Linking Facebook and my blog

A few weeks ago my two sisters persuaded me to join Facebook so that I could see various family photos.  I set up an account, invited a very few people to be friends (mainly family and old friends from New Zealand) and told every one I was not going to post on it.  Then a little later I learnt about Facebook Pages and decided that if I set one up in the name of Reensstitcher I could (a) set it up with a link that would let people know I had posted on my blog and (b) use it to post photos of some of my quilts.  I am very aware that putting photos on it means people can 'rip them off' but this afternoon I have worked out how to do upload photos and the Reensstitcher page now has an album of quilt photos.

Deciding which photos to use was an interesting exercise as I found I had worked to themes more than I realised.  I will probably open another album with some of my other work at some point.  The next problem has been locating the photos.  How I wish I was a methodical tidy person but I am not sure if this comes naturally to creative types!  I have photos everywhere - on a memory stick, on a free standing hard drive and on the computer although I moved most of them off there at the end of last year.  Now I discover that some must have vanished when I bought a new computer in 2009 as the filing system (such as it is) seems to collapse at that point and there are at least two photos I wanted to use which I am going to have to take again.  So here is Gwithian Two which you may have seen before but nowhere can I find Gwithian One.  Fortunately I still have the quilt so I will retake the photos tomorrow.  I cannot even find it on my blog although I distinctly remember taking the original photos.  The album I have set up is on the theme of the coast and the sea around Penwith.

The other task involved in setting up the Reensstitcher page has been to organise a link between it and the blog.  I have had good e-mail instruction from a fellow contemporary quilter but I am still far from certain that I have done it right.  It appears that there is now an automatic link between the blog and my main Facebook account but not between the blog and the Reensstitcher page.  Of for a handy young person to sort me out!  If you have got to this posting via Facebook chances are you are one of my Friends rather than someone who has ticked 'Like''

I have however, been glad to learn in the last twenty-four hours that I am not the only one facing these problems.  There is some interesting chat on the SAQA Yahoo group about following blogs and what widgets to have.  Interesting what happens when the older generation decides to take over the younger generation's social media and I am not surprised most young people have abandoned Facebook.  The Preview page tells me I cannot access my widget so it will be interesting to see what happens when I publish it.

SAQA benefit auction

I have belonged to SAQA for several years but I have never entered any challenges or participated in anything other than doing a stint on the stand at the Festival of Quilts every year and attending the get-together they have there.

Then last week I suddenly realised that SAQA had extended the deadline for contributions to the annual Benefit Auction.  At the same time I realised I had several journal quilts that measured 12 ins by 12 ins. which is the size required.  I could easily live without one of these but which one?  I become hypercritical in these situations and several were rejected because they were too dull in colour or rather boring in subject matter.  In the end I had to ask my husband to help me choose, something he does not like doing as he is not artistic.  I also had to make my decision very quickly: no chance to mull it over for a couple of days as I was in danger of missing the new cut-off date.

Here is the one that I finally sent off on Monday.

Potting Shed

I still have doubts about it being rather dull in colour and in this photo the edges do not look straight (but they are!)

I made this quilt and several others on the theme of watering cans after taking part in a workshop run by Bobby Britnell  bobbybritnell.co.uk at a Contemporary Quilt Summer School.  I became really enthusiastic about what we learnt which included monoprinting and a lot about shading in order to create 3D effects.  I had already learned monoprinting techniques at a printing group I used to attend but this was the first time I had used them on quilts.

Potting Shed began with monoprinting onto calico with black ink.  I cut out templates for the watering can and flower pots and used a wide toothed comb to create the vertical lines in the background.  The unique thing, though, is the use of Chromacoal to colour the 'picture'.  I seem to remember that those of us who took this workshop went and bought up almost the entire remaining stock of Chromacoal in the UK.  This had something to do with it having been discontinued because of health and safety issues but if you look at Bobby's website you will see the work where she has used it.

