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

Dorothy Rowe

Friday, 11 June 2010

Today was contemporary textiles day …

the last one as it happens, because we’ve decided not to go next year.

So of course it was the best one we’ve had.

IMG_1250 We were told to take a box, so I took one I've been saving for years, just in case.

Amazing what a bit of spray paint and a flash photo can do – unfortunately it doesn’t quite look like this in real life.

This is just a slip case -

 

 

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this is what it looks like inside. [To give you an idea of scale, it originally held two miniatures of Talisker, a present to Wensleydale, though I helped him drink it <g>.]

 

We had to make an ‘environment’ inside, inspired by our choice of poem. Sensible people chose poems with lots of visual imagery, but I chose ‘Remember’ by Christina Rossetti.

Having a gold box, I had only taken gold and black fabric and threads, so I was a bit restricted. And I’d been looking through this book by Rozanne Hawksley before we started, which might have influenced my choice. [The only time I ever cried at an embroidery exhibition, was at Hawksley’s ‘The Seamstress and the Sea’, which we saw some years ago  in Portsmouth, a particularly poignant place to see it.] 

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But I digress. By the end of today’s session the box looked like this inside.

 

 

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I had also tacked this together, to go inside. It was going to be a panel placed on the other layers that are in there already - there are another 3 you can’t see.

But when I got home it folded itself over and told me it was a book.

It will become a book of photos of my parents and grandparents – I have several of those tiny black and white ones they took in the 40s and 50s, which I think will fit quite nicely.

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On a much less serious nautical theme, the mermaid’s purse is finished. Note my attempt at set dressing.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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And another bit of seaside felting – I can’t remember if I showed you this bit of hand needle work.

Tomorrow we’re off to ‘Sea Fever’. All this salt water splashing around. Must be the summer …

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