Just because …

it was a lovely sunny day, and it seemed ages since we’d been out together, we decided it was time for a trip.

And on lovely sunny days, our thoughts turn to the seaside. Even in January.

So, after taking one look at these on Romsey Rd and deciding to take a different route - we went to Bournemouth, to the Russell-Cotes Art Gallery. After a very pleasant and reasonably priced lunch in their cafe, we meandered round the gallery.

They have an exhibition on at the moment called ‘Food for Thought’, which combines items from their collections with some connection to food, and the work of 4 contemporary artists on similar themes. To be honest, some of the connections are a bit tenuous, but that made it more interesting – the last thing I wanted to look at was a room full of Victorian paintings of food. There were plenty of those, but also some interesting ethnographic artefacts connected with agriculture, hunting and cannibalism. Just what someone with a new found interest in ethnography wanted.

The art works I liked best were by Paul Amey - this and one a bit like this, but with crockery under the net rather than crabs.

For those who don’t know, the Russell-Cotes Collection was started by a Victorian hotelier, Merton Russell-Cotes, and his wife Annie, and is displayed, in part, in their house. I think it is fair to say that they had more money than taste, but there are some gems amongst the oversized nudes, and you can explore a high Victorian house which combines ‘Renaissance with Italian and old Scottish baronial … Moorish, Japanese and French decorative styles alongside contemporary Victorian design’. Yes, it is every bit as OTT as it sounds.

If you visit and you are the right sex, don’t miss the ladies’ loo in the house, [not the one in the modern extension].

Grruuuump…

Just started another cold – less than a month after the previous one. The kind donor was Babybel, always generous to her granny.

The cold may be part of the reason I spent all yesterday afternoon [came home early from college] and a significant part of today trying to couch down about half a metre of thread.

Sounds easy? Well, it would have been, if I hadn’t been trying to attach some of these to the thread – and make them work.

For some reason i cannot now remember and have some cause to regret, I decided it would be interesting to put lights at the bottom of this.

So I bought one of these. Yes – the reduce, re-use, recycle ethos of the 3D piece went completely out of the window.

Of course, when it came – no instructions. And Google, for once, let me down. Lots of instructions for inserting LEDs, but all of them written for electronics experts who can’t sew, rather than sewers with no knowledge of electronics.

So I snagged a passing techie who reassured me that I couldn’t blow it all up if I wired it up the wrong way, drew me a wiring diagram, and promised to come back if I got one of these. Err – I think not.

Couldn’t be easier, I thought. And it was, the first time, except that I’d wired the switch in the wrong place. So I moved the switch and tried again – and again – and again, to get all the lights to light up. Individually yes – altogether at the same time – not on your nelly. [No, it wasn’t because I’d wired them in sequence, I’d been warned that would lead to difficulties. And I kept replacing the thread.]

Finally, as I was about to give up, I decided to try some copper wire I just happened to have lying around.

Easy peasy. The problem had clearly been with the ‘conductive thread’ which I could not get to make a decent connection with the LEDs.

So here they are, all lit up – although you’ll have to take my word for it.

 

 

 

Two tips I did pick up from my Google search:

1. couch the thread down rather than trying to sew with it. Essential if you use wire but also easier with the conductive thread. [Anyone with experience of using metallic thread will be able to guess how it shredded and split and generally behaved very badly indeed.]
2. Use a press stud as a switch – I found it easier than the minute switches in the kit, and of course it looks more appropriate. In fact all you need to do to get the LEDs to light up is get your wires crossed, but for the purposes of getting this thing marked I decided a switch was better.

The next step is to line the drawer, insert the electronics which are sewn to a separate piece of fabric, add this red diffuser cut from a plastic file folder, insert the tubes of paper, and light the blue touch paper – switch on.

When it probably won’t work…

But the external examiner told me to try something I’d never thought I’d do. So I have. And I might even try it again, although I'll pass on the conductive thread.

[The EE also said our work didn’t have to be beautiful, which is a good thing in the circumstances…]

 

 

 

In another pat of the forest chest of drawers, the result of my experimentation with string.

Crochet chains, some with beads, made on the biggest hooks I could find – I knew that 12mm one would come in useful one day.

I did try some binding and wrapping, but decided that the process was too slow, and the results too small, to fill the drawer in the time. I think it needs some red, though.

So, despite my cold, and the frustrating wiring, I’m quite pleased with progress on this piece.

Small steps…

some of them very small.

I decided I needed some fluff in the corners of my drawers – I’m sure none of you have fluff in your drawers, but I do in mine. [No, not that sort of drawers!]

