81: it’s showtime!

It’s been mentioned before that I’m a bit of a butterfly when it comes to making and crafting: I usually have several projects on the go that can be picked up and put down, taken on tubes, worked on as a way to help me focus in meetings or at D&D games, focused on while the TV happens in the background, that sort of things. These are alongside the ones that need more attention – things with sewing machines or full coverage cross stitches, for example.

So, imagine my delight yesterday when my crafty buddy H and I visited the Autumn Knitting and Stitching Show at Alexandra Palace – the first live craft event we’ve been to since the Waltham Abbey Wool Show in January 2020, before all those lockdowns. I’ve always liked the autumn one better than the spring one (at Olympia) for the exhibitions of quilts and students’ work. The venue is also pretty amazing, with glorious views over London. ‘Ally Pally’, as it’s known, is one of those Victorian ‘people’s palaces’ which have so much history attached to them: the BBC broadcast from there, it was used as an internment camp during the First World War, there’s an ice rink and a beautiful park.

We started with a plan to work our way around the outside stalls, which took us through (among other things) the Embroiderers’ Guild Members’ Challenge exhibition ‘Exquisite Containers‘. We spent a long time talking to the Guild member watching over the exhibition, admiring her mother’s stunning or nue book covers: after working for many years and bringing up her family, she vowed after retirement that she’d dedicate her time to her craft and did just that for the next 25 years or so. We talked about the loss of creativity in the school curriculum – she had written a stern letter to Gavin Williamson lambasting him about the destruction of the creative subjects.

‘I do believe we are muted’ – Philippa Moggridge

*Free Range Egg Custard Tart* – Maria Thomas

H is a DT teacher which gives us an excellent excuse to talk to people about techniques, and I was keeping my eyes open for makers who were working with up/recycled materials. Maria Thomas’s work ‘Relative’ explored her place in the world as a mother, daughter, aunt, niece etc through mixed media pieces like the Free Range Egg Custard Tart jacket pictured here. These pieces were inspired by the housecoats her mother put on after work to do housework and cooking, to protect her ‘good’ clothes. I loved the way books, vintage packaging and text were blended into the patchwork and quilting. I’d really like to work with her.

Onome Otite‘s textile collages filled us with joy – so much colour and movement in her pieces inspired by Cirque du Soleil, using bright ankara and batik fabrics. There were several stalls selling African wax print fabrics, and when I find the right pattern I have all their cards. Lovely bright reds and yellows called to me, but I resisted.

After the exhibitions we hit the stalls – usually H is a good influence on me, taking lots of pictures of projects we’d like to do rather than buying the kits. Yesterday we were terrible influences on each other, though at least her ‘this will be a Christmas present!’ buying was a good excuse. There are so many lovely kits and fabrics to buy, and you can squish and squash them all you like, and have chats with the stallholders. We got hopelessly overexcited when we saw Matt, Peter, Mark and Raf from the Sewing Bee, especially when Matt and Peter stopped for a photo op with us. I came home with an English Paper Piecing jewellery set, some Foundation Piecing patterns, space invaders jersey fabric (new pants coming up!), some sewing patterns from an indie maker, a lot of business cards, haberdashery bits and bobs and gadgets, a sari silk skirt in my favourite reds, and a Christmas decoration kit which I can only put down to end of day panic buying. We had a go at marbling fabric, admired woodblock printing and mini screen print kits, got carried away by puffins, hares and highland cows, lusted after high-tech sewing machines and storage furniture. I left with a lot of ideas for things I really want to make. Now to find the time….preferably before the next show!

It won’t be this week, for sure: this week I am trialling my new school session in Thing 3’s primary school, and updating a talk about play for a local FE college. My hallway is full of boxes of strange resources like model chickens and miniature blue blocks (as seen in this week’s cover photo), scraps of fabric and laminate insulation. I’m also working on the next birthday present, and playing around with a small crochet bag design.

I’d better go off and do something useful….

Kirsty x

What I’ve been reading:

Tales from Moominvalley/Finn Family Moomintroll/Comet in Moominland – Tove Jansson (Audible)

Trader/Someplace to Be Flying/Dreams Underfoot – Charles de Lint

Week forty six: can you lick the end of your nose?

While scrolling through my Facebook memories this morning a post popped up from 2015 which just said ‘Terrible urge to learn to crochet’. I remember waking up that day and my fingers were actually twitching with the need to learn something new, to create something tangible and practical. It wasn’t as if I wasn’t making other things – I was dressmaking by then, and cross stitch was always in the background, but I am the very definition of a life-long learner. Combine this with creativity and curiosity and what you get is – well – me.

