Thirty one hours in London

I am back from a little mini-break with my Mum in London, practising my skills in Extreme Art. This is what we did.

Fisrt ( and I suppose before our thirty one hours officially started) we enjoyed a very civilised full breakfast on the train. Checked in at the Kingsway Hall Hotel (mini review: chosen for its fantastic location for our plans, hotel perfectly comfortabe nothing special 7/10) and headed out for the latte  and cake at the London Review of Books

 with a quick pit stop at Blade Rubber stamps next door to see the African Gallery at the British Museum so I could revist and show Mum my favouriote works:

El Anatusi's metal kente cloth and the Christian Aid Tree of life made with decommissioned weapons.
Then to the special exhibition there The Kingdom of Ife . (mini review - interesting enough for half an hour but at £8 would have been overpriced save that given all the other times I've ben to the museum for free we did not begrudge paying for once! 7/10).

From there to my beloved October gallery to see the calligraphy panels by Rachid Koraichi (Mini Review: This gallery never ever disappoints. Beautiful series of inspiring panels. Lessons in simplicty, repetition and variation. Eminemetly stitchable. 10/10). Usually they have a cataolgue for about £5 and I always buy them as they have never had an exhibition which has not inspired me. But this time only a book of poems illustrated by him  at £17.50. I resisted as money is flowing housewise at the moment. But I  regretted it, came home and checked Amazon. £12.76. It is on its way!

A quick nip to the London Graphic Center to pick up some leaftlets about airbrushes and get a sale assistant to explain the ranges (more expensive than I thought - an item for post new studio building I decided) . Then, back to the hotel to paint each others nails, watch Wimbledom and get dressed up. Dinner at the Covent Garden Grill ( mini review: good for people who need interesting but plain food for allergies. Leather seat ripped. Got orders totally wrong and then charged us for the wrong meal and the right meals as well. Did give Mum balloons becuase I said it was her birthday. Food 6.5 / 10)

Mum was reluctant to just leave the balloons and as we walked out the door a little boy was passing with his parents. My Mum asked his Mum if he would like them and as my Mum went back into get them the boy's Mum showed me a deflated baloon she was carrying that the boy had just burst, to his dismay. You can imagine how pleased he was with the four helium filled replacements!

Then to the whole point of the trip. Royal Opera House, Covent Garden to see Placido Domingo in Simon Boccanegro. (Mini review:  about 25/10)

Sleep.

Mum managed the gym for a bit before I even woke up (shame on me) breakfast then to the National Portrait Gallery - unplanned but we were passing so we chose one room (40) to see portraits of William and Harry including this one .

Through Trafalgar Square to see the Fourth Plinth ship in a bottle made out of African Dutch wax prints by Yinke Shinabore and then through my beloved St. James Park to the Queens Gallery at Buckingham Palace for the exhibition about the art collection of Quenn Victoria and Prince Albert.

(Mini Review - did you know Queen Victoria had a budget of £2000 per year to buy art and often didn't have enought money to buy what she wanted. I warmed to her! I found this exhibition suprisingly interesting - especially the flat pack throne from India! 9/10)

We then grabbed a cab to the V&A to meet up with best Quilting Buddy Lesley and her sister Claire who had just been to the Quilts Exhibition which is where we headed. (10/10  Obviously. Even though I had seen it already.) That left just enough time to get a taxi to Tavistock Street. Or at least as near to it as the Gay Pride traffic controls would let our driver get. The pristine Trafalgar Square we had been through a few hours later was now filled with rubbish strewn on the streets (0/10). So we walked the rest of the way to find the Primrose Bakery

 which turned out to be nothing all that special but which I had wanted to find since I bought their cupcake book and realised it was close to the hotel. And then 'twas time to collapse onto the train and read House magazines!

Art day - don't miss the glass dresses!

Today I decided to make the most of it being a Bank Holiday weekend to see some art in Liverpool. But unlike most poeple who would go and see one gallery or a single exhibition I seem to have turned it into an extreme sport....