How to make fluff? Felt and an embellisher. I know you can use dryer fluff, but as I don’t have a dryer …

It felt silly just embellishing felt on its own, so I experimented with layering the felt on brown paper, sure the paper would just disintegrate.

But it didn’t – well, not straight away –you can see the beginnings of some disintegration bottom right, but I had to embellish from the paper side to get it to do that.

 

 

I don’t think I’ll be using this technique  for this piece, but the effect is interesting.

Other bigger small steps are:

finishing the itsy bitsy button bags [here in the wrong drawer] -

 

 

 

 

and the layers of rubber bands – now I have to pluck up the courage to fit it to the drawer -

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

and adding some handles to the chest – doesn’t it look distressed? -

 

 

 

and turning lots of ‘string’ [or string-like substances such as macramé cord] into machine cord.

I have bitten the bullet, taken out a second mortgage and, as advised by Ruth Lee, bought a cording foot – and it does make making miles of machine cord easier – the cord doesn’t get flattened, but because the feed dogs are up it doesn’t wiggle all over the place.

The next step is to sample various processes for making loops with this – crochet, wrapping and binding, buttonhole rings – or anything else I can think of.

As an alternative, I want to sample ways of filling a drawer with bubble wrap – anyone got any bright ideas apart from ironing it?

And finally, I retrieved this from its perch on top of a radiator – the bowl I made from the left over brown paper pulp. It has dried very hard and crunchy – I wish I’d made it before I handed in the 3D samples, it looks the perfect receptacle for unidentified archaeological artefacts – after a bit of distressing, of course…

When the weather gets warmer I want to experiment with making hand made paper with brown paper, too.

Mmm – is that one step madder than cutting up fabric and sewing it together again – shredding paper and making paper with it?

Now you see them…

now you don’t…

Or, to be truthful, you do, but in a truncated form.

My original plan was to use horizontal rolled instruction leaflets, but it became obvious that I didn’t have enough, and when I decided to  develop a theme of circles [or roughly circular forms, anyway], they had to go. End on and shorter, that is.

 

 

My second idea was to use shorter, vertical rolls of brown paper [regular readers will know that I have a lot of brown paper], but brown paper alone looked boring, even with different sized rolls, so I added the instruction leaflets, and some bus tickets as well, just for variety. At the moment they are sitting in a failed drawer with no lining – I shall have to think about the lining, as you can see it through the larger rolls.

I didn’t manage to pluck up enough courage to unpick the needle lace last night, but might manage it tonight, although I have a few more button bags to sew. It looks like 160 will be enough. [For the first time ever, Wensleydale said something which implied that he might have the teeniest tiniest suspicion that, perhaps, maybe, I am possibly a wee bit – well, shall we say bonkers?]

He might be right – although I found making the bags quite meditational, like knitting. And Radio 3 have a new series of World Music on Thursdays which went very well with itsy bitsy button bag manufacture.

So – I have one drawer of rubber bands, one of paper, one of buttons – not sure about the fourth, might be bubble wrap, might be wrapped, crocheted or turned into machine cord string – or something else I haven’t thought of yet. [Stitch? You think I should have more stitch? In the tutorial I was expressly forbidden to get too hung up on stitch!]

While I was feeling destructive I distressed the chest of drawers a bit more, with an ink pad. I have resisted the temptation to attack it with a hammer. So far.

Must add the handles.

And just to prove that insanity making chests runs in the family -

this one was made by my father in the 1950s [it’s tiny, I keep sewing tools and haberdashery in it]

 

 

and this one by my great grandfather, a wheelwright, in [probably] the late 19th century - by the look of it from what he had lying around at the back of the shed. It is a little bit bigger –big enough to hold spare quilts in the top.

Although they probably wouldn’t approve of the rough and ready construction of mine, my forefathers would definitely approve of the recycling, a trait which  runs deep in the family [Dad had it too].

Did I mention great grandfather was a Yorkshireman?

Here today and gone …

by this evening, very possibly. Well, a lot of this will be.

I had a tutorial in college yesterday, and when asked the reason for the needle lace on this, I realised there wasn’t one.  At one stage  planned to make the rubber bands detachable from the base, so they needed holding together. Now I’ve decided to sew them to the backing, I don’t need any additional stitch - and, as was also pointed out, it hides the interesting background.

So tonight I will remove the needle lace and the shisha, and add some more layers of rubber bands, trying to make them look as if they are piled up in the drawer. Yes, I could just pile them up in the drawer, but I want something that won’t move around.

These, on the other hand, will be left loose. I just need a few more of them, so I made about 100 more little bags this afternoon [polyester sheer and a soldering iron] and found some more buttons – yes, I have a lot of buttons. So my alternative task tonight is sewing buttons into little bags.