Having coloured the top, I put it on a stiff wadding that Bobby recommended and then free machine quilted it.  Then I had no idea what to do with it so it sat in a box with other the same size.  When I read about the Benefit Auction I realised it was a really good cause.  This is SAQA's main fund-raiser, based on donations from members.  I do not really expect this to sell but it might appeal to someone who wants a decoration on a gardening theme.  The other thing is that it has made me realise how much I like this size of quilt so I am all set to make some more, using up some of my UFOs.

Nui Maidment 2001 - 2014

We were very sorry last Monday to have to say Good-bye to our older Siamese cat, Nui, the day before what would have been his thirteenth birthday.  Nui was rather special because of all our seven Siamese he was the only one who was not a sealpoint.  This was simply because he was the only boy in the litter and we wanted a brother and sister.  He was a lilac tabby and a particularly beautiful and large cat for a Siamese.

If you are wondering about his name, it is Maori for large. His sister was called Iti which is Maori for small.  We have always had Maori names for them after we named the first cat Tiki. We chose these two names before we got the cats and we did not realise how true they would be.  Nui was very large for a Siamese while Iti was tiny.  She was possibly the smallest in the litter as sealpoints tend to be girls and are often the runt of the litter.

Cats often feature large in quilters' lives and this was certainly true of Nui.  He and Iti got into textiles at an early age.  Here they are helping to construct a sampler piece.  It looks as though butter would not melt in their mouths but this was not always the case.

Here is Nui celebrating his first Christmas by attacking the Christmas decorations.

We lived in Northamptonshire in those days and the cats had to travel to Cornwall several times a year.  They were very happy to have these holidays although we had to be careful about letting them outside so they were on leads.  You read about people bringing their cats down and the cats then running off.

When we moved to Cornwall at the beginning of 2006 we decided that as we had a walled garden, it would be safe to let them out without leads.  Needless to say, Nui soon discovered how to climb up the wall so in the end he and his sisters came to only be allowed out when we were in the garden with them.

Nui was passionate about heat - what cat isn't?  In Northamptonshire he was often to be found in the drier

but here it lives in the studio.  He quickly discovered the airing cupboard and down the years clawed the hot water cylinder so badly that on one occasion the man who was servicing the central heating told me he thought we had rats!

In 2009 Iti suddenly died of kidney failure at the age of seven.  We have always known that this is a problem with Siamese as our first cat had it at eight but survived.  Just as well because in those days you did not insure pets and we were permanently short of money.  Tiki had a week on a drip but he outlasted all our other cats and we finally lost him at the age of fourteen.

Nui was devestated when he no longer had a sister so we decided to get him another one.  This proved to be quite difficult because people had stopped breeding them because of the recession.  We finally found a breeder near St Ives.  When the kittens were born there were six rather than the expected five and we had twenty-four hours to decide if we would take one or two.  After speaking to a few people who advised us that two kittens could play together and leave the older cat in peace, we opted to take both and so we got Hinemoa and Pania.  We were finding it more difficult to think of Maori names by this time so I turned to an on-line dictionary of baby names.

This was our first experience of introducing an older cat to young ones.  It took only a week for Nui to decide that sisters were a good idea and he spent most of his later years curled up with one or both of them.

When the cold weather comes, they move from the conservatory to their igloos next to the radiator in my bedroom.

The interest in quilts continued although he became better at not helping himself to pieces of fabric, ribbons and wadding. When I got a new quilt last autumn Nui decided he preferred the old one.  I realised the other day that I made the first one the year we got him so he had always had it and I think he must have liked the colours..

But any quilt will do.  Here he is with Hinemoa on a sofa with quilt,

In the end kidney failure got Nui too.  We had known he carried the gene since Itil died so for five years I had to give him a 'high blood pressure pill' every evening.  Pedigree cats do not live as long as moggies and over the last few months we had seen him begin to show signs of ageing.  Fortunately his final illness was short.

I will leave you with a photo of him in his prime in the garden.

UFOs

All quilters have UFOs (unfinished works) and I am no exception.  Mine go back over a number of years and I am getting tired of finding them lurking in various boxes and plastic bags.  So I have decided it is time to finish some of them.  Of course others should probably just be binned and accepted as having taught me something, e.g. a new technique.

