Stitching .........at last!

Great day today, received some ATC's (thanks to Dale) from Australia yesterday and felt inspired by them to go to my workroom and play this morning. The weather was still cool, so bearable to do some work. I decided to get the embellisher out and used an assortment of fabrics I had dyed, as well as some merino wool fibres I had dyed previously.

I also had some puff paints in my collection.

They had been in my cupboard for some years, unused and so I decided to give them a go.

The colours are a bit bright, the black is useful though. Just need to finish these pictures now. Any ideas what I can do with the blue ones I made?

Thunder and Packing

Over the past few days it has been really hot here in the UK. Clear skies and temperatures in the 30's C.

Great today as we had a wonderful thunderstorm that has cooled everything down. Starting to feel human again! I slept through the thunderstorms this afternoon, totally unaware that much of the town is under water as a result of flash floods. One of the advantages of living on top of a hill, is hopefully we will not experience floods. The garden enjoyed the deluge of rain and the Buddlia drooped under the weight of the rain.


Why I was sleeping in the middle of the afternoon is a tale of exhaustion.

In all this heat my colleagues and I have been packing. Apparently packing and moving family house is high up on the stress list. Wonder where packing and moving a whole school of 1300 children appears on the stress list........ and doing that in a heatwave......hearing constant health warnings about heatwaves!

So by Friday (yesterday ) all the subject departments in the school, except science and my department went off on holiday, all their packing complete. I have to go into school next week to finish the packing due to an error on the part of the removal company, as they forgot to order the cages for the Art deparment. I was not best pleased to say the least! I am supposed to be on holiday next week! It will be all worth it when we finally start teaching in a brand new building in September.

There has not been much time for blogging this past week.......sorry........will try and do better next week.

You know me well then??

Who Should Paint You: Andy Warhol

You've got an interested edge that would be reflected in any portrait You don't need any fancy paint techniques to stand out from the crowd!

What Artist Should Paint Your Portrait?

Red Arrows

Gill,s comment on my last post from this morning has reminded me about the Red Arrows acrobatic team. We always look forward to their display and living where we do, we almost get a free show. Very special. See from their website news, their last show was with the Netherlands Air Force.
Thanks for reminding me about them, Gill. My eyes and ears are waiting for the familiar sight and sound of these brilliant flying machines, travelling in formation. If you go to the Air Tattoo website, the Red Arrows are on the video highlights which you can view online, the patriotic red, white and blue trails and red aircraft are a giveaway!

Trapped at home

That's because......
















Its the weekend of the International Air Tattoo at RAF Fairford, which is just a few miles up the road. Unfortunately Concorde no longer flies, we used to enjoy watching her fly over us every evening at 7.15pm on her flight to New York. Wonderful sight.

As you can imagine the road congestion, around here this weekend with all the extra visitors to the area, means we cannot get out or in to go anywhere by car or bus. The upside of this is we have some fantastic views of the air display for free!

I had hoped I would be able to go to the other big event taking place just over the county border in Oxfordshire, which is Art in Action a truly wonderful event, saw these sculptures there last year. Might see what the traffic is like very early tomorrow morning.

Gallery Preview

Sandra Blow

Just returned from a preview at a local Gallery, its called Wetpaint and is in Cirencester. The Exhibiton featured work by Bridget Riley,

Terry Frost RA

and

Sandra Blow RA.

I found the exhibtion very inspirational, it was all Absact Art and many of my fellow bloggers know that I have been working a great deal with my local Art gallery and my students on this theme.

My internet friend,Paulene, introduced me to the work of Sandra Blow, so I was particularly pleased to be abe to see her work the "flesh". I am very familiar with Bridget Rileys work, having first seen her work in Bradford on a visit as a young girl. I was waiting for the ice rink to open and sauntered i to get out of the rain. The work made an instant impression on me, at first made me feel quite dizzy, but also a great inspiraton to my later work. I had only seen Terry Frost's work as prints in books. Think I will be going for another look before the exhibition ends on 12th August.

Sweet peas and Kids clay

These sweet peas are looking good, they are the everlasting variety, and all the same colour. They do not seem to attract green fly or black fly and I particularly like them because they came from my late fathers' garden, so just a bit special. They do not really have that heavy fragrence of sweet peas, but the bees love them just same. So having surveyed the garden over the weekend.......went on to...........................


