On why I do not have time to quilt..

The house move is (touch wood) coming up on 11th August.
I pressed for a date so I could book time off and eventually my solicitor gave us the 11th as 'an agreed provisional date, subject to contract to be treated with caution.'
It is a good job I speak fluent lawyer!

So, on a practical level we are at the packing up stage. Or I would be if I didn't keep getting sidetracked with legal niceties;

We got the Land Registry deeds and there is a restrictive covenant that prevents the construction of a building or structure within 20 yards of the rear boundary. i.e. right where the studio is going. Ah.


Turns out you can insure against the risk that someone will come along and ask you to take it down. As the beneficiary is a dissolved company the risk is not high, but it still exists as they might have sold the benefit on. It will  cost about £500- £800 if I insure pre-build and less if I build and wait a year then insure, as they insurance company suggested. Right. So you want me to be uninsured for the riskiest period so that the premiums reduce. And the point of that is....?!! We are shopping around for quotes. I did suggest that I could always convert the loft as an alternative to a garden room studio anyway. Dennis became quite firm that I deserved a place out of the house for all my threads. I'd like to think he was thinking of me and validating my art, but somehow....

Then today I arrived home to find that the solicitors have done all the checks and searches on the house. It is not going to fall down a mineshaft and it does not have Bhopal like contamination in the ground. It does however have Chancel Repair Liability.

What? I am pretty sure I never heard of that when I was doing my 6 months conveyancing stint – and as I did my own conveyancing  for this house while I was in that post I was actually paying attention to my training.

Turns out that under medieval law if you owned land within the parish of a certain kind of church the parishioners were liable to pay half of the repair costs of the church and the rector had to pay the other half from the tithes. This liability attaches to the land and it appears that we are within a risk area for this.

Now you might think that this is nothing but in 2003 there was a House of Lords case where a couple who inherited a farm with this liability were clobbered for £196,000. As they were daft enough to litigate it to the House of Lords it also cost them over £250,000 in costs. As a result it has become a negligence issue for the solicitors not to search to see if there is a risk. And of course becuase that was so in the news, parochial councils are now aware that there might be a better way to raise money for the spire than coffee mornings.You can  insure against this risk. It is £15 for a basic search to see if you are in a risk area –that’s what we have. You can then pay £100 to do a full search to see if you have an actual risk and what proportion of the cost you might be liable for – although that would not help as even if the land is now in thousands of parcels apparently the church can just ask one party to pay it all! If you do that check though and there is a risk the insurance premiums rise because of course the risk has juts become a whole lot more certain. To insure the liability for £250,000 with a policy you can pass on to your successor is £145.88 to be insured for perpetuity or £100.88 for 25 years.... so of course you just pay up. I am finding this all terribly interesting. D is just bemused. (his word not mine). It has however proved an excuse to avoid packing in favour of an hour's internet research.

I rang the vendors to ask if by chance they had a policy. They bought in 1970 something when no one was aware of this so they don’t but they did invite us around to meet the neighbours over drinks and nibbles on Monday – isn’t that nice?

And finally I solved the T-mobile problem. Rather than a £35 iphone contract which is what I was begging them to give me. I have put my SIM into a £3.95 Virgin  pay as you go. When  ny contract runs out I am going to sign up for a £15 per month contract with a free Android smart phone and buy an I touch. I get everything I need technology wise and save £350. Yahboo sucks to T-Mobile.

PS The photo is not my parish church. It is Salisbury Cathedral. But it was the only copyright free photo I could quickly find. But imagine what it would cost to replace that roof!

PPS As I write Dennis has been looking at the cost of redirecting mail. They charge per surname not per address and of course I use my maiden name so we pay twice..... shall I just drain all my blood out now ready for moving date?

PPPS I was about to post this and D looked over. What happens to the chancel liabity, he asked, if the Church of England is disestablished?  How should I know? Only an Irishman.... I did ask him a little later what we were going to do for tea. "I don't know," he said, "Can I take out an insurance policy to cover it?

One way loyalty

Warning: Consumer rant follows.

I have been a T mobile customer since 1999 which I first acquired a mobile phone. I even run my account in credit. Today my Nokia phone died. No screen. Nada.
Not good when my husband is at the airport trying to text me.
Ah well, I was waiting until my contract ran out on 30th Sept to get an I-phone. So I will have to pay 2 months contract and change now. Such is life. I need a phone now.

