go down a mine but I passed on that as I’ve been down several already and preferred to stay in the warm sunny outdoors!

If you’re a member of QuiltWOW, you’ll notice I have an article in the new June issue, about painting on fabric with acrylic paints. Maggie Grey asked me in the spring to write one, and I was thrilled because her online workshops site, Workshop on the Web is well respected and well known and QuiltWOW is the quilting version of it. As you’ll know if you are a regular reader, I love online workshops!

If you haven’t come across them before, there are free taster issues online which are well worth visiting.

Here is a sneak peek at one of the photos in my article:

I painted lots more fabric that I didn’t use for the article so I might post pics of them in the blog over the next month or two.

I was also honoured to be asked by John Turner, editor of the journal of the NSW Guild of Craft Bookbinders, if he could reprint my tutorial on making concertina books in the journal. Of course I agreed, and he kindly sent me a number of issues of the journal which I’m looking forward to reading.

If you missed the tutorial, which I wrote back in December 2006 and which still gets hits today, here’s the link to it.

Summer always seems to be a busy time with exams and kids’ outdoor activities, so I haven’t had much time for textile stuff. I recently bought some family tree software – other members of my family have done most of the hard work and have got back as far as the 1700s in some cases – but I thought I’d like to have a go myself. The software came with a free month’s subscription to Ancestry so I have been making good use of it while I can, delving into census returns and trying to solve the mystery of missing persons and wrongly transcribed names! I also went on a visit to the Black Country Museum just outside Birmingham where they have a cottage that my great great great grandparents used to live in! More in the next post, when I’ve uploaded my photos!

This is just a quick reminder that I still have about 8 fabric bundles for sale… and as a way of clearing some space in my studio the next person in the UK to buy some can have 3 bundles for the price of 2! Just pay with the Paypal buttons for two and email me to let me know which other one you want and I’ll mark them as sold. I’ll post on here when they’ve gone. You can find them here. This offer will expire at midnight on Wednesday 3rd June.

And I also have a number of Print Gocco machines for sale – I haven’t got any B6 machines but I have several PG10s and PG10 Supers. They are on my Print Gocco machines page.

If you haven’t the foggiest what I’m talking about, there’s a page of links about the Print Gocco here.

This is a card I printed with it. I really must get it out and print some more… they really are addictive once you get going!

Well, the patio is looking a bit better stocked now;   I just hope these French beans will look as healthy after the slugs sniff them out!

And here are the tomatoes all bedded in!   The big ones are Alicante, the smaller ones Gardener’s Delight.

Just to end this little horticultural interlude, the wisteria at the front of our house is in full bloom; it smells heavenly.

And to get back to textile content, DH and I went and got a HUGE piece of MDF for my printing table the other day – here it is in my studio.  So now I won’t have to keep pinning and unpinning fabric and moving it along to do the next bit…

Here’s a sneak peek at my reeds hanging no.1.  The stuff on the table above is being auditioned for hanging no. 2.

This year I decided I want to grow some tomatoes and French beans – we used to grow amazing tomatoes in the last house we lived in, because the patio area by the French windows was such a suntrap, and tomato plants loved it.  But I hadn’t managed to find a comparable spot in this house, even though we’ve been here over 10 years now (having three growing kids might have had something to do with it!).  The house faces south so the front gets the morning sun, but the back, where the patio is, faces north.    Besides this, the patio was a bit overgrown a week or so ago…

This is it halfway through being cleared!   Most of the pots are now empty because they were full of weeds. 

What I decided to do about the tomatoes was to take photos of the various possible areas hourly throughout the day to see which bit got the most sun. 

This is the bit that won… trouble is, that was a tad overgrown too…

That is the garden path you can see in the foreground, so I had to clear that and reclaim a couple of feet against the wall so I could put two growbags there.  And what a difference!

I took this before I’d cleared all the debris… but that’s all gone now so I’ll give it till the end of May for the weather to do its worst and plant them to see how the tomatoes fare there.

While I’m on the subject of gardens, I would like to draw on your expertise … in the front garden, we have some mystery plants which come up every spring.  I think they belong to the onion family because they smell of onions when you rub them, and I’d love to identify them to see if they are edible.  These are the leaves… an untidy mass of droopy plants.  I’m pretty sure they’re bulbs.

Here is a photo of them over the wall:

They have a small white flower, about an inch in size.  I couldn’t get a very good photo of it, unfortunately – I did pick one and tried to take a close up but it didn’t seem to have enough contrast to focus properly. 

Can anyone shed any light on this?  I did look it up in my wild flower book and wondered if it was something like ramsons but they have wider leaves and clusters of small flowers, but I think it is similar.