Some clay work. Knew we were having some of the kids over, so I bought a bit of clay home for them to work into. Its terracotta and gives a lovely colour when fired. Intoduced them to rolling pins and tiles, adding "worms", incising into the clay and general mark making. We also made thumb pots, seven year olds have incredibly small thumbs!!!! And a coil pot. Will fire them this week, and then probably give them a transparent glaze which makes them lovely and shiny but retains the warm tones of the terracotta. Lots of fun and mess. Parents were glad it all took place at our house, until I sent them home with the leftover clay, which I will collect from them later this week to put in the kiln. The parents should know me better by now.......I like to share the mess!

Sketch 'n' Stitch

Feeling a bit deprived of doing my own thing in terms of my work at the moment, as I'm bogged down in timetables/staffing/course outlines/etc. etc. So now that my moan is over, I have decided to do a bit of something stitchy and sketchy.

So this is not new work, but just me re-visiting comfortable painting/drawing and machine stitching and doing something for my own sanity.

So important sometimes just to do, nothing ground breaking, its almost like doodling, no decisions, just do it.

I have to prepare for some exhibitions at the end of this year, but I don't think this work is exhibition standard that I could sell.

However, this type of work is very rewarding for me. How often do you give yourself permission to just doodle and do it?

Nana and Year 9

Great fun today, finished the Nana's that year 9 have been making for the past few weeks.

Great artist and I know there are many of her sculptures in Atlanta.

Wish I could take the students to see the real sculptures.

Students worked in groups and after they had created some intial drawings in colour influenced by the artist Nikki Saint-Phalle , they started the making.

Chicken wire and papier mache, and then the final painting today.

They were great fun to make. There is a whole museum dedicated to Nikki's work in Japan, another place I would love to take the students.

I promised my trainee teacher that we would take photos of the finished Nanas, as unfortunately she had to leave us before the Nanas were complete. Hope you like them Becky and visitors to my blog.

Swindon Stone

Just like to share this photo of one of the stones at Avebury. Its the Swindon Stone, it towers over the road.....just hope it never falls over. Aptly named the Swindon Stone. Blogger would not let me upload this picture last night, must be something to do with the weather, still melting hot here, but I can smell rain from a thunderstorm somewhere, but not here........yet!

Still 24C at 9.30pm in the evening. Some of you out there in other parts of the world are used to these temperatures, we are not in this country and so we find it quite uncomfortable.

What a day .....the pictures!

At last blogger is allowing me some pictures:- so to continue from yesterday........

Picture 1. -----at last .....the pictures.......this is the Jane lemon bag I was talking about yesterday (click here to see the report)

Picture 2 ----- Maggie Grey's wall hanging. As you can see for yourselves, under Val's expert guidance , these two very talented ladies pushed the boundaries of this new City and Guilds Syllabus to the extremes. Moral of this tale is do not go by the title - look at the content and then a bit of lateral thinking, that's creativitiy.

This was taken on the journey home , as you can see Avebury was quite busy with tourists, but then it was sunday afternoon, the heat was blistering though. Mad dogs and Englishmen comes to mind.

As the bikers (motor variety) will tell you, the famous Red Lion quenches the thirst.

Some welcome shade.

What a day!

Off on my travels again today. Back to Urchfont for the Textile exhibitions that I chatted about last weekend. Some of the City and Guilds courses were finishing, and some good traders also attend. Its also a great opportunity to catch up with good friends. I decided to go early as it was promising to be a scorcher of a day. That was a good decision, when I arrived it was already 26C at 10.00am, when I left at about 1.30pm it was 32C. I was certainly grateful for the air condiditioning in the car.
The tutors at Urchfont for the City and Guilds are first class. Sian Martin had her groups' work on display , they have just finished level 3 ( used to be Part 2 in my day!) and certainly plenty of talent.

Sian also had her distance learning students work on display, and certainly that was a delight to see. The restrictions imposed by the need to use snail mail, did not hinder creativity at all.

Val Campbell Harding had 2 groups finishing one on Machine Embroidery and here is a lady to watch, Doreen Woodrow, fantastic work. I had the pleasure of working with Doreen a few years ago when I was an internal verifyer for a C & G course on Automatic machine patterns. Her work as you can see has progressed and evolved to be wonderful.

Val's other course has a very uninspiring title, but that does not deter Val, and she has exploited the syllabus in a very imaginative way.

I would not particulary sign up for a course with this title, so I was very surprised when I found out 3 of my friends had signed up for it with Val!! They were also thoroughly enjoying it. Here are some of the results of their endevours......... You will see it was fantastic fun.

