Sew2Speak

New homes for quilts

Ruth — Tue, 01 May 2012 17:41:51 +0000

We have had time in the last few weeks to start finding homes on our walls for quilts and other pieces of art. I thought I’d share a few photos of them here.

I found it interesting that despite being able to choose again, which of my quilts to hang on the walls, I didn’t decide to hang any of my newer quilts. Although I enjoyed doing my City & Guilds course and learnt quite a lot doing it, during the course I didn’t produce any quilts that I really want to see hanging on my walls and be continually looking at. Even quilts that have been in exhibitions like my Colour Vortex quilt, when it came down to hard choices, did not get a space on the wall. I suppose the moral of the story is that the quilts I made to fit someone else’s constraints are not the ones that really express what I want to be creating. One of my old favourites that never made it onto the wall in our last house, Compass Rose, is now hung on the studio wall behind my sewing table. I’m pleased that it has finally come out of wrappers. Detachment comes with the passing of time and I was able to be more objective about other quilts, so Farbenfroh did not pass muster and has not been hung. It was an interesting experiment and I like the idea behind it, but at the end on the day the actual execution did not make the grade.

So far we only have one other picture on the wall and 3 family photographs. When you don’t have so much wall space it is hard to decide what pictures should get hung again. DH and I agreed easily enough as to which quilts to hang. The other art works are going to take more negotiation before we are agreed. And of course there is some space left on the walls, where some new quilts will find a home once they leave my imagination and become real.

I had to include a photo of the Jesters. I love these faces. We bought them in Devon years ago now. We were worried about the weight of them on plasterboard walls so they are hung in the outside seating area on the terrace, where they blend nicely with the stone walls and delight you when you notice them.

Sustaining creativity

Ruth — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 17:40:02 +0000

I’m certainly having problems sustaining my creativity right now. There are a number of reasons for this. The top two being a manic phase in my current work project that leaves me with hardly any free time apart from the hours I spend sleeping and doing household chores and the fact that my studio is now approx. 1700 km away from where I live most of the time. My knitting, which is progressing slowly but surely, is about all I can cope with and allows me to combine doing something with my hands and watching the box – nothing too strenuous so that I can wind down at the end of the day.

I was interested to read this blog entry about the Top Secrets of Creatively Successful Women. Guess I must be in my winter dormant phase right now. I have some ideas and some wall space in the new house waiting for quilts to take their places. Now I just need the opportunity. Until then I shall keep busy with small projects of the less space demanding type. When I’ve finished my knitting I might finally get around to trying my hand at bobbin lace. I have the equipment now – thanks to ebay. I just need to get started.

How well do you see colour?

Ruth — Sun, 15 Apr 2012 16:32:23 +0000

If you want to know the answer take the Online Color Challenge here on the x-rite site. According to them

1 out of 255 women and 1 out of 12 men have some form of color vision deficiency.

This was my result:

If you don’t have perfect colour vision the result shows you where in the colour spectrum you have problems. (Which could explain why DH and I often disagree about colours ) This could be useful information when working creatively with colour.

You might like to browse the site too. There is more interesting information available about colour.

My sketchbook has been digitized

Ruth — Sun, 01 Apr 2012 11:30:15 +0000

My contribution to The Sketchbook Project: 2012 has been added to the first draft of the Digital Library.

You can take a look at it here. They have done a good job of the scanning, apart from the one page where there are fold-outs that have been scanned in the folded up position, which looks rather strange.

I think it’s a pity that the Art House Co-op seems to insist that you register with them to be able to view the sketchbooks, but I hope that people won’t be put off by that. It is certainly interesting to look at the other sketchbooks available. I’ve been taking a look at how others have interpreted my chosen theme of Travel with Me.

Metal or bamboo?

Ruth — Sun, 18 Mar 2012 11:48:21 +0000

Progress has been minimal on the knitting front. I started on a sleeve and got to the point where I was to continue knitting in the round, when I realised that I’d made a mistake in the way I’d been knitting the decreases for the underarm join. So it was back to the picked up stitches to start all over. While I was about it I decided to use a set of double pointed sock knitting needles, as I was going to need them to knit the sleeve in the round. My long double ended needles were just too long.

As any sock knitting needles I have were in all Spain I went out to buy a new set. I’d been reading opinions on the different types of knitting needles somewhere on the web and had read a recommendation for bamboo knitting needles. The writer claimed that they were warmer in the hand and that the stitches slipped easily over the surface. Although they were nearly double the price of a set of metal needles I decided to pay the extra to experiment. The difference of about 3€ wasn’t going to break the bank and bamboo is environmentally friendlier as it is a renewable resource.