I could have machined them, but I wanted a thicker line and the tassel-like ends which come from using embroidery floss. Anyway, I don’t think machining would have been much quicker, because of having to manoeuvre each tiny bag under the foot.

In case you hadn’t realised. they are inspired by those little bags of spare buttons which come with new clothes and which you keep in the back of a drawer, although you can never find the right one if you do lose a button.

Apart from a tutorial, the other college event was the presentation. I only made a minor cock-up with the technology, I kept to the time limit, and nice things were said by several of my fellow-students as well as the staff, so I am happy with that – and even happier that its now over!

Back to work

On her excellent and inspiring blog Margaret Cooter has written about being ‘energized’ by going back to college. I know what she means – but in my case it is blind panic which has led to an outburst of activity. Panic caused by finally allowing myself to accept that the 3D piece is due in by the end of this semester, i.e. February. [I can feel my blood pressure rising just typing that.]

So I had to make some decisions. The first was that I would line the drawers with some Cas Holmes inspired fabric. Unfortunately the piece I made before is not big enough, so I spent yesterday afternoon making some more, while the rain drummed on the roof of the [unheated] conservatory - the only place suitable for sloshing wallpaper paste around.

Then this morning I moved the fabric inside, otherwise it will never dry. It is now squeezed between the dining table and the window, which is fine provided no-one wants to sit at the table…

Last night I got started with a sample of embroidery to put in the drawers. Yes, embroidery! Not cardboard engineering. Not glued fabric. Stitch!

I want the drawer contents to be those everyday things we all have at the back of drawers, but used in an unusual way. Hence the rubber bands used as the cordonnets for some needle lace. [The blue threads are temporary, holding the cordonnet to the temporary backing.]

Plan A with the real piece was to use blue rubber bands as we have lots of them. Plan B was to use red ones as we have nearly as many and, as Sheila Paine points out, red thread has special significance in a lot of traditional embroidery.

But I like the look of the boring beige ones so much I had to go out this morning and buy some more, because I’ve used all we had in the sample.

This afternoon I found two more book mailers and made two more drawers for the chest, so they are all the right size, if nothing else. So I now have four that aren’t the right size, as well as four that are. I used a dud drawer to see whether sanding them made the surface more interesting- I knew they’d come in useful - and as it did, sanded the real thing.

And finally, I made some crud pulp from brown paper and PVA and tried to fill in the holes and gaps in the chest – which wasn’t as successful as I'm hoped.Still, I figure  I can sand it down again after it has dried.

There was, naturally, a lot of crud left so I lined an old bowl with cling film and made a moulded bowl.

No idea if it will work, and it has no connection with the 3d piece, but I couldn’t bear to throw the crud away. [Yes, I know what it looks like…]

It is sitting on the radiator, otherwise I don’t think it would ever dry out. I would have liked to make paper with the crud but as I normally work outside when I make paper and it has been a wet, windy, January day – I decided not to.

Back to the sample tonight. I hope you realise how brave I am being using needle lace, when the external examiner has written books on it…

A little belatedly…

may I wish everyone a happy New Year!

The last few days have gone past in a bit of a blur. Mostly a ‘Oh heck I’ve c****d it up again’ blur.

 

You would think that some one whose favourite subject at school was geometry [yes, I know, sad] would be able to make a simple cardboard box, wouldn’t you? Or if she made a mistake with the first but she’d get it right after that – especially as she’d carefully made paper mock ups first?

You’d be wrong. I made six and none of them are completely right. Folds in the wrong place, too long, too shallow, too short – and now I’ve run out of book mailers. So I’ve decided that fate intended these drawers to be less than perfect, so I will have to live with it…

Then I though I would wind a hank of wool to start some new knitting. OK it was rather a large hank – and my swift is a bit decrepit – but did it have to collapse on me?

 

Result – a basketful of spaghetti. Mind you, it wasn’t helped by a misguided decision to try to untangle it while Babybel was here …

And finally – an attempt to make a basket out of newspaper. I realised early on that it wasn't going to be as robust as I’d hoped, but when I got to the sides - and I remembered that weaving baskets works best of you’ve got an odd number of stakes – I decided to cut my losses and bin it.

Should have stuck to Lois Walpole’s instructions.

However, we did have a good day yesterday, at the annual King Alfred’s Bus Running Day. We went on this one, this one, [a.k.a. ‘Bertie’] and this one – but Babybel really really really wanted to go on this one. Because it’s purple.

Mmm, I suppose it’s a bit anorakish to be able to identify them all – but we had a great time and Babybel loved it.

Back to the routine tomorrow – day with Babybel, then college on Wednesday. And the three modules due in over the next few weeks are all done and dusted, so perhaps I didn’t muck everything up this holiday!