First is Lost in Lace, an exhibition at Birmingham Museum which promises good things.  There is a fabulous set of photos on Flickr here.

And there is the Staffordshire Hoard, the huge Anglo-Saxon gold hoard found by a Staffordshire metal detector enthusiast in a field near Burntwood.   Part of it is on show in the Birmingham Museum too.

Then I want to go to Birmingham City Archives, who hold an indenture made between my 4x great grandfather Ephraim Docksey and various other people about an inn called The Cock in Norton on the Moors, Staffordshire and the will of my 5x great grandfather Joshua Dale.  No idea what they are doing in Birmingham Archives but I assume it is because the estate papers of the land they leased ended up there.  Very conveniently, it looks as if the archives and the museum are just across the road from each other.

Then I might have a walk along the canals where I took this photo a few years ago:

and made it into a gocco screen to print on  cards and Moleskine journals:

If I do all that, I might just need several days – time to get the diary out!

We went to the Eden Project in Cornwall – this is the inside of one of the biomes.

This is it on the outside:

They are building a new railway station to try and tart up Newport for the Ryder Cup.  Apparently the roof bit is made of the same material as these biomes:

Apologies for the poor photo – I took it with my mobile phone.

During the summer, my brother Martin, his wife Luisa and their 4 year old son Pablo came to visit us, and we went to a nearby playground (my teenage boys got on like a house on fire with their young cousin!).   In the park this web was wrapped around several of the trees.  

Some whole trees were covered with it!  Incredible…

Anyway, back to FOQ.  I had a wonderful time!  I diidn’t take many photos because I wanted to concentrate on actually looking at the work.   I went to six lectures over 3 days, mostly artists talking about their work, which was fascinating to watch and listen.  Elizabeth Barton showed us the progression of her work over the last few decades, Susan Shie talked about the background behind her quilts and what was going on in her mind and her life (and the life of the US as a whole) as she made them.  Pauline Burbidge talked us through her year juggling her studio quilts and quiltlines businesses. It was great to be able to go and view their exhibitions  and chat to some of them after listening to what they had to say about their work.

A bit highlight for me was meeting so many people who I know online either from Yahoo groups or via this blog or Facebook.  So many I missed meeting too!

I had an all too brief meeting with my Artful Dodgers friends between two lectures:

From left to right, Sue of The Magic Armchair Traveller, Gill of An Elegant Sufficiency, Paulene Cattle, Mags of Digital Gran (who I met for the first time), Helen of Textile Goddess, Carol of Textile Tales and Maggie of Stitching with Schnauzer and Siamese.  I met Helen a few more times and had a good chat over coffee on Saturday but sadly the others were only in Birmingham for the day.  Myfanwy of Winifred Cottage was also at the show but hard at work on her stand. 

I also met Rayna who blogs at Studio 78 Notes – Rayna was teaching a 3 day masterclass and I managed to catch her at the very end.

I have been reading Rayna’s blog ever since she started blogging, I think, and it was wonderful to actually meet her at last. 

Another blogger I met was Marlis Egger of Textileartand…  Sadly we didn’t get a photo but kept on bumping into each other throughout the 3 days, as I did with Stephanie Pettengell, who I got to know on the 3 day class I attended last time I came to FOQ (was it really the last time?).

I also enjoyed meeting Claire Benn and Leslie Morgan of at the Virtual Studio and bought their last two books, Screenprinting and Thermofax Printing of Committed to Cloth and spent quite a lot of time there!  Here is Leslie screenprinting:

I’ll save my purchases for the next post once I’ve taken a few photos.  Not so many of them for once!

I arrived at Paddington and took the tube to Oxford Circus.  Then I walked to Berwick Street in Soho, to go to Cass Art to buy supplies.  And it was a good move, because lots of things were half price! 

I then walked to Clerkenwell to go to the Society of Genealogist’s library as they had an open day and it was free to visit rather than the £18 it would otherwise have cost.  

Here is Bloomsbury Square, where I was standing when I took the photo of the London Bus that I made a gocco print of:

On to Centrepoint:

Then, in stark contrast, there was this lovely old shop just up the road:

Some gorgeous facades if you look up:

And these funny things on the lamp posts:

Past Lincoln’s Inn Fields, which was all locked up; I suppose because it was Saturday.

Some tall blocks of flats; I liked the blue in the stairwell, though it isn’t so clear in this photo as in real life.

Nearly there:

A mixture of old and new…

The boys went back to school today and I’ve finally got back into my studio to continue with my reeds series.  The next one is hopefully going to have a grey background and golden reed stems but it depends if the experimental piece works out.    Meanwhile, I’ll tie off the summer blog posts with a few photos.  The above is the scarf I crocheted at Urchfont in July (how long ago that seems now!).  I used gorgeously soft cashmere/silk yarn from Makalu Yarns.  It drapes beautifully.  Hopefully one day I’ll finish it:(

We didn’t go anywhere exciting this year as a family, but I had a few day trips.  Here is Salisbury – DS1 was going to help at a kids’ camp there and as he had not long passed his driving test, I went with him to make sure he took enough breaks on the way.  That was a good enough excuse for an outing!

I loved the colours and shapes of these houses in the market square:

Then on Monday we went to Oxford for the day.  Two of the family teenagers took rather a lot of getting out of bed and the trip was rather fraught (like a fight between them while we were stuck in a traffic jam…) but it was worth it, just about! 

We went round a few colleges and I took this photo from the garden of one of them.  The round building on the left is the Radcliffe Camera.  Apparently to be a member of the Dangerous Sports Society of the university, you have to climb up the outside of it…  DS2 was looking very thoughtful when DH told us this… calculating just how he would go about this task…

This is part of the Bodleian Library taken from the quad.  I love the grid effect created by the different parallel lines.

In the afternoon we went punting on the River Cherwell.   Love the reflections..

Isn’t this rusted Green Man amazing? 

We did dyeing with Helen and I obviously have a green theme going on looking at this piece of Evolon – I used the transfer painted papers that I decorated several months ago….

And of course I did some mark making doodles with the parallel pens:

While we were there, there was another workshop where they were making chairs – honestly! A whole dining chair in a week!  Steaming the wood to make it curved and everything …  One of the ladies on the course brought us this gorgeous strip of planed wood at the end of the week – isn’t it gorgeous? 

My main achievement during the week, however, is a blue crocheted scarf and I can’t believe I haven’t actually taken a photo of it yet so it’ll have to wait for the next post…  I hadn’t crocheted since I was a teenager so I was glad to see the skill hadn’t left me. I used a silk/cashmere yarn for it and it feels yummy!  Since getting back, I haven’t even touched it and I only need to do about another 12 inches so I must pick it up again…