The Artist Within

I'd like to kid myself that because my office is in central Birmingham I can easily take advantage of the wonderful opportunities to do something different in my lunchbreak; go to a museum, visit a gallery, go for a walk by the canal.

All too often I'm afraid, lunchbreak is me, sat at my desk, eating some sort of food from whatever sandwich shop I judge to be nearest to the building.

On Friday though I finally achieved my aim, thanks to a bit of prompting by a friend who had seen a leaflet of an exhibition that she thought would be just my thing. She was right.

Taking Time: Craft and the Slow Revolution is a travelling exhibition, currently on display in Birmingham's Waterhall gallery (part of the Birmingham Museum and Gallery but a little bit around the corner of the building from the main entrance).

It's a mixture of creative art; there are things that L and I looked at, looked at each other, and just thought 'meh'; there are things that we thought were beautiful; and there were things that we thought were fun.

L's favourite from the beautiful category was an enormous white board panel, patterned with tiny pebbles of slightly different sizes. From a distance you see squares and rectangles, close up it swirls in front of your eyes, and from the sides the different widths of the pebbles make even more patterns. We both found it very soothing to look at. A picture of part of the piece is on flickr here

For my favourite I struggled to choose. There are a series of garden mugs and matching plates; the plates show the layout of each garden as if viewed from above; a veg patch, a river meadow, and a formal garden, and the mugs that go with them have trees on the side; the river meadow has (I think) oak trees, the veg patch has fruit trees, and the formal garden has conifers. It's all in blue and white in a slightly 'chinese' style, and probably wins the prize for 'piece I'd most like to take home'.

My true favourite I can show you - there's a picture here

It's very simple, an inscription of a diary entry from a 14 year old girl from years back who lived in Norfolk (I think her name was Anne):

"Very early the Brigantine went off. I slept all night with her riding light shining on my face. I woke Antony up and made him come and see her go.

First she set inner and outer jib, then flying jib, then she got underway and weared round, running before the wind.

Then she set lower fore topsail, then forecourse, then upper fore topsail, then the togallant, then the two lower main staysails. The Barquentine, by the way, had gone before the morning."

Reading the inscription needs no picture to show you the scene that morning, I can see the river and hear the thrum through the rigging in my mind.

We saved our interactive art for last. They have two projects running - one of which involves choosing something you like, drawing a picture of it, making that into a badge and pinning the badge onto a place special to you on a giant map of Birmingham.

We drew a cupcake, wrote "we like cake" on it, and pinned it over our office. This marks the spot of the team cake shelf!

The second is called a garland or 'step and stitch'. Pictures are here. Really it is a wonderful huge spiders web of yarn with bits of crochet and knitting joined in for good measure. They have spools of yarn lying around in wonderful colours (donated by a local carpet factory), and needles and crochet hooks.

On one side L make a drunken spiders web, and I added some finger knitting in giant loops, on the other side (after we found the needles), L added bright red dangling pompoms and I cast on and knit for a little bit. When we could no longer ignore the need to return to work we tied the knitted strip up by its cast-on tail and left the needle in - anyone who goes can continue knitting my strip - as long as they're tall enough to reach it of course. What I really wanted to do was knit a long strip, blending through all of the different colours and then weave it in but alas, work called.

It does seem that extensive exposure to yarn in my lunchbreak might not be the best thing for me though - during the afternoon I kept coming up with new yarn-based ideas, mostly to do with Christmas decorations.

S and I who share a partition have already added fairy lights along the top but felt that it needed a little something extra. Halfway through the afternoon I called to her:

"S?"

"yes"

"I'm seriously considering little red pom-poms along the top - what do you think?"

My only response for several minutes was borderline hysteria from the rest of the team - apparently my tone had been rather serious and suggestive of the start of a conversation discussing a report or some other form of actual work!

Oh well - let the subliminal conversion of my team continue.

Wild Cat Island Ahoy!

The sun has finally made an appearance this morning (albeit briefly) so I have enlisted the help of my chief (and only) photographer's assistant to show you the finished, and now blocked, Ishbel:


This is the larger size of the Ishbel and it gives me a perfect wingspan shawl in this lovely Aegean blue.

The blocking wires have proved their worth too - all of my points are nice and neat and even - achieved without spending hours curled into a fetal position on the sewing room floor, fussing over each and every one of them.

The great beauty of this shawl is that it really shows off the beauty of the yarn as much as the pattern.

Handmaiden Camelspin is subtly variegated - I think it must be kettle dyed like Dream in Colour - and it has both a sheen and a halo and is so incredibly soft that this rockets right to the top of my list of favourite yarns to knit with and to wear.

I am going to feel totally cossetted and cozied wrapped up in this shawl in the winter, and for the summer it makes a nice little shoulder wrap.



The project that has occupied me for the last couple of days has not been knitting (gasp! horror! ring the bell for smelling salts!).

This, or rather, these, are the end result of an idea I had while I was swimming on Monday. The idea started out life as a plan for a quilt - and may well end up as such - but I thought I would trial run with a couple of cushions.


To fellow aficionados of Arthur Ransome these need no introduction
'The Swallows set sail'

'The Amazon Pirates head out to battle'

I used cheat applique for both of them and I love the stuff - it's the fabric equivalent of sticky-backed plastic and it's brilliant - and quick.

