Making a list...

Yes, I did make a list; it helps me to maintain the illusion that I have some control and that I'm organised. And on that list, under the heading 'Patchwork' I had written "on the long finger for now". For reasons I won't go into, the next day I sewed together all the blocks for the front...and then I put it away until things are less busy. Only in the meantime, some part of my brain is having random thoughts about what to do for the back and the edges.

 

Roped in and cushioned, the ram travelled from the foundry to my house last week. 

There were some man-moments of working out how to get it in through the narrow door..

...and of course a way was worked out...

A week later, having had either the stove or the heater on all day, the plaster is still not dry enough...and after checking with the client, I have a week less than I thought to the anticipated delivery date.

The good news is that once I started sewing in a zip it all came back to me, so I feel that bit more prepared for the sewing workshop this weekend...and I have, in a very organised way, been working through the list of things to prepare.

Making progress

More from the foundry...

Patination...looks spectacular...

                   ...has to be done fast...

and the finished Hares...
...a never-to-be-repeated shot, as this is the last of them.

Remember this?

....it's now this...ready to go off to Dublin.

Making a mess...

It was a good thing the clothes I wore really were old...plastering the ram made a mess of them...and of the floor...and my camera...and anything else I touched.
 This is scrim dipped in plaster - working fast with small mixes.

The head had been finished separately...

...and fixing it to the body was a bit of an adventure. In the end we put a plastic bag inside the head and part-filled it with plaster, holding it in place until the plaster had gone off enough.

Now it needs to dry before I can do any more - the next adventure will be moving it from the foundry to my house.
Many, many grateful thanks to my son, who helped enormously with the plastering and to Seamus for giving me the space and encouragement.

So while the ram dries I have a breathing space to focus on another deadline... I allowed Shirley's enthusiasm to talk me into teaching a new sewing workshop, a follow-on to "How not to be afraid of your sewing machine"...which I've run several times.
This one is "How not to be afraid of zips, buttonholes, bias binding and piping"...HOW did I think this was a good idea??? Especially when I have never made piping, it's years (decades?) since I last sewed in a zip or used bias binding and I had to look up how to make buttonholes on my machine...and there are two weeks left before the workshop. ( I could have started this before Christmas).
First a search for some hours on the internet for ideas - for a design that would result in an object of desire. There were some printed cushions with hares..made of hessian? linen? Not able to do printed, but can do a simpler shape with applique...that was the easy bit.

Flicking between four books from the library, I eventually worked out the piping and the second attempt was good. It takes quite a while to unpick 72 inches of stitching.

Even worked out how to make the buttonholes...and after several attempts made them the right size.

On reflection, it's been a helpful experience; a reminder of how it is to be a learner, not knowing how to do something, not being competent...making a mess of it.

More Ram...

Really focusing now; I have about five weeks before the ram is to be finished. The shape of the body is nearly there, I think. It's a bit difficult to see it clearly.

This head is a rough draft - to help me get a feel of the whole shape.

This skull is from the beach...it's a goat, but as they are so similar to sheep I've used it as a former....( a shame the lower jaw was missing)...and built on to it, which has been an interesting way to work. Usually I see things as a shape -from the outside.

After trying to start the horns with card, then with coiled wire, I ended up simply winding newspaper around a single wire, then pasting on strips of muslin...a lot more layers to go on yet. Working with wire and paper is familiar ground - even so, the nose, mouth and chin are not yet right. There will be pulling apart and reshaping to be done tomorrow.

More pictures from the foundry...all these hares have a home to go to, and that's the edition finished.

One of a set of three - I was persuaded not to smooth the surface, but to leave the strips of paper showing. I'll be interested to see how it looks after finishing and patinating.

Just making...

It's been a busy time...making the fabric houses led on to an idea for cards...the time they took would not make them financially viable to sell, but I did have a lot of fun. I also feel happier for having come up with an idea and designs that were sparked off by what's around, but are mine.

Thank you to my sister, over in France, who gave helpful feedback via e-mail.
The cards were finished in the morning...above is a sample...

...in the afternoon I worked at the foundry..

 The drawing is mine; the armature welded by my son -seen below, cutting with a grinder...always looks so dramatic- it's for a commission for a life-size sheep.

And I really am making this up as I go along because I've never worked in this way before. To date all my pieces have been on a smaller scale. Having recently worked out that for a lot of years I've been an "I can" person in fact, whilst mis-perceiving myself to be an "I can't", and that that can be the biggest brick wall, I am practicing "of course I can"...and as what I do is not brain surgery or high voltage electrical wiring, it doesn't matter that I don't know exactly what I'm doing...I'll work it out and with luck, learn something new. Was that a Pollyanna moment, or what?
The new thing I will learn is to weld...because I'd like a few of these for myself, just as they are.

Also in the foundry that day...the (bronze) casts of my pieces, to be finished.

And then, in the evening...because it had to be done that day...

Real Seville marmalade.

After finishing the last rug...