I started with the exhibiton windows at the Liverpool Community College in Myrtle Street, as, being like shop windows they opened before the galleries. There were four artists displayed and I liked them all but two were hard to photo as the reflections on the glass of the street really interfered. I got better, although still not perfect photos of my second favourite - work by Karen Ball.

And I loved, loved, loved the cyanotopes by Sian Hughes

From there I walked over to the John Moores Liverpool University Art and Design school for the student show. Sadly disappointed. Two galleries of mostly tosh. ( In my subjective opinion). Is that what they get degrees for? One 'artist' had dropped a splotch of fountain pen ink on to water colour paper from an upstairs window. And framed it. Art? Discuss!

So I went to the 'proper' (I.e. din't start out as the Polytechnic)Liverpool University Gallery and took in the Breaking with Tradition: 100 years of theContemporary Art Society display.  They had some Bridget Riley wall paper designs and I thought I might finally appreciate them if I saw them with an explanation. But no - still just lines of colours to me!

The building itself is a good reason to go to this gallery though:

I then moved my car from its 'Aren't I the locally smart one' free parking space and drove though the tipping down rain into the city (only about 15 mins walk but way too wet) and parked it in the 'Yes I know I should have gone by train' exorbitant car park. That enabled me to still be fairly dry when I got to the Walker Art Gallery. I did very much like the Enamel work by Ruth Hall   but was absolutely transfixed by the glass dresses by Diane Dias-Leao.  There were no no photography signs but because of the light my photos do not do them justice and I'd rather - apart from the photos of the wall illustrations below- that you saw them well shot - so try this site. and the museum's own flikr site here

I think there are 16 in the exhibition and boy was I glad that I had taken my naff-but-so-good-to-the-feet -fishermans-stool-in-a-rucksack with sketching materials. I was there for ages. It is a good exercise to really look and see how she achived 16 dresses that all look like they belong together but are all different - changes of scale, of materials or shapes etc.

Whilst Iwas there I also breifly took in The Rise of Women Artists, an exhibit called From Sketch to Scuplture by Emma Roberts and a room of Tolouse-Lautrec prints.

Then I walked to the Bluecoat Galleries and looked at more mediocre stuff interspersed with some interetsing screen prints in the Global Studio exhibition.

Finally, to compensate for the fact that none of the gallery cafes had any cakes that were half as good as I could have made myself, I went to M&S food hall, bought some high quality chocolate biscuits and came home to start work on some samples based on the glass dresses.

How to recognise an art quilter

How can you tell an art quilter from a traditional quilter? I know there are all kinds of debate about the utility of art or the art of utilty or  such yada, yada, yada stuff. Its easier than that. To wit:

When I was only a traditional quilter (because really I think all art quilters resort to strip piecing in times of extreme stress) I had a shopping list that read

1. Fabric

2. Fabric.

3. Fabric

4. Thread.

 Today I realised my shopping list read:

1. Half mask respirator

2. Grout tool

3. Acid cartridges

4. Flexible fence wire

Further,  had I been a traditional quilter only, when my husband called me down from my bath  to let me see just how utterly unsuitable the new lampshades we spent all day choosing really was, I would have been cursing and muttering about the stupidity of lighting designers and what a waste of time the day had been. As it was my immediate thoughts were:

1. Camera

2. Monorinting inspiration

3. Spoonflower.

But really - who wants a light that makes these kind of patterns all over the ceiling and walls of your supposedly restful lounge?!

The pre-Photoshop photos:

Post a 3 min session on photoshop - who needs stitch to do shibori?!



Extreme shopping

Here is my outrageous stash from Festival. Actually this is cleverly combined to make it look small. When Lesley came to my room for show and tell and found the king sized bed mostly covered she could hardly walk into the room for laughing. Just because some stalls had less stock...

But its not that bad really! Purchases fall into 6 categories:

1. For the house and therefore not really quilt stuff at all
I.e. Work box to keep the lounge tidy when hand sewing - practically furniture. And half price at £15.
Kaffe Fasset fabric to make something for our bed in the unforeseeable future - just £6 per meter.