I thought I would start with a recent piece.

This one only dates from the beginning of this year as I planned to do the Contemporary Quilts group's journal quilt project this year.  This was my January square and I also have a second unfinished one but I then realised I could not cope with working to deadlines these days so  I pulled out.

We had terrible storms at the beginning of this year and this piece was inspired by them.  It is made from pieces of fabric that I had lying around.  The background is indigo-dyed linen which I made on a workshop with  Janice Gunner several years ago.  The contrasting squares are space-dyed linen which I made nearly ten years ago.  The colours reminded me of the way the sea is churned up in a storm.  The Journal Quilt Challenge this year said you had to include a line across the whole piece so I used a fancy white thread and couched lines of it between the shibori markings.  I then hand quilted between the white lines using a Kanta technique and quite large stitches.  The squares were then hand-stitched in variegated thread in an irregular pattern.  I chose colours to reflect the colours in the linen.  Then I added some French knots to give a bit of texture to the piece.  The binding is plain blue dupion silk.

Now that it is finished it has migrated from the shelf in the studio to a folder with other journal quilts.  I have no idea what I will do with it but I think it is successful as an exercise.  I rather like the use of small squares mounted on something and frequently admire them in other people's work although I have not used them that extensively myself.

Hedgerow wild flowers Part 2

On my second walk up the valley towards the moors I noticed plants I had not paid attention to the first time.  Identifying some of them has proved difficult even with the aid of the Web.  The umbellifer family is huge and includes many common garden plants and herbs.  It is quite early in the season for them as the majority flower in June and July but I noticed two distinct types of plant.  The first has yellow/green flowers and interesting patterns of umbels.

The second is white and I think this is cow parsley.  It is certainly very prolific and grows throughout the hedge at all heights.

The other white flower which is out at the moment is onion weed.

This is a plant from my childhood as it grew wild on our walk to school.  It also smelt very strongly of onions so was generally known as 'stinky weed'.

 Here it is often found growing alongside bluebells as in the piece of woodland this road passes through.

The other things I noticed on this walk (apart from a solitary wild strawberry flower) were buttercups, dock and gorse.

 We have two varieties of gorse in Cornwall: one flowers at Easter and the other in August. This is the spring flowering one and grows as bushes at the tops of the Cornish walls.  The August flowering one is generally more prolific.  When I checked my father's book, I found he had seen the early flowering one (U'lex europaeus) at Reifenberg in Germany in May and Welsh Gorse, the late summer flowering one, in Reifenberg in June, so perhaps the flowering periods are not so clear cut after all!

Finally, dandelions.  Embroiderers love dandelions and I always associate them with Danish cross-stitch kits.  We are plagued with them in our lawn and when I see them growing wild so near to us I can see why.

On this occasion, I found a near perfect dandelion 'clock'.  Amazingly no passing cars or horses and caused the thistledown to blow away.

Wild flowers in the hedgerow

From time to time I realise that there is still a great variety of wild flowers in Cornwall.  We all know about the dangers of crop sprays and of how the number of wild flower has decreased hugely since the Second World War but when I went for a walk up the valley that leads from here to the moors a couple of days ago I was surprised how many different flowers I found.  I was also able to compare the flowers with the ones my father had seen in 1945.  He was serving in the RAF, having been seconded from the New Zealand air force, and he bought  this little book which he annotated with dates and places as he saw things.

So here are some of what I saw this week together with information about where my father saw them.

The primroses are coming to an end.  In this valley they grow on the sides of the Cornish hedges (which are built of granite boulders infilled with earth) so they often seem pale compared with the ones in gardens.  My father has noted primroses, cowslips and oxlips in Stoke Holy Cross near Norwich in April 1945. I do not think I have ever seen an oxlip and I see that the book says they are confined to Suffolk, Essex, Cambridge and Herts. The book dates from 1935 so I would not be surprised if oxlips no longer exist.