My mum was an excellent knitter and knitted things for all the family. School cardigans for her grandchildren were the last garments she knitted. In the later years she would scour the charity and second hand shops looking for plastic knitting needles. As she suffered from rheumatism in the fingers she found it painful to knit with metal needles and much preferred the plastic ones, but they were hard to find. I think she would have loved the bamboo needles. So that was another reason for buying them. Made me feel connected to her in some small way.

I’m now back to where I was before with the sleeve – in fact I’m a few rows further.

So how am I finding the bamboo needles? The jury is still out actually. Yes they do feel nice in the hands when you are knitting, but I can’t say that I notice that the stitches slip along the needles any better. I think that has more to do with the tension you knit with than anything else. I’ve not knitted with them yet for a whole evening to find out whether my fingers get less tired or not.

It’s been a long time since I knitted anything on a set of needles like this. I find it more fiddly than using the long double ended needles that I knit with these days. But then it’s in the nature of the beast. Knitting a sleeve in the round is bound to be more cramped that knitting a jumper body in the round. I can’t work up such a nice pleasing rhythm as when knitting something larger. Still it does have the big advantage to my mind that there will be no sewing together when I’m done knitting.

Open House at the Städel Museum

Ruth — Sun, 26 Feb 2012 16:07:13 +0000

I was up early for me today. Usually I have a lie in on Sunday and read in bed. Today I forwent the one pleasure for another. I was in town by 10:30 to visit the newly opened extension to the Städel Museum. The official opening was on Wednesday 22nd February. This weekend was a special Open House with free entrance in to the museum. It had opened its doors at 10:00 and half an hour later the queue was already out onto the road and around the corner down the block. It was moving quite quickly though, so I only had to wait about 10 minutes to be let in. Once inside the crowd dispersed. It was less crowded in the new galleries than in some of the special exhibitions we have visited in the past.

The extension of the Städel Museum View from outside Photo: Norbert Miguletz © Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main

It is known as the Garden Extension and this is all you can see from ground level. Yes the extension is underground. When you are in the new galleries you really don’t have the impression of being below the surface. The round portals do an excellent job of providing good lighting, so the experience is just like any other well designed modern museum extension.

I really liked the way the exhibition has been hung. The works are arranged according to themes – geometric works, urban landscapes. Three paintings placed side by side really appealed to me – Ernst Wilhelm Nay, Sinus, 1966:

Next to Neo Rauch, Stern, 2001 (See image here, click on Highlights: 6 out of 600)
Alongside Frank Nitsche, BMC-7, 1999:

I like the way the shapes and colours “flowed” from one image to the next.

These two photos were taken with my phone. Most of my photos didn’t come out well – good enough for inspiration, but not for posting on my blog. I can’t say that all of the works displayed appealed to me, but there was certainly plenty to think about. I enjoyed looking at the use of colour and value in the compositions. I found some works that added ideas to a theme I have been contemplating making a quilt, series of quilts on. Definitely worth the effort of getting up and out and into town on a Sunday morning.

For those of you interested in reading more, the Städel Museum has a lot of information on its website – Contemporary Art: 1945 to the Present
Spiegel Online reported the opening in its international edition.

And the Städel published this teaser on YouTube. If you keep you eyes open, you can see the three paintings mentioned above as they are hung.

Knitting update

Ruth — Sun, 26 Feb 2012 14:33:32 +0000

There were no photos last week, because there wasn’t much progress made. I finished the increases in the body and counted the stitches, only to discover that I was one short. What’s one stitch you say? Well I would tend to agree with you – except that I discovered that the one stitch was a yarn over that I’d missed in the last rows of the pattern. So I was missing a hole in the lace. And that hole was on the front. I knew I would always see the missing hole – if you understand what I mean – so I unravelled the knitting back to the missing yarn over and knitted it all over again.

I’m past the point at which I took two steps back now. Progress is being made. Here’s the front:

And here’s the back, where you can see the lace pattern better.

I’m hopeful that the wool will last. The good thing about this pattern is that I can just stop when I run out. The sleeves are knitted top down too.

Progress report

Ruth — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 13:17:48 +0000

I’m making good progress on my knitting. I have finished the shoulder areas of the fronts and back and am starting on knitting the body from the armholes downwards. I’ve never knitted anything like this before, but the pattern is easy to follow and if you’ve done a far amount of conventional knitting in the past it’s not really much of a challenge. All the cast ons are using the provisional method so that you have stitches to use later to knit in the opposite direction. I’ve cast on like this once before, but all my knitting instructions are in my new studio and not here with me, so I looked at some videos and written instructions on the web. I followed a combination of both, but one thing I did was not a good idea. One lot of written instructions said to use both needles together for the cast on. Seemed somehow logical to me as you are making two lots of stitches, but in practice it was a bad idea. When I knitted in the opposite direction from the cast on the first row of stitches was far too loose. I ended up using a crochet hook to pull all the excess wool to the side of the work so that the tension looked OK.

