Half-term sketchbook challenge

I have spent an enjoyable few hours this week drawing.  My sister set up a challenge for half-term week with a group of her friends, some of whom belong to a sketching group.  The challenge was to do a drawing a day.  We all know that artists should do this, just as musicians should practise every day, but I don't think many of us make time for it.  So having something to encourage us helped.

My sister set up a 'secret' Facebook group, i.e. one with closed membership.  This was great as it meant that people like me who live some distance from the main group, could still share in what was happening.  Of course one or two people were not on Facebook or did not know how to upload photos but that did not matter.  I found it reassuring that plenty of people were no better than me at this sort of thing!

It was interesting having to choose something to draw each day, especially as I am somewhat limited as to where I can draw.  Now that I can no longer drive or walk very far, working 'on location' is not really possible.  I also have to remember that I cannot sit down to draw because of the problems of getting up again so, particularly at this time of year, so that ruled out the garden.  It mostly had to be still life but one day I was able to draw our wisteria through the dining room window.

The cats are always available as a subject but they spend most of their time in the winter asleep in one or other of their two 'doughnut' beds.  They sleep very tangled up in each other which makes for boring pictures so I only used them on one day.

They started on the sofa but then got into the doughnut.  I managed to catch them with one arm out but by the time I had sketched it in, the arm had disappeared inside!

I decided that this week was a good opportunity to get out all my different materials and try them out.  I have a vast array of pencils, pens, pastels and paints although I also found that some things had died, and that my supply of paint brushes is very small.  I also have a book called: One Drawing a Day by Veronica Lawlor which says it is a six week 'course'.  I have not really used it but when I read through it, I realised that I could dip in and out of the suggestions rather then working through them.

So I tried using dip pens with Caran d'Ache water soluble coloured pencils

and combining coloured pencils, water colour and oil pastels.

It is interesting how we can avoid techniques and subjects that we do not enjoy or do not feel confident with so one day I forced myself to draw a person.  As we do not have spare people round the house I had to use a photo but I made sure it was one I had taken myself.  I used colour pencils for this drawing but I also tried out pencil and dry pastel.  I soon realised that I would need to practise a lot to master pastel.  The rules for drawing people began to come back from the depths of my brain because I honestly don't think I have done any portraiture or figure drawing for over thirty years.

What did I learn from the week?  Finding something to draw and half an hour to do it is not that difficult (I can be a great procrastinator in my textile work - I spend hours thinking about the design before actually doing anything).  Knowing what to include and what to simplify is difficult (the wisteria).  The week confirmed that I am more of a designer that an artist as I kept seeing the potential for design using techniques other than drawing and painting.

But all in all it was a good experience and helped me to get my eye back in as they say.  I think a week was about right for the length of the project but I will try and do some form of art work two or three times a week now.  I brought all my drawing materials into the house from the studio and I realise that this sort of thing is better done at the dining room table so I plan to find a cupboard where I can keep them.  Some of the images, e.g. this last one which was a photo of pumpkins I took at a farmers' market, shout 'printing' at me so now I just need to revise all those techniques I have learnt down the years and create some new work.  As I now put myself in the category of people who do not go to workshops because they are too technique focused, I realise practice is what it is all about.

PS to knitting post

I realise I haven't posted at all this year.  My excuse is that I have not done any textile work partly because it has felt too cold to go into the studio.  However, I do have something to add to the post I did on 17 November last year about NZ women knitting in World War One.  My brother-in-law sent me a photo of this painting which his grandfather, Charles Hay-Campbell, painted in Whanganui in about 1915.  He thinks it was done in the boarding house where his grandfather lived when he first went to NZ while his family remained in England.

This scene echoes what my sisters say about our grandmothers talking of knitting for the troops.  I have very strong memories of them both knitting in the years immediately after the Second World War so I grew up believing that grandmothers knitted and mothers sewed.