Now, T-Mobile do not offically do I-phones. But a lady in a T Mobile shop told me that if you ring to say to are moving to get an I-phone they will do you one. And indeed, when I press 2 then 4 then 1 to speak to the Customer Loyalty team they will indeed. They will do me a 24 month contract on the 3GS for £35 with 600 minutes and unlimited data and text. Just what I need. And the phone will cost £90.

Ah. But Orange will do the exact same price plan and the phone for free.
I ring T-Mobile back.

T-mobile appreciate my problem. And, when they officially launch the I-Phone 4 ( which I am  not bothered about having) they will be able to give me the phone for free. That is in 2 weeks time.
So they want me to pay £90 for 2 weeks use of a phone?
I need a phone now. I suggest they talk to a manager.
The manager, Sandra, appreciates my problem too. But they cannot give me a free phone.
But they probably will in 2 weeks.
They tell me that is is not good business practice to lose a 2 year contract for the sake of two weeks or indeed for £90 but they are sorry, that is what they are going to do.

But, all is not lost - because I am such a loyal customer, they tell me, I will get a very good deal on the I-phone 4 ( which I do not want)  in two weeks time ( which is too late).

It does indeed seem that for T Mobile the I-phone 4 will change everything again. Because for this user the future appears to be orange.

Grrr.

Poltergeist?

Last night in the middle of the World Cup semi-final all the small appliances in our house went off. Including the TV. Which didn't really bother me but the sewing machine went off too which was a different matter. We fairly quickly worked out that a trip switch was down, flicked it up and resumed our respective activities.

Zoom forward to 3 26 am. Now, I am happy to say that my husband does not beat me up.You can imagine then that I was a little suprised to be abruptly woken from a happily deep sleep by him whacking me on the leg as he sat up, flailing his arms in alarm and asking,
"What was that? That noise.What was it?"
Given that he had just assaulted awake a woman who once slept through an earthquake of such intensity that a member of my family ( who is best nameless in this context) ran out to the street assuming that 'The Lord has returned!", this was a very silly question. He got up, prowled down the landing and returned,
"There are books all over the floor".
I didn't even dignify this with a reply. I know that I married a very tidy man and that me having books stacked all over the 2nd bedroom floor ready for packing is not the best housekeeping, but I was not rising to such criticism/ comment at now 3.28 am.
I was about to fall asleep again when the noise starts. Even I heard it.
It was a kind of progressive series of thuds getting faster and faster. Thu...thu....thu..thu thuthuthuthuthud.

WHAT??

I went to the 2nd bedroom. Piles of books very still in their allocated places on the floor.
I went to the studio.
Ah. I see what he means.

Every quilting book I own ( except for some reason the Quilters Guild Collection; Contemporary Quilts) had jumped off the shelf.
I snapped a few photos ( becuase dear readers, even at 3.30 am I am thinking of your entertainment), pick them up, go to the bedroom and see that all the small appliances have gone again, including the alarm clock. So if the poltergeist had not pushed the books off we would not have set backup alarms on our mobile phones and I would have been late for work. What a nice helpful ghostie.
Either that or I should have listened to myself when I did wonder if that slightly wonky shelf would hold all thsoe books in my temporary studio.

I get back in bed.
"This," I say, "is why I need a new studio."
Dennis huffs. "Your Mum would say you need fewer books. I've noticed that. Your sentences always have the word 'new' in them and your Mum's have the word 'less'."

Now, Mum reads this from time to time so I had better make it clear: There were only two people mentioned there and only one was being approved of and it was not me.
Huh.
But I get to have the new studio anyway because I have a big bruise and I know how to make an application for a Family Law Act injunction......

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!

She is like London buses...

... no posts for weeks and then two come together.

If you read my earlier post today you will know that officially I am not blogging about my new house prospects. So I will pretend that this post is simply about showing you Art as Inspiration and nothing whatsoever in any shape and form about commissioning a pice of art to go on the outside wall of my studio- to be.
And maybe another for the bathroom.

Julie Langan has a studio at Cedar Farm where we spend out Sunday mornings and her glass art is displayed around the complex both inside and outside. It is distinctly translateable to fabric which is maybe why I love it but then glass can go go in places where cotton would be destroyed.
You can see more of her art here.

