Sew2Speak » This and that

Advent, Advent

Ruth — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 12:26:48 +0000

ein Lichtlein brennt. This refers to the candles lit each Sunday in Advent on the traditional Advent wreath. I actually made these entries into my sketchbook last Sunday – the second Sunday in Advent. It was a grey, windy, rainy day. I ventured out for a walk, but turned back when the rain got harder. So I sat in the chair across from the window and sketched the view out.

View outside

That was sufficiently depressing to require something to lift the spirits. So I made myself a big mug of tea and ate some Zimtsterne that are one of my favourite Advent biscuits.

Zimtsterne

Plätzchen – biscuits – are one of the best traditions here in Germany concerning Christmas. Much as I love mince pies (and I’ve always made my own mincemeat to fill them with) I do enjoy the variety of biscuits that there is here. Before Advent starts all the women’s magazines are full of recipes for these wonderful little cookies. There are so many different recipes that you could probably have a different sort each day of Advent. I have baked them myself in the past, but there are always so many tins arriving into work and some really good ones available in the bakeries that I have to admit that I’ve become lazy. I shall have to dust off the recipes and the cookie cutters when I get to Spain as I shall have to continue the tradition without outside help.

P.S. Click on the thumbnails to see a larger image

Knitting grannies

Ruth — Sat, 19 Nov 2011 12:07:03 +0000

I read this article on the Guardian fashion blog about a group of knitting grannies, who knit articles for Danish designers that are sold in limited numbers in shops in Denmark. I thought it was a wonderful idea. How lovely for these ladies to be able to put their skills to good use. The ladies all belong to a Copenhagen activity and community centre for elderly people and the money that they earn is used by the centre to provide activities and excursions for all members. I’m sure it gives a great boost to the ladies, most of whom have been knitting all their lives, to be able to continue to knit and benefit other members of their community.

When my grandma lived with us after my granddad died, she used to knit handbags and covers for coat hangers that were sold to provide funds for some good cause, although I no longer remember which exactly. I know it gave her a sense of purpose and a good use for her time. My mother was an excellent knitter and knitted many beautiful jumpers and cardigans for my sister and I. Later she knitted school cardigans for her granddaughters too. Hand-knitted garments are so much nicer that shop bought ones. I do knit myself, but I’m the first to admit that I don’t have the same skill as my Mum. My sister is a better knitter than I. When she was at school, she used to knit for her friends to boost her pocket money. Sadly she no longer has time for hand crafts.

The knitting grannies have their own web site called Kaffeslabberas. It is in Danish, but if you use the Chrome browser to view it you can set the browser to automatically translate it, which is a pretty neat feature. They have also brought out a book of specially commissioned knitting projects. Unfortunately it only appears to be in Danish.

Wouldn’t it be great if this idea caught on it other countries?

Yarnstorming

Ruth — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 18:32:09 +0000

Do you know what that is? I didn’t until I read about the graffiti knitters in London on the Guardian today. Then I went over to Knit the City and found out what it is all about:

Yarnstorming: the art of enhancing a public place or object with graffiti knitting

Right now we need something light-hearted to make us smile. Otherwise the news worldwide is pretty depressing. I particularly liked the phone box cosy. You wouldn’t see that here in Germany – there aren’t any phone boxes any more.

Push series of books

Ruth — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 18:16:32 +0000

What a coincidence – today I was reading the September issue of Harvard Business Review when the Spotlight Artist caught my eye. HBR has fairly recently started illustrating their Spotlight package with a series of artworks from an artist. I always like to look through the artworks, because they have had some very interesting artists featured. In the September issue it is Jen Stark, an American artist who creates wonderfully elaborate designs using paper cutting techniques.

Then I stumbled upon her again in this post of Lark Crafts blog. It turns out she is one of 30 featured artists in the book PUSH Paper: 30 Artists Explore the Boundaries of Paper Art which is one of the first two books published in the new gallery series PUSH from Lark Crafts. This video gives a good idea of her work, but it is worth looking at her website to see the static images too.

The second book in the new series is PUSH Stichery is curated by Jamie Chalmers – aka Mr. X Stitch. My niece introduced me to his blog Mr X Stitch earlier this year. This post on the Lark Crafts blog gives you a good taste of the goodies each book offers. Two books worth putting on your wish list. I’m adding them to mine!

Look what happened to my studio

Ruth — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 09:43:37 +0000

This is the reason for the lack of new textile work appearing on my blog:

The first stage of our move to Spain has been completed. We have moved about ¼ of our house contents (the discards from our furnishing plans for the house in Spain) into a 52 m² flat in Kronberg. This will be where I live for the next few years while I continue working and Sqeze too until the house is completed, but then I suspect I shall see much less of him. Who wouldn’t prefer a nice sized bungalow in Spain with garden and swimming pool over 52 m² with not even a balcony? Still I can boast an Apfelwein Wirtshaus just across the road from me with a nice shady beer garden.

The move took place on Monday. It didn’t take long to unpack again into the new flat – I had a plan for where everything was to go and apart from two minor changes it all fitted in perfectly.