I said I hadn't been knitting though - and I've just remembered that that's a fib - I did knit the Amazon's woolly hats - it was the one bit of authenticity that I couldn't let lie; that and the flags!


For the backing I went for a pillow tuck (because I didn't have any zips and couldn't be bothered to face town on a Saturday), so I used strips from all the fabrics used in the pictures to make stripy reverses.



I'm really quite pleased with how they all turned out and H seemed to like them - at least, when I woke him up to show them to him he reached out, grabbed one, tucked it under his chin and went back to sleep which I take to be a sign of approval!

Swallows and Amazons Forever!

A little bit of magic

It is a sad truth that when in Florida I have at some point, needed a little pick me up expedition. Holly Golightly may have thought that nothing very bad could happen to you at Tiffany's but in Orlando, nothing sad can happen to you at Disney.

My favourite part is the Boardwalk - it's usually a lot quieter than Downtown Disney as it has fewer shops and instead it's a wonderful promenade around the lake in a very New England style. If I ever go back I'm determined that we should stay at the Boardwalk, and not just for the hot tub in a pirate ship wreck!

This is the view from the far side all lit up for the evening:


And we watched the fireworks from Epcot from the bridge and the pedaling piano played wonderful jazz.




The boardwalk also plays host to a couple of sideshow magicians who, because this is Disney, are fantastic. It's not just the way that they do the tricks, it's the banter and showmanship that go with it. We turned up to one just as a ten year old had volunteered to help out with a multiplying bunny rabbit trick, but the star of the show was her little sister - all blond curls and blue eyes, aged maybe 3 or 4.

She sat with the other children on the deck in front of us and as the showman started his patter a little voice broke in:

"That's my sister!" and a little while later, "I've got a monkey. Look at my monkey, I'm going to give it to my Dad!" and she got up to show it to the magician. Without pausing he looked at her, admired the monkey and delivered the immortal line:

"You just haven't had enough sugar today have you sweetheart!"

All was calm until the next trick where our magician explained that the new volunteer would have to jump from the fourth story window and be caught by another eight year old. He explained how if it went wrong his hapless assistant's insides would be outside, her arms and legs would be broken, the full blood and guts patter. And with a truly horrified expression our little blond friend hurriedly stood up and scuttled away from the point at which he was indicating, exclaiming:

"Well, I don't wanna see that!"

You couldn't make it up.

My second favourite Disney place is the golf course - not the big proper golf courses, but that classic staple of an Englishman's holiday - mini golf.

We seem to have a habit of playing mini golf at night so I have very few photos of the courses themselves but this holiday we played WinterSummerland (the summer side):



Fantasia - which has wonderful music and a spooky cavern; and where both H and Beth lost their golf balls in the water features on more than one occasion!

And the winter side of WinterSummerland on our last afternoon. And it was here that my finest hour occurred. For a brief moment (Saturday 6 December 2008), I was on the leader board:



Ousting Tim of Wisconsin who had entered his score of 38 only moments before. Sorry Tim.

My memorial trophy was chosen and awarded by H:



Apparently he was struck by the resemblance to me on a real golf course!

In Christmas news, I have finished my advent calendar:



What do you mean "But Carie, it's December 16th" (or at least it was the day I finished it). Finished is finished and H has had great fun catching up on the days. We will gloss over the fact that I bought this panel in March (or possibly February) and concentrate instead on the need for the perfect backing fabric:



I got this in Walmart in Florida and I love it unreservedly. I mean, what's not to like:







The panel itself came with cut out pockets to sew on, with box pleats between the pockets in the lines running across the tree. To finish it I cut batting and the backing fabric to roughly the same shape and put them in a sandwich of front and back facing each other and batting on the back. Once I had sewed around the edges (all bar a little turning space) using my walking foot, I cropped the edges and the corners and turned the whole thing the right way out and slip stitched the turning closed.

It has very minimal quilting, just around the outer border and the two trees for stability in a wonderful red-green variegated thread so that you can see the Christmas tree shape on the back.

The hanging loops were not part of the pattern and were simply two tubes of stash fabric with a vaguely Christmassy theme folded in half lengthways and pinned into the top edge before sewing. The only tricky thing is remembering to get the loops on the inside of the seam so that the end up on the outside of the calendar.

All in all I consider this a most successful make, even if we haven't quite worked out where or how to hang it up!

Rectangles

If you feared that I had diverted my efforts entirely to the kitchen and the expansion of my waistline (and that of anyone around me), rest easy, it is not so, and here is the proof:



This is the body and the back section of the jacket that will form part of Baby K's layette. I hope this will see off the chill of a Scottish winter for a few weeks at least. The yarn is Debbie Bliss Baby Cashmerino in a soft teal to reflect granite and the sea or the loch on a grey day and the much sort after cream 101, finally tracked down in Liverpool. The baby is due just as two colleagues go on maternity leave at the end of the month so it's all systems go on the baby knitting front.

However, I did find the time and a cheap staple gun (£4.99 from Homebase and it comes with a pack of staples) to finish off my pinboard:



I tucked the fabric into the join between the board and it's frame and there are a few tiny wrinkles at the corner because of it but they aren't noticeable unless you look for them and I have provided ample distraction by pinning up the postcard of Brighton which Carey's parents sent me last year when he was born.

The back looks like this:

But that's against the wall so there's no need for anyone to see it!

My final two rectangles for today are my current favourite reads:


which I cannot possibly do justice to at the moment so I will tell you about them another day.