Jane has created this brilliant bag, the findings are truly beautiful. Such an inspiration.

Blogger has stopped letting me put the pictures into the blog at the moment. I will add them as soon as I can.....sorry folks (picture 1)

Maggie has worked with distressing and ageing materials...no surprise there! She was so excited too as her new book had just arrived (only the authors copy I'm afraid) and she is mighty pleased with it. She is hoping to have the copies for sale to the rest of us, by the Knit and Stitch show in Birmingham in September. If it arrives in time for the Festival of Quilts in August, we may see her there with the book. As always her work is instantly recognisable and pushed the boundaries in terms of the way she uses media.

Blogger has stopped me adding any more pictures. I will add them as soon as posible .......sorry.
(picture 2)
Clive was busy going round and videoing all the work for Val as she was not well enough to attend this weekend. Speedy recovery Val.

......and stitching?

Forgot to add this to my blog last night! This is the sketchbook and stitching work I did while on the coach, pasted in some of my little digital images, tried to do some pencil drawings and tried to stitch into the sketchbook. Problem being the M4 motorway is a very wobbily road on the inside lane, coach was comfortable, but too much wobble for that sort of work as you can see........

So I resorted to my stitching, which I had fortunately put into my bag. The bumps on the motorway still allowed me to stitch, you will recognise the embellished work from a previous posting.

Managed to do quite a bit of stitching in amongst the discussions, singing and the hot weather.

Tale of two visits

The visit today after work was on my own - I had been invited to Radley College to the Art department.

Fantastic work and a very enjoyable way to start the weekend. It seemed strange to go back to Abingdon, driving past the Hospital my eldest son was born in, past the shop my grandparents family owned before they emigrated to Canada, andtravelling past Denman College- I waved for you Gill!

Anyway I digress as usual - I promised yesterday to tell you some more about our trip to London.

When we got to the British Museum, a very excited band of students were eager to get inside, and they were suitably impressed by the glass roof and rotunda that greated them. First stop was the shop, which is in the centre. This might seem a bit odd, but the conveniences are sited very close, so it seemed the appropriate place to start.

We then went to the Africa Gallery first, really a fantastic opportunity for them to unwind and orientate themselves to viewing exhibits.

Plenty to see, and as we had studied masks as their first project they could easily relate to the designs they saw, they also enjoyed the patterning which they encountered and the use of unusual materials.

This is a quilt made from the foil cap wrapping from gin bottles and other drinks, why ? was the question from the students. I suggested.........because you can. That started the debate. How can that be a quilt? It is not nice and snuggly and it won't keep you warm! I suspect you, the quilters amongst you , are thinking - it hasn't got 3 layers so doesn't qualify as a quilt!

Students perused the exhibits and admired, and then there was one they looked at quite casually, it was displayed openly, but I knew they had not really looked. So started to ask them - what material has the artist used. (The title was the tree of life). The answer came back - metal- so nothing odd there then ? I asked them to look properly and tell me again what the answer was. Can you tell from the photos?

A video plays in a corner explaining the tree of life, the students hadn't noticed it though. I explained the meaning of the title and that the sculpture was made from gun parts, that had been confiscated. Suddenly the interest and discussion changed.......the digital cameras were recording the tree and notes were being made and the video was watched. The students certainly held strong views about guns. Social comment on another culture is difficult, but the artists would have been pleased with the way these students were understanding the meaning and relevance of this sculpture. A good lesson! It was time for lunch and we scuttled off to the dungeons to eat our packed lunch. One of the students had bought some play dough in the shop, so we all had a go at making Stone Henge and the Avebury stones, such fun. After lunch was time for the drawing and sketching of the focus for the visit. The reason we had come to the British Museum - you will recall we have been working on clay tiles and using Van Gogh as an inspiration for the design.

Students were not disappointed by what they saw. We were going to go to room 42 and study the medieval tiles.

We talked about incised tiles, relief tiles, shaped tiles, glazed tiles and there were all the examples in front of us.

As you can see a wealth of visual delights, if you can visit - do take the opportunity. My students loved it - and if 14 year olds can come away from the museum feeling inspired and not wishing to stop their sketching - it must be good!

We also managed to catch 2 drawing exhibitions that had just started, the students liked the french drawings particularly. I had great trouble getting them away from the exhibition and back onto the coach.