Trees

We get a great many birds of various varieties in the garden. In part I think this is because we hang a good selection of bird feeders out, but also there are a lot of trees surrounding the garden. They provide habitat, food, roosts, nesting places, and staging posts that allow the birds to flit from cover to cover. This is unusual because we are pretty suburban really, but the house was built in the mid to late 1800s and for a long time there was nothing but fields to the back, the bottom of the garden creating a new boundary. You can see here the way they carved out a section of the field, perhaps to build cottages for workers at the farm across the lane

The trees at the very bottom were, I guess, once a hedge, but have now grown up and screen us from the bungalows beyond. There is hazel, ash, silver birch, laurel, spruce, laburnum, and a walnut

this is where good things to eat get grown, tender seedlings are nursed along and, down in the Dell, the badgers live and wild flowers drop their seeds

there is wild bullace

and a grotto of ferns, lovingly planted by the Man

As you go back to the top part of the garden you find spiders webs catching the light

crocosmia glowing by the shed

and more trees; this time willow, hawthorne and ash behind the shed

yew which paid host to a little cloud of long tailed tits and blue tits as I was wandering about - a sudden flurry of high, excited peeps and twitters, far too fast to capture with the camera

maple, rhododendron, more laurel and, in the background, across three other gardens, two stately oaks which shield the two blocks of flats tucked in behind and are, I'm glad to say, protected. I often hear the woodpecker drumming and in the evenings, jackdaws gather, chattering away to each other. Such a precious resource.

Beneath these green guardians you'll find oxalis and violets nestled under the maple

Look up and you might find the woodpecker in the top of the spruce, tick ticking to himself

or goldfinches pausing to pour their rippling song into the air

Turn round and Wol is peeping from behind the hydrangeas

the Japanese lady communes with her dragonfly

cyclamen nestle in pots

and the little Waterboy has a new companion, waiting for a pond to appear

Detail

Just thinking,

looking at the patterns and flows of colour, trying to work out what will enhance

 where to go, what to stitch and what to leave

Suspended from the floor lamp in my (horrendously untidy) study in lieu of a design wall 

Those swayings away from True, across and down; the not quite lined up. Do I straighten them out or do they add a slight movement within the grid structure, a bit of unrule

True ... Truth ...

Squares of colour

I've been doing a little stitching, quietly in the evenings and at our first Studio 11 class last week. This started as something I took with me to Birmingham so I'd have some bits of cloth to play with in the evenings after looking at all those lovely quilts during the day. The squares began life as a tea towel, lovely loose weave linen, worn with years of smoothing cups and plates dry in my grandmother's hands. I used it in my first year with Christine as something to experiment with, to learn from, and to see the different way in which linen took up colour. I wasn't happy with the inital results - eventually the linen was torn in two and treated slightly differently on each half, way back here, but cut into squares, rearranged on some dark blue linen, stitched down with little stitches that match the background colour, I hope perhaps it has some potential. I think I've managed to keep the squares reasonably ... well square ... two layers of soft woven linen can surely wriggle about a bit in the hand when they're being stitched together. I rigged up the giraffe (OK it's a craft stand really, but you can see what I mean) to hold my embroidery frame and that made the stitching go a lot easier. I'd like to add some embroidered stitch, perhaps a little sparkle, something to enhance what's already there, but not intrude or detract. Simple. Careful. Sympathetic.

What happens now, of course, is I get the awful heebie jeebies, having got so far, and totally stall because I can't work out what to do next. To me, it says light falling to the forest floor, other might see different. What do you think?

An Adventure

When my Mum and her cousin, Aunt Cecil were children and young women they often had the pleasure of staying with their Aunts Connie and Harry out on the flatlands which surround Rye. They had a holiday cottage there, in fact a couple of holiday cottages, tucked away by the river Rother, nestled amongst the fields where sheep nibbled their way over the land and cows ruminated in the long grass. These were pre and post war times, when milk was collected from the farm in a pail, and the cream pulled off the top of the milk as it settled in a wide flat pan; no pasteurisation, just lovely milk fresh from the cow. Connie and Harry, as mentioned before, were a lesbian couple, very daring for those days, who found refuge in this peaceful place and delight in having their two nieces and other family members to stay. My great grandmother Nanya certainly stayed there, she painted the view down the river in 1924

my grandmother Ganna and grandfather Gerald stayed there, and Gerald was woken one night by the sensation of his sheets being slowly pulled down the bed by some invisible force; no-one was actually there. The two girls, sometimes together and sometimes separately, might sleep out under the stars, be chased across the field by an enthusiastic cow, 

Letter from Mum dated May 1940

or visit the farmer when one of the dogs had puppies. They watched our aeroplanes battle the Germans high above the levels during the war; Cecil slipped into the river just as she was about to leave to go back home, muddying her best shoes and frock much to her Mum’s annoyance; one day when they had been out picking blackberries, the kitchen being out of bounds because their Aunts were holding a religious meeting there, they washed the sticky juice from their hands in the toilet pan! Health and Safety hadn’t been invented and they both seem to have survived.