The rest of the week has been spent in the house packing up the remaining ¾ of our possessions ready for the move to Spain. The photo above shows what used to be my studio, which is now almost full with packing cases. And no they don’t all contain my art supplies, although a few of them do I shall have my main studio in Spain, but not be there most of the time in the beginning. I don’t have much room for stuff here in the mini flat, but have taken my portable sewing machine and also intend to learn how to make bobbin lace. I shall have to find a new medium for the interim until I can get into my new studio.

First attempts with positive and negative space

Ruth — Mon, 09 May 2011 20:06:25 +0000

It’s been a while since I had anything really to post about. Just before Easter we had my niece and her boyfriend to stay. Then I got caught up with hay fever – it only affects my eyes, but they swell up all red and itchy and then nothing is much fun at all. At the beginning of May we were in Spain to visit the building site and so on and so forth.

I’m still not having a lot of success at being consistent about what I’m doing. Despite taking the class “Working in Series” I’m not. It was certainly a good class and I started out full of enthusiasm, but then all this other stuff came along and now I seem to have lost the impetus again. The book Notan that I mentioned in my last post did interest me enough to have a go at trying to balance positive and negative space to produce an equilibrium between the two. I guess I didn’t choose a particularly easy subject, but I feel the first attempts show some promise. Like the vicar’s egg – they’re good in parts.

Here is a small sample:

ArtBabble

Ruth — Sat, 05 Mar 2011 17:45:18 +0000

If you are interested in art you will probably like this website introduced to me by Elizabeth Barton in my last class at QU. ArtBabble is a collection of videos on many different subjects. Their subtitle is aptly Play Art Loud. They have many prestigious art galleries as partners. Just take a look at their list.

You can learn a lot from the videos. Try this one on Vermeer: Master of Light.

Drool

Ruth — Fri, 11 Feb 2011 19:45:42 +0000

Wouldn’t it be lovely to live near a shop like this:

I stumbled across it on Apartment Therapy. Unfortunately for me Tender Buttons is in New York – not a place I can just drop into for a visit. BTW be sure to click on the Tour our Store link on their website to see some more photos to get those juices running.

When we lived in Munich there was a shop just like this on Dienerstrasse. I’ve just looked on google street maps and I can’t find it any more – another shop probably gone out of business due to a lack of interest in dressmaking and tailoring these days. I can’t remember exactly what it was called, but I’m pretty sure it began with an R. The other great shop in Munich was Orag – which at least appears to still exist. Here’s a link to a report about it in German, but google translate will assist in understanding. It sells everything you need in the haberdashery line for tailoring, including (at least when we lived in Munich) horse hair canvas for interfacing. Lots of great buttons too.

There are some things that I still prefer to buy in the flesh, as it were – and buttons is one of them. If you get the wrong shade it’s a disaster and I don’t trust the internet for displaying the colours correctly. In the photo above you can see the buttons are displayed in the same design and in various sizes. Both the shops I mentioned in Munich sold buttons like that too.

When we lived in Munich there were lots of great shops for buying fabric and haberdashery, including a shop that sold only silk fabric and one that only sold felt in all the colours of the rainbow. I went back not so long after we had moved away and sadly many of them had disappeared.

Generating ideas

Ruth — Sun, 23 Jan 2011 18:12:52 +0000

As I wrote in my last post I am currently taking a class at Quilt University with Elizabeth Barton called Inspired to Design. The first two weeks we have been doing lots of exercises to generate designs. Some of them are ideas I’ve read about before, but never gone as far as actually experimenting with. I am trying to do as many as possible just to see whether they work for me or not. None of the designs I have come up with yet are anything particularly striking, but it is interesting to see how they spark off new ideas.

We are also learning how to evaluate our designs. This has been quite a valuable exercise, as it is not something I can remember being given much guidance on in the C&G course. Of course we covered all the aspects of design, but I didn’t feel that I actually gained much in how to apply the theory in practice.

Lesson 3 is about using value and colour and although I’ve not started doing any of those exercises yet I’ve read through the lesson and found some interesting information in it that I hadn’t picked up anywhere else.

Here are a few examples of some of the things I’ve been doing:

Starting the New Year

Ruth — Sun, 09 Jan 2011 20:35:57 +0000

We are one week into the new year and I’ve not written anything on my blog yet. I’m not about to list the goals I achieved last year or list my new year’s resolutions for this year. I don’t believe doing the one or the other. I know many people say that it helps them to stay on course if they commit to things in public, but that is not for me. I read on a blog just before Christmas someone who said he didn’t make goals at a particular time like the beginning of the year, he set goals when he needed them. That sounds like my kind of thinking. As the guys who wrote Rework said:

Planning is guessing. Unless you’re a fortune-teller, long-term business planning is a fantasy. (…) Writing a plan makes you feel in control of things you can’t actually control.

Certainly I think 2011 is going to be a year for me where long term planning is not going to be possible. We signed the contract with the builders to start work on our house in Spain last Thursday. Building work has to start within 15 days of us signing. There will be potentially a lot of things happening on that project that will require my time and attention. So I’m not making any long term plans concerning my textile art work.

To quote Rework again:

Give up on guesswork. Decide what you’re going to do this week, not this year.

This week is the first week of a course I’m taking at Quilt University called Inspired to Design with Elizabeth Barton. That’s what I’m doing this week and for the next five weeks!