Thistles on a Quilt and Thorny World Problems

 

I worked  on a custom quilt all week and finally finished it on Saturday. There were large rectangular blocks to fill and I could not find any suitable digital Celtic style blocks because they are all designed to be square. This quilt is going to Canada so I thought that it needed the most obvious Scottish motif - a thistle. It took quite some time to get all of the thistles done and then I decided to fill in some gappy areas with hearts. I had to do SID around the appliqué with invisible thread and also in the pictorial blocks. 

Nella has been psyching herself up for starting college but on Friday evening received an email to say that classes would only be held once a week due to Covid restrictions. She was devastated as this event has been motivating her to fight anorexia and nows she feels that there is little point. It is maddening that large football matches and concerts can take place, schools are back, but a supposedly full-time college course can only offer classes one day a week. I can feel a Cause coming on…

The major international news this week has been the chaos in Afghanistan as the Taliban took back power, to the surprise of the rest of the world (apparently). I am greatly saddened by the horrific stories of those who have safely been evacuated to the UK and of those who have been left to their fate. I do not profess to have any expert knowledge of foreign policy but I do know that Britain had military campaigns there in the 19th Century and it did not work out well then either. Clearly, there is no simple solution but just to retreat after 20 years of military occupation, abandoning the people of Afghanistan yet again, is madness.

Perhaps therein lies my lack of motivation - it is not just simple hubris, more a sense of general pointlessness. Or perhaps I am bored - I have all the distractions I could ever want but nothing is grabbing my attention. But after reading the relentlessly gloomy news, I have to remind myself that at least mundane is safe.

More Gadget Fun

 I have always loved gadgets, even though I was the first person in my school to get an Ungraded mark for O-level Electronics. This week’s whim was to order a mini thermal printer with a teddy-bear face after seeing it on a Youtube vlog that Nella was watching. It does not use ink or batteries and the till-roll type paper is very cheap. The images are pretty good and it can also print sticky labels so I think it’s great. Since I love organising and labelling everything, I think I will have great fun with it:)

I now have 2 GoPro cameras so I can teach Qmatic techniques over Zoom. I have had the wifi boosted so I can try to get all of my camera angles into a program that will allow me to have several different views for teaching. The 2 cameras both have names - Cameron and Camilla - so I can distinguish between them. I made a little video after this week’s lesson, explaining how to download a design. Despite the boosted wifi, it still seemed to take about 18 hours for it to upload to Youtube. 

Freya has been home over the weekend and was most impressed by the height of our sunflowers.  It just proves that the summer has been hot and wet for it to reach the proportions of a magical beanstalk. She really came home to spend quality time with Pepper / Bluecat who at the grand old age of 17+ has developed Type 1 cat-diabetes. I don’t want her to suffer the trauma of twice daily insulin injections so I am keeping her fed little and often and she has a comfy nest on the kitchen window sill. 

Next week I should be working on a custom quilt and making sure that Nella has all of the stationery she might ever need to start college at the end of the month!

Up to Allsorts

 I decided to have another week of just “catching up” with odds and sods. This involved finishing my Wiksten Unfolding jacket which proved to be very successful, even though the reversible sleeves went in quite weirdly.

The week just filled up with random things like going with Nella to a piercing place in Aberdeen, taking about 30 seconds to get rid of cobwebs that have been hanging around for x-years, decluttering the kitchen drawers, tidying cables (again), and organising my sellotape collection. Yes, fine - it was a lot of procrastinating but that was entirely necessary.

We spent the weekend in Glasgow with Freya and without Nessie. It was a relief only to have to tackle the 77 steps once a day since we did not have to make multiple trips to find grass. The girls browsed a couple of vintage clothes shops and we visited a couple of nice cafes. They occupied themselves for a day while I went to teach a Q24 owner, who lived outside the city,  how to use her longarm machine. 

I was astounded to see a protest march in the city centre with a heavy police escort against Covid vaccinations. I simply don’t get why people would not want to vaccinate their way out of a pandemic!

We visited the Glasgow modern art museum which was illuminating. Don’t get me wrong - it was interesting in an intellectually pretentious way. There were amazing tapestries that had a complicated explanation to do with steel, Sikhs and some other stuff that went right over my head. The visit was quite an affirming experience for me. I came out and realised that my art is actually “worthy” of being displayed in such a space!

A Slowish Catchup Week

 

There were no customer quilts waiting this week to make me feel guilty for not working on them. Instead, I have decided to spend the next couple of weeks pottering away at small things I have been putting off. I got through some admin, wormed the pets, had another go at making pumpernickel which was pretty good but rather sticky to cut, and filed all of my dress-making patterns into one drawer of the filing cabinet. My workshop still looks a bit cluttered and when Rainbows Warliors arrived back from the show, I decided to leave it wrapped up since I can’t now easily access the quilt cupboard. 

Having organised all of the patterns, I have now cut out the Wiksten jacket that I have been meaning to do for ages. I originally planned to make a quilted version but decided to hang fire on that until I could see if I actually liked the basic lined jacket. 

We are not quite in the middle of August but there is a late summer vibe here now. The evenings are getting darker, the poly-tunnel is yielding rosy tomatoes and there has been some heavy rain. Nella has been struggling a bit so we have been going out for coffee to remind her that Life is waiting for her. She is still motivated to go to college so I think we should go and buy some fresh stationery to enhance that “back to school” feeling;)

FoQ is Back in 2021!

 Nella and I drove down to Birmingham last Friday in Freya’s VW Beetle and it was probably the longest that trip has ever taken. There were roadworks, hold-ups for an accident and a ridiculous volume of traffic since many British holiday makers are staycationing in the UK. We made it in the end, picked Freya up from the train station and heated soup using the microwave that I took for Nella to be able to cope with the food situation. The girls explored Birmingham and visited the show, which they enjoyed.

It was a very different FOQ to normal. The traders and galleries had all been given extra space and there were far fewer visitors, almost none from outside the UK. The attendees enjoyed the more leisurely and spacious experience but it felt surreal without the usual busy-ness. I did not see many familiar faces, I did not go out to socialise in the evening but I enjoyed the show more than I thought I might. Face masks were worn and social distancing was observed, unlike in the hurly-burly of English service stations where it would seem the Pandemic is now a distant memory. 

My classes went well - it turned out that I had not completely forgotten how to teach;) The Sunday morning session only had 2 pupils so they had an almost one-to-one experience. 

Rainbow Warriors did not win anything but Kaffe Fassett was spotted filming it, possibly for a lecture, so that was cool. There was the usual discussion between friends about whether some of the winners were the absolute best out of all of the quilts. There were many that were terrific. I think the current trend with judges is that they favour simplicity. The winner of the contemporary category was a subtle double wedding ring in hand-dyed fabrics, quilted simply with one-inch horizontal lines. My quilt had so much more going on because I don’t believe in “less is more”! I am always baffled by the judging comments. It is interesting that one judge might award me “Excellent” in all tick boxes, whereas another judge won’t award any higher than “Good”. I freely admit that I don’t enter just for the pleasure of taking part… I want to win;) Mixed judging comments make me question my ability since I feel that if I am not now getting “Excellent” as a matter of course then I must be going wrong somewhere. 

As usual, visitors to the Fine Art Masters gallery were heard to utter, “Oh?!” as they observed more conceptual pieces of textile art. Too be fair, some of the stuff was really interesting but let’s be honest - the only time I was ever juried in was when I came up with something quirkily ironic, rather than my finest work:P