The two cottages were called Sedges and Nirvana. Sedges was their first summer holiday home; Nirvana was built later by Harry, not literally you understand, but she organised the builders and had the materials brought up from Rye Harbour via the Rother.

Connie and Harry outside Nirvana

This was Connie and Harry’s happiest place named, perhaps, for the way it afforded them a refuge from society’s disapproval, release from the problems of the world, a space of sanctuary, where they could just be themselves. This was in the days when Radclyffe Hall’s novel The Well of Loneliness was declared obscene by a British court and ordered to be destroyed, so their relationship could have brought them a lot of censure.

Connie and Harry cycling across the fields

Both my Mum and Cecil always spoke of Nirvana as a place set apart from the world, where they could be cheerful children and young women, staying with their much loved aunts for a time, before being sent back to school or work. I have pictures of Mum there as late as the 1950s so it had a central place in their lives for a long time. The name was in my mind before I ever understood that it was related to Buddhist philosophy – Nirvana was in the summer lands where Mum and Cecil had been happy with Connie and Harry, I accepted it as part of the fabric of their lives.

Cecil had her 90^th birthday last Monday and she and I went out for lunch together, and sat in the garden later, enjoying the sunshine and stroking the cats. However Jen, my lovely daughter, had wished to celebrate Cecil’s birthday as well, so it was agreed that we’d go out together on Saturday for fish and chips in Rye and a trip down memory lane to Iden Lock. We duly drove out to Rye and enjoyed our fish and chips, then travelled on through the town and out the other side. As we approached Iden Lock (completed in 1808) Cecil became more and more delighted. We got out of the car and decided to walk as far as she felt she could manage, on what was a very hot day. Nirvana is set well back from the road along a track that runs between the Rother and farmland. I had no expectation that we’d get very far, but wanted her at least to be able to look across the fields to the places she and Mum had been so happy. As we walked carefully along, Jen and I taking an arm each for support, I suddenly thought – there are no “Private” signs on this track, nothing to suggest that I shouldn’t bring the car along, and if we use the car, we can take her right to the end, to where Nirvana is.

Now the original Nirvana has recently been replaced by a rather lovely wooden property. Jen and I discovered this in June, as we had been out to remember Mum on the fifth anniversary of her death – we scattered her ashes in the river there in 2010, releasing her in the best place we could think of, to be absorbed back into the Earth. I’m sure that breaks some nonsense regulation somewhere, but our family has never been much for rules and regulations. We met a very nice lady there in June, who told us a bit about the new building, and to whom we related the history as we knew it. She was a friend of the owner and said she would let him know, I promised to get in touch as she was sure he'd be interested in our story. As the car wobbled its way down the track this time, I realised that there was someone standing just by the house. We drew to a halt and I approached him with apologies for disturbing his peace, explaining that Cecil was in the car, for he was the owner of this new Nirvana. I had hardly finished my apology before he said, with much enthusiasm, “oh, I’ve been hoping to meet her!” Making us welcome he invited us into his home and allowed Cecil to sit for a while as, between us, we told him what we could of the history as we understood it. Fierce cows and puppies were mentioned, wartime evacuation and collecting milk from the farm. Mums final resting place was offered as an explanation of our presence, along with those long ago days of summer happiness. The current owner was charming, despite the fact that his friends were arriving to have an afternoon picnic and swim in the river. I did my best to ensure that we didn’t outstay our welcome.

On our way home Cecil kept exclaiming, again and again, “oh I have had a lovely time”. She has a great capacity for enjoyment, but this was a special day for her and Jen and I were overwhelmed by how much better our trip had been than we might have imagined. Cecil will have no memory of what fun we had, her memory retains almost nothing for more than an hour or so, but we know that she had fun, and will always remember that we had a great adventure with her in these late years of her life. Thank you James for sharing Nirvana with us.

Festival of Quilts

Well, this time last week I was just back from my first experience of this amazing celebration of all things quilt related. I had the pleasure of helping out in Christine's gallery on the Saturday morning - there is a lovely blog post here by Helen Conway which says much better than I can what a lovely and moving gallery it was. It was very engaging to spend the morning there greeting people who came to look, watching their reactions to the emotion and thought in the textiles, moving towards and away to get the detail and the overall view. In expressing her experience of watching her father succumb to dementia, it was obvious that these quilts and textile portraits were deeply moving to many viewers; they touch a chord with those of us who have watched one we love slowly disappear, piece by piece, as the mind fragments; I felt privileged to be there.