2. So small as to not really require justification because if I hadn't been honest and showed you you wouldn't even have noticed I'd got them.
Trapunto wool
Magazines - one was free anyway

3. Gifts. No one can criticise you for generosity
Two small FQs for a swap.
Circle cutter (because in some months time one of my birthday swap blocks is a circle theme)
But you never know - some of the other stuff might get given away in due course too.

4. Stuff for education - City and Guilds and general self development
Education is priceless, paints are not really expensive ( and for everything else there is Mastercard.) Besides I had decided before I went that my spending was to be focused not on randoms stash development (Oooh oooh pretty!) but on a sensible combination of products I actually needed to learn the things I chose to focus on this coming academic year. Well, kids get new pencil cases in September - why are we different?

So...
Fabric paints. I want to learn the stuff in a couple of books I bought (The Painted Quilt by Linda and Laura Kemshall and Print Your own cloth by Rayna Gillman) and I also want to focus on machine quilting. In fact the Kemshall's technique nicely focuses on both. I also have limited time so I decided to focus on wholecloth quilts.

First stop three pieces of hand dyed from the Chicago school of dying - this is one example. I thought one meter would give three panels for a triptych and as you can see from the main photo I got three meters - lots of practice scope there.
But I didn't really know what to get for paints - I kind of freeze with indecision at the choice

So I started with one pot of Jaquard metallic paint and a handful of Markal paintstiks ( in the sale) and a small pot of discharge paint and then bought some of the paintbrushes Linda Kemshall recommended from a wonderful woman at For Myself. I paid for the brushes,admired her work and expressed my frozen state at the shelves and shelves of Stuart Gill paint behind her. She said she would not sell me either lots of colours or just my favourite one anyway. Huh? At first I assumed that it was a language problem - she was Dutch. Then she explained.

If I bought my favourite colour I'd get bored and not do anything spectacular with it. If I bought lots they'd sit on the shelf, expire and then I'd be cross with myself and with them for wasting money. She picked up a red, a yellow, a blue , black and white and told me to mix my own and play. Well, Duh, yeah. Of course!! But then she put them back on the shelf. I was confused. Did she think I wasn't smart enough to use them? No turns out she was genuinely just trying to advise and didn't think I wanted to buy. Nice, nice lady. I bought. Plus a couple of glitters to add in. When I asked for her card so I could order more in the future she told me not to buy from her, buy direct from Stuart Gill because they are in Scotland and the postage is cheaper. Nice, nice lady.

For the quilting I want to play with using and blending lots of thread colours in one piece and with using different brands and weights and including hand stitches. Of course little bits of thread in each quilt requires a blow out on threads overall :)

Dennis wants to know can anyone spot the little rogue addition he made to my stash before the photo was taken?

4. Bits based on the Michelangelo principle

You know how all the great Renaissance painters had patrons who supported them financially. Do you ever think how large a part the people who spent their cash to support artists made to art History? Probably they could not paint a straight line with a ruler but without them many churches would have plain brick walls.
So - copies of the Kemshall's latest journal project Threefold
Copies of the EQA catalogues ( bargain too - five and two CDS for £20!)
Handdyed fabric from Ricky Tims ( he touched it!)

5. You can't give if you are empty inside.
You know the theory - you have to fill yourself up with good things if you are going to be selfless and support others like that.
Bundle of FQs from the African Fabric Shop ( besides, a horrible migraine comes on if I walk past Magie's shop)

6. Boring but necessary.
Needles.
Bobbin box.

I also managed to win a free Microtack gun in a prize draw and Ricky gave me a free subscription to The Quilt Show because it was my birthday this month. then there was the challenge purchases - but they don't count because the came from a kitty not my spend and they are over at Quilt land anyway...


I know this all looks outrageously extravagant but in my defence
(a) I had saved up
(b) I know I am very very lucky
(c) I didn't buy everything I saw and wanted because I have three more shows in the next three months!