Thought-provoking fun

Towards
Today I tried a word-based exercise: my first attempt at a cento.  Starting with just two lines; one from a familiar poem, Cargoes by John Masefield, and another from a recently encountered poem, When Death Comes by Mary Oliver.
I made two two-line centos:

Rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine,
I was a bride married to amazement.

When it's over, I want to say: all my life
Dipping through the Tropics by the palm-green shores

I wish I had known about centos when I was teaching literature all those years ago.  I'm sure the kids would have had such fun.  I'm certainly finding it serious and fun now.

A most enjoyable exercise

Spread 6
I judge the Diving In book project a success for me.  It is not a good design - I once worked with a brilliant designer who became a friend, and I hope she does not see this.  It is not a good book: I included too many spreads, and thus the spine does not work.  There are many faults which I can see, and no doubt more which I cannot, but not only did I enjoy the process, I think of it like a successful preliminary sketch - even if it is never developed further.

Spread 7
The exercise also worked as distraction therapy for me.

Spread 8
After too long I have written a post in my work blog about the making of the spreads.  The remaining spreads can be seen there.  

Spread 10

Spread 11

Spread 12

Spread 13

Really diving in

The approach to this project was to ponder as little as possible.  I wanted decisions to be instinctive with no or minimum mulling.  The book was going to cost me an amount which I was willing to pay for this experiment, this first pull of a print, so to speak.

Spread 2
The only rule (and that is too definite a term) I set myself was to include all sea and strand related images worked up in my files.

Spread 3

Spread 4

Spread 5

Quick experimental project

 

At the end of last year I was in a plunge of depression, and in order not to disappear without trace I needed something to occupy all my time.  My husband was going away for a few days which gave me the specific time to launch myself into something.

Photobox had been bombarding me with offers of photo books at up to 70% off in the lead up to the festive season, and so I decided to use that as my project.

Over the years I have developed many images to do with the sea and the edge of the sea - several in finished stitched work, and others which have only got as far as digital designs.

So, over a long weekend I put together 17 double page spreads.  It was all-absorbing for all of each of those days.  It is not brilliant, but I am relatively pleased with the result, given the short time spent.

Photobox provide choice of layout, and do also have provision for text.  I decided however to put the text on the original digital images.  I made the common mistake of making the text too big - it's a fault I seem to repeat when designing using a monitor.  I should really have learned by now!

I'll put the rest of the spreads on the blog over the next few posts.

Dedicated to books and reading

My grand sorting really has led to a great project which has gripped me.  I am not devoting every minute to it, but somewhere in the back of my mind thoughts are churning away.
I wrote a post about the initial idea last month, and since then my interest has deepened, and I have realised just how personally relevant the project is.  My career was in publishing, and specifically in children's non fiction and in educational publishing.  From 1977 - 81 I was a commissioning editor in London for Blackie, whose gazetteer I am now canibalising.  That gazetteer came from my Scottish grandparents' house - and Blackie was a Scottish publishing house. (It was one of the Blackie family who commissioned Charles Rennie Mackintosh to design Hill House.)
I also had a passion for encyclopedias and gazetteers when I was a child.  For Christmas 1953 I was given the complete Arthur Mee's Encyclopedia, and I have had a thirst for reading for information ever since.
So, all in all, I can see that this project will occupy quite a bit of my thinking and designing for a while.

Words, words, words

I have been fascinated by words for longer than I can remember.  I was an unplanned child, born at a time when my parents had no space and less money.  I was with my mother all the time while my father studied at university and my mother either embroidered tea cloths for pin money or studied English.  I grew hearing two languages: Scots English and Greek.
My mother did her language learning out loud, reciting, reading to me.  We learned to read together.  I did not know that was what I was doing.  Then before I was one year old we went to Greece, and I as surrounded by aunts with other sounds: Greek.  Apparently I was silent for a worrying time before embarking on my attempts.

Then back to Scotland for my second birthday - back to sounds I had almost if not forgotten.  Then back to Greece when I was three - this time silent for four weeks before I began to speak fluently, in Greek, appropriately pronounced, with idiom, and including (unknowingly) Pontic Greek expressions (much delight and clapping - and pinching of my cheek!).
I returned to Scotland after my fifth birthday in order to start school.  I had forgotten my English.  The three day train journey across Europe started in panic - I could understand what my mother said to me in English, but I could not find the words in myself to speak.  A kind university student, returning from vacation on the same train dedicated himself to reminding me first of nouns by pointing, then gradually of everything else.  (I would have suffered so much more if we had simply flown as is normal today!)
In those very early years I realised that it's not just a difference of vocabulary.  Body language is also different, and thought processes, reactions, fine expression of emotions.  How much of a potential to understand more is missed when only being in possession of one language.