My mother made virtually all our clothes - well, not coats, as sewing is what women of her generation did.  The really talented ones did 'tailoring' and did make coats and jackets for their children.  As we were all girls there was no pressure for my mother to do this and we had one or two winter skirts (with bodices) that were made by a professional dressmaker and paid for by my grandmother.  I remember going to this woman's house for fittings and being appalled at the age of about five because she kept the pins in her mouth!  Practically the first health and safety lesson I ever had was to never hold pins in your mouth.  I do not think my mother was particularly fond of dressmaking and really preferred gardening, but when her generation of women were pushed back into the home after the war, sewing, which had always been an integral part of colonial life, became something that almost everyone did.  Bought clothes were expensive but there was a huge range of fabric available.  This fabric was all imported from Britain so we grew up with famous names such as Vyella, Liberty lawn, robia voile and a fine cotton the name of which I cannot spell and which I cannot find  a reference to on the Web.  A trip to town centred on the specialist fabric shops and the department stores and I reckon I could write my autobiography in terms of fabric and dressmaking!   Fashion was approximately two years behind Europe because of the time-lag in receiving the pattern books: McCalls, Butterick, and later Simplicity and Vogue.  You needed to be an advanced dressmaker to make a lot of the Vogue designs so I was quite proud when as a teenager I began to work from the more advanced Vogue ranges.  We were not really knitters in our family and I had to rely on my aunt to teach me both knitting and various sewing techniques because I was left-handed and so was she.  My cousin tells me she also relied on this aunt because of being left-handed.

For Christmas I was given the book; Knitting for Tommy: Keeping the Great War Soldier Warm by Lucinda Gosling.

This is a fascinating read, particularly for those of us who are old enough to remember the sort of illustrations that are shown, particularly the knitting patterns  which my grandmothers were still using when I was tiny.  In the end knitting socks gave way to knitting pullovers and cardigans for the grandchildren.  I think darning died out because socks began to have some nylon in them but I have a distinct memory of my father mending his own socks with the sock stretched over an orange.  Generally his mother did this task (we lived in the same town) but I remember being very impressed with his ability to darn.  I think military life gave men of that generation some useful skills although in theory my father may have learned to darn in the boy scouts.

The book deals with the Empire and the US and there is a photo of the cover of the book I mentioned in my previous post, written by the wife of New Zealand's governor-general.

As Lucinda Gosling points out, absolutely everyone knitted because the need for knitted 'comforts' was so great.  I realised that at that time there were no garments made from man-made fibres as there were later in the twentieth century and the role of Australia and New Zealand in providing wool was very important.  I also learnt that the company we know as Patons and Baldwins was at that point, two separate companies.

How to put quilting at the centre of Christmas

I meant to put a link to this blog post on yesterday's post but forgot.

You want the post for Friday 19 December.  Dove grey reader has a daughter currently living in New Zealand and this post describes the amazing Advent bough she made for her with loads of quilted ornaments.

Enjoy: .Dovegrey reader scribbles

CHRISTMAS GREETINGS

Only two days to go. I don't know why Christmas seems to consist of carrying long lists in my head of things to be done, especially when there are only two of us, but I have been busy for what feels like weeks sorting things out, so no sewing.  As all our family live in other parts of the country the schedule is set by Posting Dates although it is not as bad as the days when we had to send things to New Zealand. T hen when I had a sister living abroad  we used to swop presents when they were home in the summer.  In 1999 they delivered two lovely Zimbabwean bowls in August which then went through our house fire in November!  Fortunately the firemen rescued them and we have used them almost every day since we opened the presents that Christmas.  Now I find myself reeling at the price of postage but tell myself it is cheaper than petrol for driving elsewhere.  And yes, I do buy most things on-line but sometimes, like the calendars we give brothers-in-law, they have to be sent here first.  I have also got heavily into e-cards this year which is much cheaper and means I do not have to get to the post office as this is becoming a bit of a problem because of no longer driving.

