'If you make happiness your goal, then you're not going to get to it… The goal should be an interesting life."

Dorothy Rowe

Saturday 13 December 2014

Week 14 Running hard to stay in the same place.

My counting may have slipped a bit, but I know next week is week 15, so this must be the end of week 14. It is hard to believe that I've come to the end of the first quarter of the BA course. What have I got to show for it? A lot of knitting, a lot of notes, and the essay. All bound and ready to hand in. 😅

1. Some knitting. This is the mini sample. After felting, 50 stitches and 57 rows (it was meant to be 50 but I did too many and couldn't be bothered unpicking them) just fits a cylindrical wine box. I suppose I could use lots of cylindrical wine boxes to hold up the trees, but a) drinking all that wine wouldn't be a good idea, b) I haven't seen any more of the cylindrical ones, and c) the trees may become arms. Or maybe not.


2. Some more knitting. These have nothing to do with uni work, I just love the way the wool/alpaca blend felts. I think I have enough left for a third one. There need to be three.


3. A book. All embroidered, folded up, and stuck together. It's odd, but I like it.



4. Some Al Wei Weis. We've been meaning to go to his exhibition at Blenheim since before it started, and we finally made it on Friday. It costs an arm and leg to go in but we can get free entry for a year, so if there is another exhibition in 2015, it will only have cost half an arm and a leg. (I wasn't so excited by Blenheim itself that I'd go again just for that.)


The exhibition was a bit of a 'Hunt the Wei Weis' as they were displayed in the house, unlabelled, and in some cases, hard to find. Some were pretty obvious - I'm sure the Spencer-Churchills don't usually cover their carpets with hundreds of porcelain crabs - but finding a specific porcelain plate in a room full of porcelain plates was quite difficult.  Especially when the order items were shown in in the guide wasn't the same as the order in which you go round the rooms. Especially  when the only clue was a postage stamp sized photo in a poor scan of the guide they've run out, produced on a printer with a dodgy colour cartridge. Especially when the illustration shows one plate and there turned out to be a dozen of them. (Assuming we found the right plates.) But it all added to the fun, and there were some stunning pieces - a chandelier in the hall, a carpet based on a rutted road, and the 31 lovely things above, which were in the gardens and therefore photographable. I think. Wensleydale was fascinated by the 40 famous finger photographs, and spent ages looking at them, trying to work out where they'd been taken. This was made a little more difficult because they'd been hung sideways on, so the finger was vertical. I assumed this was so they would fit in the spaces chosen for them, but maybe they are always hung that way?

Then we had tea and Christmas Cake in the nice, and not ridiculously expensive tea shop, and came home


 


 


 




 

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