Christine Chester - Palimpset, detail

So what is my newcomer's impression of the event? Astonishing, exhausting, inspiring, overwhelming, um, all those superlatives. It shows one how wide the umbrella is that embraces the term quilt; themes were as broad as human ingenuity can imagine:

there were traditional quilts, 

Lynne Johnson - Billings Coverlet Reborn

Liz Jones - All Things Bright and Beautiful

art quilts

Chrry Vernon-Harcourt - Coastal Study 1

hand quilting, 

Vanessa Stanfield and Tricia Neale - A Medieval Bestiary, detail

machine quilting, 

Ximo Navarro - It is not a dream, this quilt is real, detail

pictorial quilts, 

Hilde van Schaardenburg - The Threatened Swan, detail

Sally Hutson - The Clothmakers Window, detail

landscapes, 

Kate Dowty - Marshwood Vale

Jean McLean - Silence. Judges Choice

quilts full of detail, 

Kirsti Hovland - The Milky Way - Stars Wandering

Kirsti Hovland - The Milky Way - Stars Wandering, detail

quilts with presence, 

Judy Doolan Kjellin - Sadness, detail

those about ideas

Natalia Manley - Beyond the Black Hole. Judges Choice

or poetry - in this case one of my favourites by Yeats

Jill Exell - Stairway to Heaven

or history, 

Marisa Marquez - Lost Inheritance

decorative embellishments, 

all sizes and shapes, 

Amanda House - Dragons Ho!

some to be viewed from both sides 

Sue Palmer - Bou Baretea, one side - detail

and the other

oh I could go on and on. I saw work there that was a million miles from anything I could, or would want to achieve, some that was akin to the tentative experiments I'm working with, some that I might perhaps aspire to one day. And I haven't even mentioned the marketplace!

It is marvellous to me to see how great the variety of human expression is when you come to a show like this, be it large or small. We see things and think, "gosh, I couldn't live with that", or "how on earth long did that take to achieve", others that leave us in awe of the skill or a technique, yet others that we could just gaze and gaze at. It is such a celebration of skill, artistry, invention, technique, thought, hand work, colour, texture; things which we are unique in being able to create and then use to express our endless inventiveness.

Here are a few more favourites

Gloria Loughman - Merrill Hall, Asilomar, California. Detail

Kate White - Dragonfly Studies, detail. Judges Choice Contemporary Quilts

Dianne Firth - Earth Bones

Annabel Groom - Costa Rican Moons

Christine Restall - Estuary

Mary McIntosh - Copper Plates

I loved it!

Maroon Breakdown

Which sounds like a band, and has been languishing. I may have found a way to move forward with these bits of cloth printed some considerable time ago now, I need to just get on with it now! I blogged about this here and here and was supposed to have put it all together as a something by now. that was part of this year's plan, but it kept getting put to one side, and then I got very tired and was doing very little for a while.

So? These are both poor pictures, but may at least be a start. Many many different layouts have been tried, this may be a final one, but I'll need to have another look by daylight.

Without a design wall this involves a lot of stooping and bending and moving and folding to get something like an idea. Then there's the straining to get a picture from the right height, on the correct plane, all in focus with the iPad. I suspect the whole process would appear quite ridiculous to an onlooker! Still not sure about it, but I really should get going and do something with it. There are still a few gaps to fill and plans to draw and the colours all look much nicer than this!

In the meantime I've had a lovely and inspiring three days with Committed to Cloth dyeing silk, linen and velvet, of which more later I hope; also a pleasurable visit to Standen, a William Morris'y Arts and Crafts'y house and garden, built by Philip Webb which has a lovely atmosphere of just occupied immanence, if that doesn't sound odd.

 There are, of course, beautiful embroideries in every room

 and the garden was delightful and full of buzzies taking delight in it

Oh, and I'm off to Festival of Quilts in a little while; Christine is an exhibitor.

Gosh, I sound quite busy don't I - did I mention the day job? :-)

When do you read?

Anny has her nighttime reads (watch your back Anny!), except now it's the summer holidays so she has a fine selection lined up. I have my morning time reads, the only point of true stillness in the day, when it's only me and the cats. Growing up, an only child, in a very quiet household I value times of stillness.

Here are my morning reads! I posted about something similar recently here. Lest you be misled, however, the pile has overwhelmed me, as has always been the case, so a selection of these may just have to go back to the library. I recall my little Ma complaining when, in my late teens, great piles of "I'd like to reads" languished on my bedroom floor and had to be cleaned around.

"The Land of Ur" my current read, is mine, as are several others on the pile - including the Art Quilts volume, recently delivered from Betterworld Books. Morning is the only time I have enough brain to sort of absorb - I work on the principle that the more I read, the more the subconcious links join up until you begin to get a vague picture of what can be known