...for reasons I cannot fathom, I took a picture of the back, but not the front...and feeling at a loose end, I finally started the patchwork for my bed - for which the fabrics were bought in May 2014.

The design is a combination of two nine-patch blocks. I wanted to use warm, rich colours and mostly succeeded in my choices, but when the blocks were spread out, there was one fabric that didn't work, so it will have to be unpicked and replaced. (and my wonderful daughter has gone to the fabric shop in Taverham to get me more fabric) I know from experience that if you're not really happy with some part of what you're making, it's best to be ruthless.

Making the blocks this big meant it was fairly quick to piece together, but I'm wondering if a bit smaller would have looked better...but then with several of the patchworks I've made, once it's finished I have wished I'd done it differently.  They don't always turn out as I'd envisaged them and sometimes I'm disappointed.

In this one, I wished I'd used warmer colours in the windows...or somewhere...it came out more blue/cool than I meant it to. About 90% of this was recycled fabric.

Whereas this one I was pleased with (not yet finished in this picture)...it was made because there was so much blue fabric left over from the big one...

In this one, I'm not sure about the blue sashing, but it was a case of using what I had, (which was an old Laura Ashley curtain) and I suppose that is in the spirit of the original patchworkers. Even further in that spirit, one of the blocks is made with mismatched but similar fabrics.

This one I was pleased with..also some recycled fabrics here...but only two colours makes it easier.

Looking back over what I've written tonight, I realise that I often don't know why I make things, but I'm thinking the 'why' is irrelevant..it's how I am made...it's what I have been given, and when I ignore it, it's painful.

Making it together...

I was in England for Christmas. One of my grand-daughter's presents was a duvet cover featuring owls and foxes, so for something to do I suggested making an owl cushion. The first pattern I made wasn't quite right, so we made another, which worked much better...so we made another owl..then we made a fox. Initially not confident about sewing on buttons, by the third one she was flying it.

 

She is allowed to use her mother's sewing machine, so stitched some of the straight seams, clipped curves, stuffed the cushions and I showed her how to hand-sew up the opening. Later, I was thinking about skills being passed through the generations. My grandmother, who was born in 1892, taught me to knit, crochet and sew by hand...and I am teaching my granddaughter who was born in 2004. I wonder who taught my grandmother? Her family were very poor; there were apparently a lot of children and at the age of seven she was 'given' to her aunt in Warsaw. From the stories she told us, it was not a happy experience.

We'd been to the sewing/knitting/crafts shop at Taverham, where I could easily spend a hundred euros without drawing breath and I'd bought a few bits to play with. I had seen some little fabric houses on Pinterest and made a couple. Once home, I made a few more and found the playing with combinations of fabrics enormously enjoyable...it was hard to stop.

  

   

I've no idea what I'll do with them..probably give them away. It's not my design, not my idea, so would it be ethical to sell them? Even if it were, selling them through the local gallery shop, in order to make them a realistic price I'd possibly earn under €30 a day.

It made me think about sources for ideas... they don't come from nowhere. It seems that at any one time there is a "look" to designed objects - a style that's in vogue. But what makes one design idea more desirable than others, so that it is copied and starts a new style/look? 

 In the late 1960's when I was in college designing textiles, I used a wrapping paper as a source for one design and Moroccan henna patterns for another. Before the internet we looked in a wide range of books and magazines...the 60's were big on cellular patterns from nature; some of my ideas were developed from looking at slides of plant cells. Now you go to Google and you have thousands of images, even if they're not all relevant.

 When making the owls we looked on the internet for ideas, but the pattern was mine. These little houses are a copy, albeit with my own spin on choice of fabrics and shapes. I wonder- has the availability of so much visual material made me lazy? Is it changing the boundaries of ownership of ideas? This is an issue I keep coming back to.

Making it up as I go along

Rug number four - for someone I know who likes earth colours.

First sketch...The design is very loosely based on the Shaker 'Tree of Life' .

This is it scaled up full size on paper.. He said he'd like the tree to be the colour of a cardboard tube...there followed several days of dyeing and re-dyeing white T-shirts with tea/coffee/cinnamon while I jiggled with impatience.

Finally - I could start. All sorts of fabrics in there - as each one is a different weight the tricky bit is cutting strips the right width. This is where I am making it up as I go along because I don't really know what I'm doing, but as it's not "work" there's none of the fear/ anxiety about competence...I can be blithely incompetent without it freezing me into immobility. I've a feeling there's an insight lurking in there.

 I like the look of the backs of these rugs...makes me think of a labyrinth...Minotaur, mazes, cochlea, Mayan - or is it Inca? Also of lugworm casts in the sand...

Having looked at a lot of hooked rugs on Pinterest and read a few blogs of American hookers ( that's what they call themselves) I'm thinking that like patchwork, rug hooking in the States has moved on from its origins and developed a distinctive style. It seems contemporary American makers use mostly woollen fabrics, and cloth rather than hessian for the backing, so loops and rows look much more regular.