I went on to learn French then German, and was lucky enough to spend some time in each country.  Then by studying literature and language development at university doors and windows were opened and my understanding and curiosity grew.  Poetry became a joy rather than an embarrassing tedious chore of rote learning and recitation.  A career in publishing drew on all of the above, and contributed the additional delights of typography: the visual aspects of language, lettering, and layout.

Imagine then my recent dilemma when faced with a 19th century sample book - containing a partial gazetteer as I try to whittle down our over-large collection of books.  Was it simply sentimentality which was making me want to keep it?  By William Morris's dictum it is neither of use nor beauty - or was it?  What on earth could I do with it.

All at once I knew what to do.  I scanned the pages which most appealed.  And within this post are the initial experiments for my new project.

Looking back and forward

(image above from here)
I visited the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1982 to see a Kandinsky exhibition.  But it was the architecture of the museum which struck a deep chord.  I was with a friend, going round the show at different speeds, and it was looking down to see where she was that it suddenly struck me: this building is a metaphor for life.  I was looking back at where I had been; even my friend was part of my past: she was a colleague from my previous job.

It was even clear that as one progresses, the perspective looking back changes.  Not everything can be seen clearly.  Recently, presently, I have been using the spiral to look back.  For instance, in trying to clarify how to move on with my work, I am first looking back at what I have done to get here in my work blog.

Last year I interrupted my flow of work to look back in a different way.  I had reached a point where there are now memories that only I have, and I have photographs of people who are now only known to me, so I decided to put together a book for my great niece explaining who all these folks are, their characters, and how they are related to each other and to her.  I also included anecdotes, some of which were illustrated by the photographs.

A book of photos with text is so much easier to dip into than a box full of snaps - or even a photo album.  So much more than simple, or even lengthy captions can be put into the text of a book.   Photobox was having a sale last autumn, so I took the opportunity.

I so regret not asking more questions of all my relations when I was young, especially as both my grandmothers' generation had lived through so much history - the wars, the migrations, etc., and so many changes.  I wanted to do a little bit to pass on my own memories of individuals and incidents, so that perhaps the youngsters would be prompted to ask me further questions while I am still around and capable of answering! 

Multi-tasking

I'm happiest when thinking about several - or at least a few things at a time.  So when I am stitching solidly, my brain is busy in other areas.  Today I have been exploring ideas about three dimensions - an alley I stroll down from time to time with no specific direction as yet.

There is stitching to be done every day - I've almost finished the individual pieces of Soliloquy, only a couple to go.  And of course the ongoing getting rid of stuff.  But my main focus today has been on another ongoing task: to work up a few drawings for lino printing later in the year. 

I managed to get a trio to the back burner point - meaning that I'm largely happy enough with them to leave them until I am ready to transfer them onto the vinyl for cutting. 

My starting point for these was the passing thought that apart from when printing, I rarely wear an apron any more, so a tentative title for the trio is Studio aprons.  I have also been feeling sentimental about bits of knitwear I've recently finally cleared out, and so the aprons have designs I created in those days.  I do hate waste.

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. 

Elusive

I have been seeking a folk song.  Several years ago, while I was my mother's sole carer and thus not my usual otherwise alert self, I happened across a television programme of a folksong gathering.  A woman described the folk tale behind the song she was about to sing - perhaps in Gaelic (Irish, or Scottish, I cannot remember).
It was the story which gripped my mind.  I do not remember it at all clearly except the bare bones:
There were two sisters; one - let's call her Catriona - had a lover that the other - let's call her Fiona - coveted.  So while Catriona fell asleep at the low tide edge, Fiona tied her hair to the rocks.  The tide inevitably came in, and Fiona walked off with the lover.
I cannot remember enough details to google effectively, so have not been able to track down the folk song, or the tale.  I keep trying at odd moments, but meanwhile the worm has been at work in my mind.  The seaweed on the shores of the Outer Hebrides provided the hair.

It is not a literal illustration of a mis-remembered story, but what hearing the story generated within my well-established relationship with the sea.  After my return from holiday I have been working on the idea above. 