The second challenge is the gluten free cooking.  The situation is compounded by the fact my husband does not eat meat in any shape or form and I am allergic to fish unless it is smoked.  So pure vegetarian it has to be.  Last year's choice of main course did not work very well and this morning my husband remarked that the menu seemed to be going round in circles!  I think it is sorted.  I bought a gluten free pudding at vast expense via Amazon.  (The first year I made one but you end up with several puddings and most of the gluten free puddings in the shops are big enough for one tiny helping.  I have always been very fond of Christmas pudding.)  Mince pies are not a problem as I have been able to adapt the popular pastry with orange by adding the orange juice to the egg that you are supposed to use for gluten free pastry.

Cake I buy from Marks and Spencer (not sure I am allowed to give them a plug on a blog!).  Traditionally our Christmas has always had a distinctive Italian touch to it as that is where we were living when we met.  I have given up on panetone as it is complicated to make and I used to end up eating most of it myself.  However, this year I have had a go at gluten free panforte.  There is a small shop here which sells all sorts of crystalized fruit so that was not a problem. Whether we will be able to cut it is another matter.  Last year I made one from a recipe that contained chocolate and it was so hard I feared for my teeth.

So that's the food dealt with.

We have a had couple of little problems this year.  First my ice cream machine decided to die last week.  I have not attempted to replace it yet because we can only fit a small 'bomb' in our freezer.  Bought ice cream often contains gluten and as a New Zealander I am an ice-cream snob so don't like most commercially produced brands.  We will live without it this year.

Our other problem is related to the tree.  We are rather Continental about this ritual and generally decorate it while listening to the Kings College Cambridge carol service on Christmas Eve.  But we know that English people buy their trees well in advance as in the days when we used to drive down here for Christmas, there were often none left by the time we got here. I learnt to order them over the phone.  So now we buy it in advance and store it in the greenhouse.  Fine, but yesterday when we got the decorations out of the roof, there was no lametta and no Christmas tree stand!  It may be a lametta less Christmas but some friends have offered us some of theirs.  The Christmas tree stand was more of a problem.  We think some of the workmen who have been in our roof this year have moved it to a part where we cannot reach it (it is a very confined roof space) so we had to buy a new one.  Luckily the nearest garden centre still had some but then we found that the tree was too big for it.  So this is what my husband had to do this morning:

Having lost some of its trunk it is now up in the conservatory although still not stable.

The cats were very annoyed that they were not allowed into the garden to witness the tree alterations but they are more or less indoor cats and it was almost raining.










I have updated the photos on my Facebook page to ones with a Christmas feel. Joining Facebook has put me in touch with a lot of my quilting friends again so has been well worth it.

And,finally, I have decided it is time we 'retired' the quilted decorations.  Like most quilters I have an assortment of wall hangings and table mats which used to come out each year.  However, finding places to hang things in this house is difficult.  They seem like a symbol of quilting times past, so they are staying in the suitcase where they live.  So I think that is Christmas sorted for another year.  I hope you all have a good one.

Knitting and New Zealand women in WW1

dovegreyreader scribbles  latest post is about about knitting in World War One and how everyone was encouraged to knit all the time.  I immediately thought of how both my grandmothers were expert knitters.  In my early childhood at the end of the 1940s both of them were always knitting.  I particularly remember my paternal grandmother knitting socks - there was always a four-needle piece of knitting sitting by her chair.  My maternal grandmother also knitted socks but she lived in a different town so I did not see her regularly.  I do remember her talking about knitting socks for soldiers in World War Two, though, so I began to wonder what they had both done in the first war.

My paternal grandmother was married and had two babies during World War One.  She was 31 when the war broke out.  My maternal grandmother was four years younger.  Her father never allowed her to work: she was very much the unmarried daughter who was expected to 'look after' her four brothers.  At the beginning of the war she got engaged to my grandfather but he then went off to fight and did not return until December 1918.  We knew all about Gallipoli because he was wounded there and then he went on to the Western Front and fought in the Battle of the Somme amongst other things. Having lived in Britain for over forty years I know a lot about what women here did from nursing on the Western Front to working in munitions or taking over work on farms,  but I knew very little about women in New Zealand.  So I spent an interesting afternoon doing some internet research by searching for 'New Zealand women knitting World War One' and thought I would share my findings.  I must, however, apologise for a lack of photos as all the sites I went to had copyright issues and I could not use them.  If you want to find out more or see some of the photos, I would recommend a website called http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/