So for the next attempt I used one needle one size larger than required for the actual knitting tension. This was much better, but still too loose. The crochet hook came into play again. So in future I will just use the same needle as for the rest of the pattern. Here are a couple of photos showing the shoulder area before I started knitting in the round on the body. The second shows the state of play. The knitting looks a little lumpy in places – that’s because I’m using the wool straight from being unravelled without washing it again to straighten out the kinks. My mum did a lot of recycling of wool too and originally she always unwound the wool into skeins and then washed the skeins and left them to drip dry, which straightened the wool again nicely. I’ve mostly done that too in the past, but in the middle of winter in a small flat I have nowhere to hang the wool to drip dry. So I’m knitting kinks and all and will straighten out the lumps and bumps when the garment is finished by giving it another immersion in water. I’m pretty certain that my mum changed to knitting straight away with the unravelled wool and that I’ve done this before too and that all worked out fine in the end.

I’m enjoying this knitting much more knowing that I won’t have to sew all the pieces together once the knitting is finished. It’s the part I dislike about knitting all the sections of the garment as separate pieces. I’ve not found my ideal way to get a good finish. With this pattern I have nothing to worry about.

P.S. The colour in the photos looks so different because one is taken with flash at night and the other in daylight. The truth lies somewhere in the middle.

Maurizio Anzeri

Ruth — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 12:39:21 +0000

I was catching up yesterday on some of the blogs that I follow and found this link on Susan’s blog OCA Creative Arts Journal. Maurizio Anzeri embroiders over the faces of portrait photographs he finds at flea markets and car boot sales. As Susan writes the first impression is that they are a little weird. I find them fascinating too. I remember embroidery classes at primary school where we had to make evenly spaced holes along the side of a square and them make designs by joining the holes with thread. Anzeri takes this technique to a higher level.

I did a little more research and found this Artist Profile on the Saatchi Gallery website. It offers more information there about his process. He considers the embroidery to be a mask that grows out of the person. Masks and portraits interest me too, which is I suppose why I find Anzeri’s work so interesting.

I’m glad he says this though:

it’s all been done before but it’s never been done by you

because this kind of geometric embroidery (based on my childhood recollections) is on my list of ideas to try at some point. Having found someone has already made an art form from it, it’s reassuring to know that you can still use the same techniques but make them your own in the way you interpret them. More food for thought collected.

Here I go again

Ruth — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 12:29:21 +0000

Sketchbook finished, no studio, grey days – what am I to do with my leisure time? As I have written about before, I enjoy knitting, but I don’t have a high success rate at choosing patterns to knit that I actually like when they are finished and I am wearing them. I think I choose patterns for the challenge of the knitting and not whether it will look ok on me when I’ve finished. Another thing I’ve learnt and am definitely trying to adhere to is not to knit in cotton. Everything I’ve knitted with cotton yarn has ended up shapeless and baggy after a few washes.

So I had this blue jumper hanging around that I very rarely wore for a number of reasons:
1. It had a V-neck that had little depth and did not suit me.
2. I tried a new method of working the ends of balls of yarn into the knitting that I read about on the web and it was a complete disaster.
3. It was in reversed stocking stitch and when looked at from the back it would appear that I knit purl rows at a slightly different tension to the knit row – which is not visible on the right side of stocking stitch.
4. The way I had joined the pieces together just wasn’t working for me on the purl areas.
5. It was too warm to wear most of the time.

As you can tell from the list the jumper wasn’t a big hit in my eyes. This is what I started to do last night:

I did like the cabled hem to the jumper – that was why I chose the pattern. I like knitting cables. I like the colour too. And it is wool yarn. So I’ve decided to knit it up as a cardigan. I hope I’ll get more use out of it that way. I spent a long time searching the web for a pattern I liked without much success. So I decided to join up to Ravelry to see if I would have more success there. And this is what I found – a lace cardigan by Chic Knits called Cerisara. What really made up my mind was this yellow version knitted by Craftivore – doesn’t that look great?

Hope mine is also a success. If not I guess it will be unravelled and reknitted at some point. It wouldn’t be the first time I knit yarn up 3 times before I like the finished product. (To be honest I’m finding the sleeves on this purple one less to my liking over time. They are too wide at the bottom edge. Might be another reknit in the offing!)