Dreaming Spirals

A sweet shop in Tours.  Unfortunately for the kids, it was closed!

I liked this pyramid shaped ‘roof’ sprouting up from the ground.  It seemed to have a staircase leading to somewhere mysterious down in the depths…

These ropes were carved into the wall of a house in Tours:

A boat on the river Loire…

I was amused by this one - it reminded me of Noah’s Ark!

[Read more →]

Via Sharon B’s blog, I found this useful set of links to blog posts entitled What everybody ought to know about blogging.

I have only worked my way down to the third link so far, which is 50 tips to unclutter your blog. My sidebar is very full - what links do you like and which annoy you? Should I move the archives and the blogroll to separate pages, or don’t you care? Any thoughts and comments will be carefully considered!

[Read more →]

Sharon B’s blog, In A Minute Ago, has moved - she asked readers to spread the word, so here I am telling you!

[Read more →]

I meant to post this yesterday but I spilt tea on my laptop keyboard so it had to languish overnight to dry, with all detachable parts duly detached.  Luckily it doesn’t seem to have done any damage, or nothing which has shown itself yet.

While I was at FOQ, I met several people in the flesh whom I had ‘met’ several years ago through emails.

Here I am with Carol of Textile Tales in the SAQA Reverberations Exhibit.

Carol was with her friend Jenny of Felted Fibers.

On Friday I had lunch with Frances of Island Threads but we forgot to take any photos.  And I saw Myfanwy from Winifred Cottage several times as I couldn’t seem to keep away from her stall! 

[Read more →]

I have a question for you.  Is my blog taking ages to load with all the photos?  I have just reduced the number of posts on a page to 6 instead of 10 because I thought that some people who have a slow internet connection might find it difficult reading my blog, but please let me know if it is still too slow and I will reduce it further.  What is the optimum number?  I would hate to lose readers because you can’t view it easily…   I can set it to whatever number of posts I want to, so do leave a comment and let me know.

[Read more →]

I’m back!  Actually I got back on Friday night but we had to collect the kids from their various camps in the south-west yesterday and by the time I had done that and unpacked their stinky clothing I had no energy to do anything except be a zombie in front of the computer and have an early night.    All next week is holiday club at church and I’m helping with the crafts every morning so I thought I had better write something about last week before it all scrambled up in my brain.

The course was wonderful though it was very strange to be at the NEC on Tuesday and Wednesday with hardly anyone else there.    When all the quilters started arriving on Wednesday evening and Thursday morning it was quite a shock to the system!  We didn’t get to see the exhibition before Thursday, although we did get in half an hour before it opened because Erika took us in to view her exhibition and told us how she came to make them and the progression from one to the next, which was fascinating.    They were all very monotone - she had mostly just used discharging and quilting on them.  She said that she felt she needed to get right back to the basics and not be distracted by colour, so all but a couple of the last ones had no colour at all apart from black and the sort of cream/sepia colour you get from discharging.  I found them very refreshing, after being bombarded with all the colours in the rest of the quilts in the exhibition.  Very simple and to the point.

We did very few organised exercises during the course - she asked us to come with a possible subject in mind.  First of all we got together in pairs and talked about our chosen subject - she said she thought it was important to articulate what we had in mind because often just talking about it would bring up thoughts about it that we hadn’t been conscious of - and we did a word association exercise with the subject, writing down all the words or phrases  connected with it which came into our heads (a sort of brainstorming, I suppose), and took note of any that particularly enthused us.  We also did some mark making to music (not necessarily connected with the subject) and she read some poetry to us, at intervals all through the three days.  Then she told us to come up with four designs in different shapes of frames connected to our subject, because having to fit something into different shapes would affect what we came up with - a vertical rectangle, a horizontal rectangle, a square and a circle.   (A long, thin, horizontal design would have a different emphasis than a square one).  Then after this she set us an assignment  - basically to come up with a more-or-less finished piece of work (this turned into a quilt top for most of us) by the next day.  Cue for panic!!  This was to be based on either the subject or about how we felt at that moment.  We had to present this to the group the following day.

She set a few ground rules, the chief of which was that we weren’t allowed to offer any comments or even praise about anyone else’s work, or even to go round looking at it (except surrepticiously!).  This was amazingly freeing, because it meant that we could concentrate on our own work and weren’t distracted or feel the need to say ‘that’s nice’ just because someone had said that about our own… 

My subject was mud, specifically the River Usk which is mostly mud at low tide and I ended up making something based on the design I came up with for the vertical rectangle (very unlike me - I usually don’t draw very much at all!).  This is a photo of the sketch - I don’t want to post a photo of my work as it is at the moment because there are a number of pieces in the process of being made and I don’t want to dry up my creative juices prematurely! 

It was basically a sort of abstract rendering of the various layers of the river floor and the way the mud was affected by footprints and the action of the waves - a cross section… lots of lines and layering and cutting back and ripping!!   By the third day I decided I wanted to concentrate on getting lots of design work thought out because lack of a direction in what I’m doing is what normally keeps me away from working and if I have lots of ideas and stuff started then I feel like going into my workroom and carrying on.   I ended up with about 4 different things started and lots of stuff in my sketchbook so I hope that I will carry on with that.

All in all, I had a fantastic time and met up with a number of online friends, several of whom recognised me from my photo!    I spent the Friday going round the show and trying to see as much as I could.

[Read more →]

I suppose I ought to put all of these snippets into context and show you where we stayed. We were north of Tours, in the region known as the Gatine near Beaumont la Ronce. We stayed in a gite -

Here it is - it was a converted farm building joined to a barn, part of a working farm. It was so peaceful there.

This was the field up the lane from the gite.

I love these poppies growing wild by the sides of the fields. They were rich with wild flowers. I saw St Johns Wort and origano.

As well, of course, as the ubiquitous field of sunflowers. Ubiquitous in that region, anyway.

I took this one from the car - I love the impressionist effect.

[Read more →]

I didn’t find much of textile interest while on holiday (except in terms of inspiration like the manhole covers). There was a silk factory which had a museum attached but I was told by the tourist office in Tours that it was closed all July and August.

However, I did find a few things, unexpectedly. We went to see a strange motley collection of … basically anything with moving parts, the Musee Maurice Dufresne. I think that M Dufresne couldn’t bear to leave any machines he found rusting in fields or anywhere; he had to rescue them and add them to his collection. Something had been found at the bottom of a lake. It was a huge combine harvester or something like that. Goodness knows how it got to the bottom of the lake or how he knew it was there and managed to get it out again. It was that sort of a collection.

Anyway, in amongst all this stuff were a few looms.

I don’t know much about looms or what type they are but it was lovely to see all that pile of yarn in the midst of machinery! If anyone can enlighten me, I will add the information.

I think this one made braid, or ribbon.

Is this a machine for winding shuttles? or warping or something? (can’t you tell I don’t know ANYTHING about weaving?! Still, I do find these kinds of things interesting and I would love to learn, so please enlighten me!)

All these looms were a drop in the ocean in the huge barn-like buildings in which they were stored. I found some sewing machines high up on a shelf later on and I felt so sorry that they were stuck up there so unappreciated.  I wanted to take them all home with me!

In amongst all these were cars, farm machinery, a London bus(!) and even a guillotine which had travelled around during the French Revolution - it was mounted on a cart. Bikes, printing machines, you name it, it was there. Amazing.

[Read more →]