Luckily, I had yarn from my knitting phase and crochet hooks from the last time I’d tried to learn from my beloved’s mother, so with the help of YouTube and my crafty library I was able to get on with it. Over the next few days Facebook will show me my early progress: wonky granny squares, double crochet which gains and loses stitches at the end of every row, and – finally – a recognisable square. Friends were free with helpful advice – the craft community usually is, probably as we love to see other people getting joy from the same things we do – and I quickly became hooked (if you’ll pardon the pun). Generally I have crochet with me at all times: emergency yarn under my desk at work, a sock or an amigurumi in progress on the commute, and a large home project like a blanket. It’s very calming to be able to sit, to make repetitive actions, and the tactile nature of yarn makes it a sensory process too. If you’re happy using basic yarns it can be a relatively cheap hobby, too, but it never stops there.

I have an urge now to learn something new. I want to learn to draw. Once (in 1985) I got a B- from Mrs Allan the art teacher for my observational pencil drawing of my mum’s avocado plant, but that has always remained the pinnacle of my artistic achievement.

I don’t want to draw portraits, though I wouldn’t mind being able to draw a recognisable cat. I want to draw flowers and trees, houses and streets, and to be able to feel confident enough to do this whenever and wherever I want. I love seeing urban sketching on Instagram by people like the Shoreditch Sketcher and MaltzCreative, and two of my cousins are producing gorgeous work (Colour Confusions and ElliesPad – check them out!). I love Michael Powell‘s quirky paintings. I want to be able to see an interesting doorway or a window, and to be able to whip out a sketchbook and render it on the page.

So that’s my next mission: learn to draw. I have books (so many books!) and I signed up to Craftsy a while ago when they had an offer. There’s a number of ‘learn to’ videos on there, and it’s ridiculous to say I don’t have the patience – what I need to develop is the discipline to practise.

Play for mental health

Making and creating are play activities for me. I have attended a couple of really interesting webinars over Zoom this week about the importance of play for children’s mental health, particularly during the current pandemic, and the challenges of ensuring that children have access to play opportunities at a time when government focus is on ‘lost’ learning.

There is a lack of understanding in the current ‘knowledge-based’ curriculum that play is learning: it helps people (not just children!) to build relationships, to solve problems, to take risks, to have autonomy over their actions, to self-regulate their emotions, to make decisions, to make sense of the world around them. It doesn’t have to be structured play or play with a specific, adult-generated learning outcome. Playing with children enables us as adults to recall our playful selves, to find moments of joy in watching children make discoveries, to remember our own childhood. Sometimes its really hard to do this when you’re an adult.

One of the presenters, Sheba Gittens (an activist/artivist in Pittsburgh) talked about the need to forget that anyone might be watching you and give in to moments of joy – face pulling, laughing for the sheer joy of it, moving your body. She suggested that perhaps children’s ability to do all these things without self-consciousness is actually our default state of being, and we become so weighted down with other people’s expectations of ‘proper’ behaviour that we lose those abilities. I’ve certainly never been encouraged to try and lick the end of my own nose in a meeting before, or to pull a lot of funny faces. I’m usually trying to stop myself rolling my eyes…

When I teach a session called ‘The Importance of Play’ to GCSE/A-level and undergrads I ask them to define play, to tell me when children stop ‘playing’ and what activities they do themselves that they think are playful. It’s quite disheartening (for me and their teachers!) to hear the narrow definitions they have for play, and that they think children stop playing when they start school and ‘start learning’. Once I can get them to think of play as an activity that they do because they enjoy it, they open their thinking a bit more: I have found, also, that by starting the session with a play activity they are far more inclined to come out of the shadow of their hoodies and share their ideas. The best sessions are the ones where people talk to you, and ask questions, and think – the number of teachers who have apologised for their students interacting with me amazes me. I’d much rather they talked to me than looked at me in silence.

Reach for the stars

The lovely people at CPRE invited me to create a craft activity to support their annual star count, which this year takes place between 6 and 14 February (that’s now!). The focus of the count is the number of stars that can be seen within the constellation of Orion, which reminded me of the chapter in one of my favourite children’s books where a baby barn owl meets an astronomer. Here‘s what I came up with – why not have a go at the Star Count and making your own Orion? For those of you doing home learning, it supports fine motor skills (threading and sewing), science (light pollution), art, and English.

That’s it from me this week – I have a giant blanket hoodie to make and some mending to do, so I probably ought to get on with it. See you at the end of week 47.

Kirsty x

What I’ve been reading:

Ring the Hill – Tom Cox

Close Encounters of the Purred Kind – Tom Cox

The Night Hawks (Ruth Galloway) – Elly Griffiths

Spoils of the Dead (Liam Campbell) – Dana Stabenow

Tate: Sketch Club Urban Drawing – Phil Dean

Week eighteen: swimming with the fishes

It’s Sunday afternoon and here I am feeling pleasantly relaxed after a successful swim this morning, at Redricks Lakes – about 20 minutes’ drive away between Harlow and Sawbridgeworth. I say ‘successful’ as this was my second attempt at completing the induction. Two friends and I went on Wednesday evening as well, and they finished – and I didn’t. I was bitterly disappointed as I love to swim and had been really looking forward to it, but I think so many things put me out of my comfort zone that I felt quite ill. If you don’t have a wetsuit, you have to use a tow float and I found it very restrictive, creating drag behind me and preventing me from floating or swimming on my back; it was early evening so the sun was blinding me through the condensation on my goggles; and the instructor was quite firm about using front crawl which I am no good at. He also made us put our faces in the water and blow bubbles. I really, really hate getting my face wet! Other people in the induction group raced off at triathlon speed and…. I floundered. Luckily there was a lovely lady on a paddle board who talked me through, encouraged me to come back and try again when I felt better, and generally boosted my confidence. Thanks Siobhan! I emailed Phil, who books the induction, and asked if I could try again today and he was very helpful.

