Enjoying the tennis

and in intervals enjoying a few rare interesting images of tennis:

Camille Pissarro: Girls playing tennis (image from here)

Yuko Shimizo (image from here)

As ever ...

... when I should be settling down to something serious

a silly idea pops into my head: a hare-raising story!  A doodle to add to my lino cutting pile perhaps.

Can't settle

I have many things to get on with, most of which need a deal of time, but I find myself distracted to focus on something different.  My main determination at present is to eliminate extraneous STUFF.  Stuff which has accumulated over so many years, and has been added to and accommodated as parents have died.
Stuff might prove useful, books might be read or re-read, stuff is too good to throw away, but now obsolete, or out of fashion, or in not quite spruce enough condition to give away, ....
Anyway all this in itself should make me busy, but the very process of sorting through the stuff - especially in this case the textile stuff - has tripped me up.  I found myself making a collage of bits left over from other projects.  And now have given myself yet another stitching project.

The base is a screen print on heavy calico.  The image is a drawing of part of the plan of Winchester cathedral.  Many years ago I was part of an exhibition in the cathedral and as I live relatively near I did the early morning shift.  With hardly anyone in the cathedral I spent an enjoyable time looking at the structure of the place, and especially at the medieval inlaid tiles.

I made screen prints of the tile designs too, and bits of those are in this new collage.

The figures are offprints from other projects.  I also added some text about the tile makers, and all that would have been ok - but the idea is to pull it all together with the kind of intensive stitching that I used for City living, below.

Sigh. 

Rook work

Fishy diversion

I have a box full of felted knitwear, and from time to time I try out ideas for using it.  Today it came into my head to try out one of my favourite designs.

Originally a linocut, my fish on a dish has had a few manifestations.  First it was a heat transfer stitched piece.

Then it became a couple of small quilts, one with 'found colour' - these were the colours the computer gave me when I scanned the original lino print with the colour setting on.

And today I've made one with different thicknesses of felted knitted Shetland wool: two colours/threads for the body and fish, and one colour alone for the plate (apologies for the rather foreshortened appearance in the snap).

As you see, I like the figure facing in either direction.  I am quite pleased with the pattern on the knitwear showing as it does.

Juggling around

Patched pastime
After the exhibition in Margate I have been thinking more about things round in general, but also relating to my own work.  The most obvious link is with the juggler - which is a figure who comes round again and again.
At the Turner Contemporary there were examples from the ancient classical world as well as those modern and contemporary, and thinking of this sent me furtling into my postcard boxes.  I was looking for postcard pages from a calendar I had been given by an elderly German family friend.  She was from Berlin, was passionate about Ancient Greek art, and as a Friend of the State Museum in Berlin in the early 60s received an annual calendar.  She gave me one of these which features terracotta figurines.

I was delighted with these, as museums in Greece itself were not in the excellent condition they are nowadays, and I had seen hardly any figurines.  My love affair began with these postcards (just two of which shown above).  The girl on the right is playing the tambourine and came from the Black Sea area (as did my maternal family).  The child juggler on the left is described as probably coming from Thebes.
Whether influenced by these, the juggler has come to mean a kind of frivolity, a stepping away from serious concerns, how society is perhaps more interested in meaningless trifles.  Maybe it's just me not being able to accept that I no longer have the meaningful role I occupied previously.  Whatever it is, the desire to employ the image of juggler comes round again.

I was so pleased with Patched pastime that I am repeating the exercise with similar strips of knitted silk yarn, but in a different orientation and another colour.  I'm delighted to be using printmaking (the juggler herself is a carborundum print on tissue paper, scanned then digitally printed onto cotton), knitted strips I designed and made during my short-lived days as a knitwear designer, and hand stitching as well as machine stitching.

I was further delighted to find that this piece not only fell firmly into the SAQA Europe/Middle East theme for an upcoming exhibition, but for the one and only time so far in several years of membership I fit the size requirements for submission.
But as I worked on quilting the patchwork I got to thinking.  The idea of the exhibition is to tour to at least four venues which means much handling even with the greatest care.  This is not a conventional quilt, and I'm concerned that the knitted element might just tempt fate.  So once again I shall not be submitting my work for selection.  Hey ho.

Meanwhile, however, I am preparing a second piece of hand work to take with me on an imminent trip - just in case I finish the piece I'm stitching at present. I've printed a small, slightly different version of the juggler to take with me.  Appropriate colours for the onset of Autumn.

And then, rather than getting on with processing tomatoes I was distracted by an urge to doodle.

Distracted - again!

When I should be doing other things - like sewing sleeves on completed quilts, mounting completed small work, or looking for the misplaced project (I've given up on that: it will appear when it's ready to come out of hiding.)

I had the urge to doodle away at some templates for lino cutting.  And I feel much the better for completing those.