Playing

Several years back a friend and I used to work closely together.  We did our own thing, but every three weeks met, and gave ourselves exercises to stimulate thought, work, and discussion.  Life got in the way, and the close association dissolved, and I do miss that constant stimulus.
Of late I have felt myself on a kind of plateau - plenty of projects to process, but a whiff of same-old same-old creeping into my horizon view.  So, I decided to do two positive things. 
First I shall not fret.  I have a lot to be getting on with, as is the way with hand work - so on with that I shall get.  Meantime I shall set myself exercises.
A long time ago when I was similarly in the doldrums about what new fiction to read in order to widen my experience, I set myself the exercise of for instance buying the thinnest book on a shelf, or one with a red cover, or the first one I saw with something specific in the cover design, or title, ... etc.  I encountered very few duds, and enjoyed the stimulating experience greatly.
So, for my first exercise I chose a square sketchbook (from my embarrassingly large pile of empty or almost empty sketchbooks!), pastels, made myself a stencil, and was to use at least one postage stamp (from a collection my brother and I had as children - he does not want them, and I am thus slowly disposing of them).  The stencil I made is of a group of five running figures.
The image at the top of this post is the first attempt, with a stamp of one of my favourite mosaics.  I decided that the stamps I chose should have some personal meaning for me, and the one below reminds me of the hours I spent in Singapore airport in the mid-1980s!  (I was flying out to Jakarta for work every couple of months, with an eight hour wait at Changi between planes - those trips involved me watching a lot of tropical fish!)

After my first attempt at the exercise I wanted deliberately to do something that needed 'editing'; working on in some further way.  So this was a lot looser in approach. 

I tried not to have any idea of what that further work might be, but as I scanned the scribble this morning my memory dredged up a photo of water lily leaves I had taken a couple of years ago.  So I had a little play with that.

The next big project

It's not the beginning, because apart from the idea, the making started with the lino prints.  But now I have 25 pieces of printed fabric to begin the stitching.  There was a little remedial work, which I've described in my work blog, and now I'm making decisions about thread colours - before embarking on the Grand Projet. 

Is it a kind of madness which has me hooked on hand stitching?  I've designed a whole made up of 5 x 5 pieces sized approximately 38x33cm (15x13"), each filled with hand stitching in fine silk.  The fabric is cotton lawn which at least will be easier on my fingers.  I will also be stitching other projects for a change of scene - and at some point trying out printing with my otherwise redundant pasta machine (see Jac's blog for a brilliant idea).  So, will I have finished Soliloquy (the project pictured) before next Spring - I wonder.

Twilight, tulips, and templates

I have reached the end of The Last of the Light: about Twilight by Peter Davidson, a book I have been reading in small chunks so that I can better savour the contents and the thoughts leading from it.  Out of these thoughts and feelings has come at least one design - which coincidentally I completed stitching on the same day.  It now awaits ironing and finishing.

The idea for Fading also came through my thinking about tulips.  The figure is drawn onto a photograph I took of fading tulips.

My very first encounter with textile tulips was at the age of four.  I have shown this cross stitch piece before on this blog - perhaps even more than once, but I make no apologies as I am rather pleased with what I achieved. 

When towards the end of my publishing career I took up knitwear design the tulip was a form I explored for possible patterns.

I also played about on the computer to doodle a possible needlepoint design.

Then when I decided to leave the knitwear for hand stitching I attended a masterclass course which included a session playing with photographic enlargers.  With no film involved I processed a tulip petal as if it were a negative, then developed the photographs. 

Using one such image and other photographs I had taken of Queen of the Night tulips I made one of my first heat transfer print stitched pieces: a triptych.  I'm afraid that this snap was taken recently, long after the piece was framed.

Is the tulip a cliché subject?  I don't know, but it's one which draws me back with pleasure.

Cutting an alphabet

I have finally got round to cutting a block alphabet for my Red Letter Memoir book project.  The raw material is conveniently shaped erasers.  I looked for a suitable free alphabet online - something along the lines of bold Gill sans - i.e., simple and chunky, and printed it out mirrored.

After I traced each letter onto the eraser - three letters per eraser except for M and W which are wider - I cut them with a scalpel.

Now they are ready for me to try out with some ink.  I have plenty of erasers left should I need to re-cut some of the curved letters which were the most fiddly - although I do not want perfection in any case as I am going to accompany the headline letter with my handwriting.