I always associate bluebells with May but they often appear here in April. Maybe I am wrong because my father saw them in Cardington which I see is in Bedfordshire in April.   I can remember when it was difficult to find them and we used to make special trips to places with bluebell woods but they have spread everywhere now and these were just in the hedgerow.  We even have them self-seeded in our front yard.

This is greater stitchwort.  It has a long flowering season these days and is described in the book as common in hedgerows throughout Britain.  My father saw that in Swyell in March.  I think Swyell is in Northamptonshire which makes sense as I know my father was stationed in Northamptonshire over the winter of 1944-45. 

Red campion is another flower with a long flowering season and I notice I have some photos of it taken with foxgloves in July.  My father saw it in Norfolk in April and again at Refenberg in the Taurus mountains near Frankfurt am Main in June.

I think the forget-me-not has spread from someone's garden although Skene describes it as a wild flower and my father saw it at Stoke in April.  I am not sure about this next one.  It may be is a gentian or a member of the forget-me-not family but I find it difficult to identify and it could even be a bugloss although to me that is a hairy plant which flowers later.

I will do a second post about flowers from this walk as some of my photos were not in focus and I need to retake them.
 
On this occasion, the thing that I really noticed was the sycamores coming into leaf.  They self-seed everywhere here and I am constantly having to pull them out of the garden.  I don't particularly like fully grown sycamore trees but the new leaves on the tiny plants emerging from the hedgerow have some lovely colours and good shapes and have potential for design work.

Church wall paintings at Breage

When we lived in Northamptonshire we stumbled on the medieval wall paintings in the parish church at Slapton which was a short walk across the fields from where we lived.  Although I took a few photos I did not really know what I was looking at and I had no knowledge of the tradition of medieval wall paintings.  This all changed recently when I joined a group visit to the church at Breage.

Breage is a village between Penzance and Helston.  The church is Gothic and was built in the fifteenth century.  It is dedicated to St Breage or Breaca who was an Irish nun who came to Cornwall in the fifth century.  There are 144 Celtic patron saints in Cornwall with more churches being dedicated to them than to more commonly known saints.

Although Breage is only a few miles from here I had never been there.   There are four saints depicted in paintings on the North wall.  This is St Christopher and is situated next to the door.  I believe that is the traditional place for him.  Here he represents 'sudden death' rather than his usual association of travel.   There are three other saints on this wall: Ambrose, Corentine and Hilary.

There is also a 'Sunday Christ'.  This is a large figure of Christ designed to discourage Sabbath breaking and blasphemy, i.e. it is a warning to those people who work on Sundays.  The tools of the trades of Sunday workers are used as illustrations.

Local occupations are represented which means in Cornwall there are often fishermen.  I am afraid the quality of these photos is poor but here you can see the tools of the tailors whom I imagine just worked away at home and there are fishing tools including a fishing reel between the saint's legs.  It was common to put locally specific things at the bottom of the painting.

Fish and other things to do with the sea are popular in Cornwall and this painting has a mermaid with a mirror and a large plaice.

I was interested to see that my photos of Slapton also have a mermaid and that is miles from the sea so I am wondering if it is also telling another story.

The churches also had paintings of 'international saints' which in Breage includes St Thomas a Becket.  International saints generally appear on the South wall.  The subject matter of the paintings is always the lives of saints and not bible topics which only appeared at the reformation.  I expect that helps to date them.

We were told that there are also paintings in St Just which I must have seen years ago and need to revisit.  I would also like to revisit St Keverne at the tip of the Lizard peninsula which is where my great-great grandmother was born and brought up.  It apparently has some good paintings but the day we visited they were installing a new heating system and it was not really possible to study the church.  All I remember is the large numbers of graves from shipwrecks on the Manacles rocks below the village.

Apparently the Breage paintings are quite late as the church was very new at the Reformation.  The aisles were probably decorated when they were built.  After the Reformation plaster was introduced and all the paintings covered up.  We were told the Victorians had removed the plaster but this cannot always have been the case because I remember the Slapton paintings were only uncovered in the mid-twentieth century.