New Zealand is very proud of the contribution it made to the First World War.  It was the first colony to declare war and sent a higher percentage of its population to fight than any other colony.   Mention of the fact that fifty per cent of the state funded schools were one teacher schools is interesting because so many of the teachers went off to war.  At one point my maternal grandmother taught for a short time in a school at Lake Coleridge where a large dam was under construction.  She was completely untrained and had left school at fourteen so I think there was a real problem finding teachers.  The population of New Zealand was only just over one million. One thing I noticed from old newspapers was the number of trained nurses who left and went to France or Britain.  Nursing has always had high status in NZ and I am sure they were well trained.  These were not VADs although I know people who were VADs in the Second World War.  New Zealand, like Australia, recognises that it 'grew up' as a result of the war and these days Gallipoli has huge significance although I do not remember this being nearly as marked in my childhood.  Perhaps this was because we were still recovering from the Second World War.  Most of us had fathers who had fought in that but not that many people I knew had grandfathers who had served in 1914-1918.

Within the first two to three days of the outbreak of war, Lady Liverpool, the wife of the Governor General, established a fund to assist the soldiers overseas and encouraged women and children to knit socks, sew shirts and contribute money to the cause. Lady Pomare, who was a high status Maori, also had a fund to raise money for Maori soldiers.  There are accounts of the committee meetings for these two funds and it is apparent that being on committees is what the 'establishment' people did.  However, much of the work was done by sewing and knitting bees.  Women who were not in paid employment made clothes for Belgian children, as well as socks and shirts for soldiers.   Children also contributed to this 'textile' work. Virtually all women were used to making their own clothes so it probably seemed a natural thing to do.  I had assumed that there would not have been a problem with access to wool such as there was here but then I found a letter to the paper in which the writer complained about a shortage of wool and being expected to pay for the wool herself.  When wool ran short in Australia, people in Melbourne and Sydney bought spinning wheels.

The advertisements in these old newspapers are fascinating.  There is one for a knitting machine and Kirkcaldie and Stains department store in Wellington advertised Patons wool 'specially woven for Soldiers' Comforts'.  Lady Liverpool produced 'Her Excellency's Knitting Book'.  It was felt that work like this helped women to feel closer to the men on the other side of the world.  Of course, some women worked and I found a wonderful photo of a course teaching women how to grade fleeces.  There was even a 'knitting song' which originated in Britain and reached NZ via Australia.  The main music shop in Wellington advertised the sheet music.  I expect it was the same in NZ.

There are regular pieces in the newspapers listing the articles people had made and donated: socks, balaclavas, scarves cholera belts, mittens, pyjamas and day shirts.  The names of donors are given and from this distance it is easy to see it may all have become very competitive.  Old clothing was also recycled, e.g. old (I assume leather) gloves were sent to England to line waistcoats.

Women were also heavily involved in fund-raising through garden fetes and market stalls.  And they sent food parcels.  My maternal grandmother had a brother serving on the Western Front and she used to talk about sending fruit (i.e. Christmas cake recipe) cakes and Russian toffee.  As a child I always used to wonder how the food survived the journey which would have taken at least six to eight weeks.  My sister tells me that this grandmother used to talk about knitting socks for soldiers so there you have it.  Unfortunately I know almost nothing about what my paternal grandmother did as she lived in a more rural area.

Developing originality - some musings

Since my last post I have been wrestling with the problem of originality as I try to work out how to make map quilts that are not simply clones of other people's.  Like many of us I have always been 'addicted' to maps and will spend hour reading them.  (My husband, in contrast, is an avid reader of dictionaries.)  I also have a great interest in local history so I decided that I would try making maps of this area from old maps.  I already had a couple of this village but I also bought some local old maps from Alan Godfrey Maps http://www.alangodfreymaps.co.uk/england.htm.  Unfortunately our house is situated just off the top left hand corner of the Penzance map!

