Just a few pretty shades of yellow and green for your delectation. (Love the way these blogs allow you to show things for no other reason than you like the images - whether it's a quilt you've made or a bowl of soup or a nice looking corner of your house ...)
The painting's gorgeous, and the above CD is great to listen to as well. Plus, love the girl's flaming red hair.
How gorgeous is this image?
If you're a Lady Gaga fan (I admit I am, she's bonkers but brilliant) you'll recognise this style of dress from the Bad Romance video. It's an Alexander McQueen, a mere snip at £4,500. I love the texture of it, those shimmering reptilian scales. The floral 'hat' is stunning though it might look over the top even at Ascot. Her nails are nice too - I think that pale green is fashionable this summer, though it takes some flair to wear it. I think I'll stick to pale pink or vanilla.
A few more images for you: these are from a notebook I keep of images I've cut out from magazines or flyers. I can't call them collages as they're so rough & ready, but they're good for leafing through when inspiration runs dry.
My 'Not at Liberty' quilt is making steady progress, and I've completed a few blocks now. I'm searching through my fabric stash for material that resembles Liberty print, and also was a bit naughty and splurged on new fabric yesterday. But it's so pretty and so Liberty-esque. At £3.67 a metre it was also a bargain.
The blocks I've made are mainly quite soft colours, so I'm not sure how the red one is going to fit into the finished design.
Another view of them:
The edges on the horizontal and vertical lines of the Union Jacks are deliberately not turned under, and they're already fraying a little, but I'm happy with that. I like quilts that look worn, and anyway I'm going to quilt the blocks with rectangles over the centres of them when I'm assembling the whole thing so I think it'll be pretty hard wearing. I think sometimes with patchwork we get too fixated on producing something that's technically perfect and forget that some of our favourite quilts from past decades/centuries are the ones with the wonky seams and make do & mend attitude. The ones where the fabric was just what was available rather than specially bought. At least those were always the ones I gravitated towards!
One of the quilts I loved at the V&A's major patchwork & quilting exhibition this year was this Liberty Jack quilt, made of gorgeous tana lawn.
I wanted to have a go at my own version, but frankly can't afford to buy Liberty fabric. But I've got lots of small floral prints which could (if you squint a bit) look Liberty-ish, and I made my first flag block today.
I decided it would drive me nuts to hem all the pieces, so I'm stitching them into place, frayed edges and all. I'm not sure how big this quilt will end up, might be more baby quilt than bed size, but I'm planning on sewing several blocks over the next few days.
Don't you love just mooching around in the newsagents and suddenly spying a new copy of Selvedge? Pity it's a tenner, but I decided I deserved it!
Or 'elvedge' as this I-forgot-to-crop image says .... Don't you just love that intense colour of those bluebells, married with the darker tone of the the dress? I'm bidding for 'Bright Star' on ebay and can't wait to get the DVD so I can see the film again. Gorgeous costumes.
Oh, I'm not such a Fancy-Nancy now ... I downgraded my Typepad status, so this is just a free blog rather than a bells & whistles paid one. Not as nice, but I couldn't justify paying for something I so rarely posted to. I do mean to post more often, but you know how it is ... real life just gets in the way!
So anyway ... I was recently sent a free copy of Living magazine, and it's full of gorgeous - costly - things to buy. But for us craftier types there are ideas we could pinch, modify, put our own slant on. How about knitting a lampshade?
This one's a pretty simple shape, though I don't know whether there's any special requirements about the flamable/non-flamable nature of the fibre you use?
Or how about a bit of painting on china?
These plates are fab, but couldn't you make your own with a few tester pots and some clear varnish on top?
More plates, this time floral:
The flower design on china is within most peoples artistic range, while there's also a pinchable idea with the cushions - add brightly coloured bobbles or mini pompoms to a printed cushion for extra oomph. Oh, there's the decorated cupboard too - if you couldn't paint these, you could decoupage them. Grab a magazine like Country Living and snip away, then paste down and varnish.
Finally ... for something completely different, also featured in Living magazine but sadly without credit to the designer. I absolutely adore these dresses. They clearly take inspiration from Victorian crinolines, but they mix that with a modern take on umbrella spikes and come up with something utterly modern. Wonderful.
I thought it was about time I wrote about the Quilts exhibition at the V&A which I went to almost a week ago. It was a really good, well put together show, and packed with virtually all women - mainly ladies 'of a certain age'! The quilts that held most peoples interest weren't the modern ones - like Tracey Emin's bed or the Grayson Perry quilt. Rather they were the traditional ones, and in particular the apliqued ones which really showed up the character of the maker.
Of the ones I particularly admired - loved this by Natasha Kerr, entitled 'At the End of the Day'. The colours appeal to me, as does the use of a family photograph along with fabric which shows signs of wear & tear, making you think about the 'life' it had before it was incorporated in this textile piece.
I adore this 'Liberty Jack' quilt by Janey Forgan.
The colours, the mix of prints, the lovely striped binding (which you can't see in this picture). The message behind the design is about having a symbol - the Union Jack - that's inclusive, incorporates many people from different backgrounds and ethnic groups, all coming together and merging into a whole.
This is a quilt by prisoners in Wandsworth gaol, who worked with a charity called Fine Cell Work. The charity sounds odd at first - teaching quilting to male prisoners? - but it seems to work. They take pride in what they make, the sewing is relaxing, passes the time, gives them something to concentrate on and a sense of achievement. Work is sold and the prisoners get a percentage of the money raised so they can pass much needed money on to their families. There was a video about the making of the quilt and I found it really moving to see these men in crampt, Victorian cells concentrating on their needlework.
Finally, this is one of the quilts that everyone seemed to admire. Made by Ann West in approx 1820. The applique is fab, the animals charming, and you need to actually see it in person to appreciate the size of the quilt and the immense amount of work and imagination that went into it. Superb stuff.
The exhibition's on for a while longer, and it's £10 to enter. Plus the V&A shop has lots of quilt themed goodies on sale. I could've spent a fortune, but I resisted and just splurged on postcards.
I've been to a couple of great exhibitions this week. Yesterday's was the Quilts show at the V&A, which I'll blog about later today/tomorrow when I've scanned some images in. But a day or two before I went to the Victoria Art Gallery. Having a day off work I went to Bath just to mooch around, do some shopping (bought some fab black wedges for summer ...) and generally wander around a bit. I hadn't realized Edwina Bridgeman's work was on show, so it came as a lovely surprise.
Her work reminds me of Julie Arkell's creations, though they're more sculptural than Julie's which seem to incorporate more knitting and textiles. The theme of the show as 'Shelter', looking at our feelings of home and how so many people in the world don't have a safe place to call a home. They're very gentle, folk art kind of pieces, and used recycled materials - old wooden spools of thread, discarded cutlery, sweet wrappers, driftwood, buttons and so on. The faces on the little people are very sweet - they're painted on plaster for a fresco-like qualtiy, which lends a childlike quality to them.
I'd recommend a visit, but it's only on show until 6th May so get your skates on!
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