Deliveries

busy day yesterday getting items together to deliver for the Reading Arts Week:
-hanging apparatus for Dragon Claw, Rainforest Dragon and for Ancient and Wise Dragon
-Cord and labels for EquiARTeral's 3 Staffordshire Hoard Pieces. All will be at the New Direction Caversham centre exhibit on the 25th and 26th. Merete's piece, The Hoard, has also been chosen to be at Battle Library on Tuesday and Caversham Court on Wednesday!
-deliver all of these to Caversham on a circuitous route to West Reading to teach last night.
Merete Hawkins - The Hoard ('They gave to the earth')

Jane Glennie - Unearth

Me - Lay Not Up Treasure

Today:
- labels for Communication: Letter and Endless Possibilities...also make sure Endless Possiblities can be easily hung in a quilt show...added a small piece of organza between the panels of the triptych.
- delivered to Sandown for the National Patchwork Show this coming weekend.

and also delivered a bag of fabric trimmings, empty spools, etc to the Rainbow Guides for collage!

off to a meeting tonight...

Here I am!

No, I didn't fall off the face of the earth!
I was having more and more problems with my computer, and at last my son declared I needed my operating system upgraded. (after being asked too often to help me work out how to sort what was wrong.) So, I turned the computer over to the resident masters and now it has been sorted. Well, it didn't take that long, but I decided to use the holiday I am having from college as a proper holiday, and took a long break.

I have not been idle. I have been reading, but I have been sewing, too.
I have been doing a bit of sorting in my studio (you wouldn't know to look at it, but it has to do with what was going on in the cupboards...or starting to go on outside of the cupboards because things weren't returned.)

3 basic skirt patterns have been determined to fit, fabric found in the stash, cutting out has been done, and sewing up has started.

batik - 8 gore, linen - 4 panel, gabardine - A-line

Also, I am nearly finished with the Staffordshire Hoard piece which has been on hold for some time.

I have been doing admin for the Thames Valley Contemporary Group and for the Coffee Morning I am to organise for the national CQ group at the Festival of Quilts this summer.

And I have started a Merdragon...based on a seahorse, of course. But it is not ready to show yet.
So, it has been a good break!

Staffordshire Hoard project

While I was in London (at City Lit seeing Margaret's exhibition), I was not too far from the British Museum. They have a few pieces from the Staffordshire Hoard on display til mid April, so I thought I would go and have a look in person.

The photos in the booklet and on the website are stunning. I knew it was macro photography, but I didn't realise the pieces were quite as small as they are! They were rather hard to view because there were skylights above them which reflected off the glass. Even harder to photograph, but I wanted some of my own images to take home as a reminder of what I had actually seen.

Here are some of the better photos. Some are zoomed in after I got them on the camera. You can tell how small because you can compare them to the weave of the fabric they were laying on!

Love the button!

The garnets inlaid into the filigree are so tiny.

You really admire the workman who made it!

an example of less geometric filigree.

I think they said this piece would have had garnets as well, but they have fallen out.

tiny eagle head

You may recall that our EquilARTeral group has a challenge in response to the finding of the hoard. We were very pleased to hear that enough money has been raised to keep the hoard in the country. Now to raise money to have it cleaned and preserved.

I am off to the Sewing for Pleasure show today at the NEC in Birmingham. I am going stay over to help with the Contemporary Quilt exhibit on Saturday. When I return, I shall let you know what I discover while there! I have set a Featured Blog post for while I am away.

Staffordshire Hoard project

Another step on the Staffordshire Hoard piece:
The stitch-like grass that works to push the edges of the pieces back into the ground - so to speak. this photo is better because it is a detail, even though there is still glare, the camera was close enough for the glare to be kept to one area.

When I do complete this I shall have to try doing a photograph in a place where the light won't bounce off so much. That should prove interesting. or not.

Staffordshire Hoard project

A couple more steps for the Staffordshire Hoard piece. Brown felt round some edges. Gold leather with garnet stone chips. and starting to do some of the big stitches to represent grass and to pull the different parts together.

Staffordshire Hoard project

I have worked off and on stitching the parts for my piece based on the Staffordshire Hoard. This is the project the EquilARTeral group has been working on. We will all have our pieces mounted on gallery stretched canvas which has been painted with the same colour and texture. This will unify the 3 works of art.

I have not worked with a canvas like this before, but somehow for this, I think rather than making a whole piece and mounting it, I felt drawn to depict how it must have been to keep discovering more and more treasure in the earth. So, I feel I need to do small pieces that are incorporated into the canvas in some way. I am quite drawn to the pieces with the garnets mounted in filligree gold work.

So, today I started laying the parts out to get an idea of how they might look. I think it is getting buttons, and several of the pieces are having layers of wadding behind them to make them stand out. Here is a photo of the beginning of the composition part of it. I think I may be using brown felt around some of the pieces to make them seem to come out of the ground. It is not easy to get a photo, as the light bounces off the paint.

Although there are images of the Staffordshire Hoard online, it is not easy to flip back and forth between them. I discovered that a booklet has been put out about the hoard and what they know so far. So, my son bought it for me for Christmas. That has been a big help...especially a photo of one of the gold and garnet pieces laying in the ground in the field with bits of grass, etc. Not sure if I will work the grass in, but I might do large long straight stitches around the edges of these stitched pieces as a method of attaching them to the canvas and implying the grassy bits.

I hope to get a lot more done on this in the next couple days.

Inspiration - Staffordshire Hoard - start

As I stated in this post, our EquilARTeral group has decided to do our next set of work based on the find in Staffordshire this year. A link to more about the story.

We are taking the step to try mounting the work on gallery wrapped canvas. In order to unify the pieces, we have the same size canvas and we all have painted them the same colour. From there, the work will be our own.

Since I finished Connect-Disconnect, I finally got to start on this work. So, today I painted the canvas with the paint Merete mixed up. It is textured with sand and pebbles, and then dry earth applied on top. For mine, I also embedded bits of a gridded gold mesh, because I am really interested in the idea of digging and what it must have looked like to have so many bits and pieces of gold showing up.

In the post referred to above, there is a link to quite a few photos. But here is another link to photos which actually have a bit of a description of what you are looking at.

I was also struck by the pieces from the hoard which have garnets set in gold. So, you can also see in this photo a start on some pieces reflecting that concept, which I will cut out and work with. I cut portions from the gold mesh and then stitched around them.

I am looking forward to working on this one. I think I may have scattered bits, rather than one piece mounted. I really enjoyed painting the canvas! I might try other aspects of this sort of thing in the future.

Staffordshire Hoard

Although I am still trying to get a spare moment to get the last Connect-Disconnect piece done for our EquilARTeral group, we have already decided what to do next.

I am very excited! We are each going to do a piece based on the Staffordshire Hoard! Then we will mount them on Artist canvas which will be painted earthy brown, and so tie the 3 pieces together.

What is the Staffordshire Hoard? From the Flicker site from the Birmingham Museum and Gallery "The Staffordshire Hoard is an unparalleled treasure find dating from Anglo-Saxon times.The quality and the quantity of this unique treasure is remarkable. The hoard was first discovered in July 2009. It has sparked enormous interest from archaeologists, historians, press and public since the news about the find was released on September 24th."

I saw one or two photos on the newspaper and telly, but here is the link to photos of the pieces.
I am also going to try to embed a video of the archaeological dig where they found more of the pieces.

Staffordshire hoard excavation from Dan Pett on Vimeo.

This is so up my street! I have done a few pieces based on the Middle Ages, so this will be quite exciting. Besides, it gives plenty of scope for bling!

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