Sold!

I see that I have been absent from this blog for 22 days. How did that happen?

Well partly it has been that our Internet decided to play up for days on end. But mostly it has been that I am distracted. Look what is outside our house!

We even have somewhere to go that will accommodate a studio at the bottom of the garden - you can bet you will be hearing all about that as plans progress. I kind of don't want to jinx the whole deal by blogging too much about the details until contracts are signed. But by way of explanation of how this is distracting - in a fit of celebration I went out and scoured newsagents and now own the July issues of every single house magazine published in the UK. I am happily scouring them and ripping inspiration out and scrapbooking....basically moving house is just one huge shopping experience in all kind of stores I don't mormally think about.

But I have to say that some of the magazines are too aspirational even for me. I spotted a roll top bath. White and  very sleek I admit. But it cost £43,645!!!!

Not for me. But I am thinking  a spa bath......

Meanwhile one of the first things I think we shall do is rehang these baskets that are gracing our current home.

Look who has a new studio!

I probably mentioned in passing that we are househunting with a view to me getting a nice large studio space - or two if I separate out wet and dry activities. Well, of course these things do not happen all at once but a consequence of me not working from home anymore is that I do not need a full blown home study the way I used to. So, on Saturday at about 3pm I took a sudden notion........

This is how our third bedroom looked at 3pm, as I was half way through the 'half hour project' of moving a few things here and there. (Mostly law books into the boot of my car which I have long considered an extra room of the house.)

Still office related equipment as you can see, including a barristers gown on the door and Dennis' CD collection. At 3.01pm Operation New Studio began. That involved:

1. Taking every last thing out of the study and placing it in the second bedroom ( which already housed my stash and quilting book collection).

2. Taking half the things from the sewing space in my dining room downstairs up to the second bedroom ready to go in the study.

3. Starting to move all the CD's down as on the return trip the remainder from downstairs is brought up.

4. Leaving Dennis to rearrange CD's in the cabinets which once housed sewing items whilst I tackle the studio transformation.

This method results in a clean slate to work with and a frightening mess in the second bedroom spilling over into the first:

By 11pm it was still not finished but I gave up. Sunday I awoke and reaslied that this process is extremely good excercise for your gluteus maximus, especially, I suspect, the use of stepladders to replace books and boxes onto the very top shelves. We honoured our usual Sunday morning date at Cedar Farm but sitting on the sofa was hampered by the bottom ache! But the trip did mean I could buy some containers at the Potting Shed a small and up market gardening shop there and some plantpots at a large and downmarket garden centre on the route back. A little more work that afternoon and - voila!

 New studio!

 

The wicker baskets from Ikea mostly have threads in them

I have only shown you oblique glimpses of the cork board on the left as you enter as it has on it some Twelve by Twelve work for the latest purple and yellow challenge which is yet to be revealed. I also need to put up the second board (donated: thanks Mum!) and get up the courage to move the internet router downstairs and hope I do not mess up our connectivity. ( I think I should wait until Dennis finishes marking exams on line!) There is still a little stuff to sort out in the 'stash room' but as they are next to each other I guess I can now say I have a creative suite! Still smaller than I would like - the ironing  board  for example has to go up next door, for example but there is room on what was the desk for a ironing pad, and there is not much space to spread out,  but at least, pending sale, we can now eat at the dining room table without dismantling all my sewing arrangements. And I am hoping that with art stuff out to hand I do more sketchbook/ design work.

Now. Any creative ideas for what to do with a £400 stuff barrister's gown I no longer need?

Cupcakes and company

On Friday I  went to visit Working Mum on the Verge and her delightful daughter. (You know the kind - the daughter that can hold a sensible and interesting conversation, does not whinge and whine and can sit and eat a full meal at table. The only kind of child I like!) Working Mum and I have been friends since were eight. her family moved around the corner from mine, she came to my primary school and the teacher said we had to be friends. And so we were. I have photos of her as Aladdin in the school play and memories of her taking breaks from exam revision  to paint her nails with polka dots. We were even at the same University but lost touch after that as she moved to Manchester to begin her married life.