I Googled 'map art quilts' and saw that this is quite a popular genre.  As I know I am in danger of simply cloning Alicia Merrett's technique I  bought a copy of this book by Valerie S Goodwin.

She uses collage rather than piecing but I have decided to stick with piecing for now.  So I attempted to make a top of a small part of our village.  It was only then that I realised making 'real' villages is not easy so I have ended up with something that is rather imaginary.

Now that the top is assembled I can see what is wrong with it!  I wanted to use fabric I already had but there is not enough contrast in the values.  I also thought that I would use the 'real' colours of Cornwall which meant lots of browns and greys because the houses are mostly built of granite.  As the moors around the village have a distinctly 'brownish' tinge to them, especially at this time of the year, I though I could get away with various pieces in my stash.  I soon realised that one reason why Alicia's quilts 'work' is because of the contrast between the buildings and the landscape.  And I won't mention the fact that my roads are straight up and down!  However, I have not given up yet as I still have to quilt the piece.  I have decided it is a good idea to make several small pieces and treat them as a learning exercise,  Then I came to a halt because I broke my free machine quilting stitching plate and have had to send away for spare parts.

However, I have had plenty of opportunity to think about all of this because of two recent blog posts.  First Elizabeth Barton who wrote a very good piece on 4 November which she titled: Original? Or Derivative?  Art and Quilts, Cogitations Thereon.  This post is well worth looking at even if you do not regularly read her blog.  She talks about how you can identify a piece of work as original and says that 'originality comes from going beyond the predictable'.  This obviously applies to both ideas and techniques.  I totally agree with her advice to not work to a formula and to 'come up with fifty ideas that the Big Name never even thought of'.  I think my idea of doing 'old maps' probably works but I still have a long way to go to work out how to translate this into techniques.  As I write this it occurs to me that I should pay more attention to the symbols that are used on old maps and how they can be represented in fabric and thread.

The second useful blog post is Alicia's own.  She has contributed to the Round the World Blog Hop
http://aliciamerrett-colourandlight.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/around-world-blog-hop.html and described how she makes her map quilts.  I particularly liked the section on how her process works as her 'map fragments' are what I think I am doing by working very small.

So that is as far as I have got.  Since I ended up with plenty of leftover house strips I realise I should start on a third piece using them and combining them with some of the many blues I have in order to make a 'fishing village'.  I have lots of hand-dyed blue fabrics because for the last ten years or so most of my work has been inspired by the coast and the sea in this area.  Quite a lot of this fabric is not cotton: I have linen, cheesecloth, indigo dyed fabric etc.  So there you are, I should be led by the fabric and see where that takes me.  I suspect a lot of us run into problems over originality and, as I have said many times before, I am pretty cut off from art quilters down here and have realised I should blog more often and get people to comment as that is another way of bouncing ideas off other people.

Another UFO finished

Some months ago (but I cannot find the post) I remember saying that I wanted to finish off various UFOs before starting on new work.  Well I am pleased to report that I have now finished the lap quilt which had been sitting half-quilted in a pillowcase in the studio.  I made this from a Cut Loose Quilts design that I had used before.  It has large 'blank' squares and when I made the first quilt I hand quilted these but my days of intensive hand quilting are now over.  I could not decide what to put in the squares so the quilt sat there for over a year.  Finally I decided to cut my losses and simply put a large diagonal cross across each block.  The pieced blocks are quilted in the ditch.

What did please me, given that I had bought the fabric at the Festival of Quilts about three years ago, was that I was able to make the binding from left over strips of the backing.  The backing was pieced using some of the same fabrics as the front plus a couple of others.  I even had a suitable piece of wadding and of course plenty of threads so it was really quite a cheap quilt.  Batik is not cheap though.  I just love it.

The quilt goes really well with our sofas so I have put the one I had there in another room.

It is also greatly appreciated by Hinemoa.  In fact I had trouble hemming the binding because she would not get off.  Every evening we have 'television time' when she sleeps on it on my knee.

However, this afternoon she was less keen about being a model.