The reconnection is entirely internet based. By some weird co-incidence my room mate from my first year at University ended up working at Working Mum's school and reads my blog. WM and Roommate vaguely recognised each other, put the pieces together and so WM arrived as a commenter on my blog and I got to go and sample her cupcakes.  And talk to her daughter who has smart and unanswerable answers to visitors who ask stupid questions:
   "So why do you like horses so much?"
   "Becuase God just made me to like horses."

Then on arrival home Diane and I discovered the joys of Skype video calling and was able to oggle each others stash transatlantically for free. Better, I was sharing my plans to buy some Crazy Daisy china and Diane, in searching for a picture of the design as we talked,  found me a store in the Uk selling it at cheaper prices than any I had seen. You gotta love the internet!




PS: To Lurking Roommate: Did I drive you very mad that first year?

Accidental sketchbook

I have just signed up for the Sketchbook project .

I keep promising myself I shall do more sketchbook work, partly for fun partly for design training but somehow, apart from the cuttings and line diagrams I do regularly in a quilting journal I never get around to it. I am not confident with art skills and am always ambushed by the feeling that spending precious time on a book that no-one sees is a waste of time. That even though I know it not to be so. But you know - head and hearts do not always play nicely together.

But this project does not require any great talent but ensures that someone somewhere will probably look at my book.( Indeed I shall be blogging it so in due course I shall be pathetically begging you all to look at it!)

Just the push I needed.

I intended to choose the theme lines and grids as that seemed safe and doable.

But I seem to have accidentally ticked the box asking for a theme to be chosen randomly for me and I got 'The view from here'.

Hmmm... not bad - some ideas already based on the excited scribbles I made on scrap paper of the landscapes when flying into Queenstown, New Zealand whilst cursing myself for leaving the camera in the overhead locker. (Too late now: seatbelt signs on and  look at those fablulous lines and fissures.......!)

And I did want to do some sketchbook work based on the local museum which I see from my room here in Blackburn.

And the theme is only a starting point anyway......

Now, I have to wait for my book to come from the US.

Do you think this occasion justifies the buying of a box of oil pastels I don't really know how to use yet?

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.

Cycling for quilters

Come ride with me. One thing I am loving about working in one place (Okay, two but they are pretty close together) is that I am home in time to go straight out on my new bike. So, today I thought I'd take you with me and we could talk about quilty stuff as we go around - how would that be?

Now, I know this is not an auspicious start but bear with me. Cross over this junction which is two roads from my house and you get into much nicer territory with a dedicated bike lane along side the Rainford bypass and verges chock full of dandelions which of course reminds me of the very first Twelve by Twelve challenge.

Soon there are fields which reminded me of Elizabth Bririmelow's reversible field quilt and the time when I was standing in front of it in Wales and Dennis, looking at another of her quilts pronouced them' horrible'. Loudly. When she was standing right behind him. Time to move on.

Nature of course has colour lessons for us. You have to go a little further on to actually pass the rape seed fields but you can see them from the bypass.

And there are several copses of trees which remind me of Gerrie's Aspen quilts. After a while we will turn off down a side road. I wonder what is around the corner?

Lines, thats what.

Now this is not guerilla knitting but when I saw it I was reminded of the blog entry about these sweet smelling sexy looking knitting needles I read about just this morning.  I passed them over to move to the next blog regretful that I do not knit. But maybe I should do just a small piece to welcome myself around my cycle routes.

A little further on we have purple and yellow - the first time since those colours were announced as the new Twelve by Twelve themes that I have seen them in nature,

Now, despite that fact that we live in a former mining/ glass making northern Town we do actually have animals.and look - thats my estate up there. Am in fact semi-rural? That description might add a bit to the house we are trying to sell!

I am sure, absolutely convinced that I read about a project that Maggie Grey started whch involved burying or letting phone directories decay outisde for embroidery related purposes, but a quick search did not locate that. Am I making it up? In any event this Argos catolgue was under a hedegrow and had become quite beautifully altereted by the elements.

A little further on I found a scuplture in a field. Well, I think it was some kind of mechanical scarecrow contraption but it glinted in the evening sun and changed in quite compelling ways as the two set of blades moved differently

Just by taking the camera out I saw all kinds of things I would normally whizz past. So I hope you enjoyed coming with me. Maybe I could come along with you in your neighbourhoods soon?