So today I tried again! My fabulous friend Sue came with me to be my support swimmer and she was quite determined that I was going to finish. This time we had wetsuits so I didn’t need a towfloat, and I knew what to expect when we got in the water. It was a much larger group this time, and they divided us by ability – swimming club speedy types in the first group, and family groups, slower people and juniors in the second. Bobbing about in the wetsuit was great, I felt confident enough to take the goggles off when they steamed up and swam without them. I put my face under water and blew bubbles. I LOVED IT. Now we can go whenever we like, and I suspect they’ll be seeing a lot of us. I feel really good that I didn’t give up after the first time, and overcame the panic.

Not the most flattering of photos but look how happy I am!

The only thing I’m disappointed by is that you don’t get a certificate and a badge to sew on your swimming cossie afterwards…..

British summertime?

As you can see in the photo above it was a bit cloudy – at one point we were swimming in the rain but it passed over quite quickly.

Unlike yesterday which was an exercise in soggy social distancing. For the first time since lockdown began a group of us decided to get together for a coffee in my garden, so the kids could run around and we could catch up, provide counselling and eat chocolate biscuits. And the heavens opened in truly biblical fashion. Being from Wales, Yorkshire and Ireland we are all quite used to the rain, but this was quite ridiculous. There was only so much room under the tree, so we huddled under umbrellas while the kids got absolutely drenched playing ‘back to base’ in the rain and swooping on the chocolate digestives as they ran past.

It was so lovely to see my cronies, however bad the weather was – it’s easy to forget how much support we get from our friends, and how sharing problems and issues with them can change our own perspectives. This is particularly true at the moment!

We still nattered for two hours, and – of course – the rain stopped and the sun came out minutes after they had all left.

Cooking with Kevin

Kevin the sourdough starter is still alive, and currently I am baking every other day or so – he has spawned two junior Kevins who have gone to new homes with friends, and every so often he makes a break for freedom from his Kilner jar after he’s been fed. I’m now onto my second 16kg sack of flour since April.

I have started using the cold bake method, using a cast iron casserole dish with the lid on and not pre-heating the oven – this gives a chewier crust and a lighter colour. You can take the lid off for the last five minutes to crisp it up a bit but I don’t always remember!

The most successful thing we have made so far, however, is sourdough pizza using this recipe from King Arthur Flour. It comes out like a ‘proper’ pizza, according to the kids, and they love adding their own toppings. We had ours with ‘nduja, red onions and mushrooms last week, and it was delicious. I’d like to try sourdough pretzels next, as I do love a pretzel! Ideally fresh from the oven with cinnamon sugar, but Marmite butter is a good alternative.

Fabric frenzy

I have been positively wallowing in fabric this week, delving into the shed stash to retrieve fat quarters and playing with prints. My initial plan was to use some Totoro panels and various Japanese prints together, but couldn’t decide on a block to use. I really liked the look of a Bento Box block, but my fabric was already in squares and some of the prints wouldn’t work in a thinner strip so that plan is on hold. I did make a test block out of polycotton scraps and I really like the effect so will be going back to that at some point!

And then I found a package of fabric in the stash with a space theme – astronauts, planets, galaxies, flying saucers – and some black/marbled black solid fabrics so at some point I must have been thinking of an Attic Window quilt. That made the decision pretty easy, but I have been playing with the blocks again and can’t decide on a random scatter of prints or to make blocks of four together. I quite like the random scatter but also the idea of blocks of four smaller ‘windows’ with sashing between them.

I finished the Disappearing Nine-Patch quilt too, although I forgot to make a border and just ended up using the backing fabric to bind it. It was hard to manipulate that much fabric so I didn’t do much quilting on it – but even with that managed to get a giant tuck on the back. It’s ended up about 5 feet long and about 4 and a 1/2 feet wide, so it’s definitely the biggest thing I have ever made. Here it is in all its glory – as you can see, Lulu was not keen to move when I was trying to take photos of the quilt on the bed. As soon as I put the camera away she came to inspect my handiwork, of course. Cats. Cats are nice.

Disappearing Nine Patch (cat included for scale)

The denim for my Morgan jeans finally arrived yesterday, so I cut out the paper pattern ready to start on the jeans tomorrow. Let’s see if I can get the fly right this time!

The other thing I have tried to do this week is a bit of sketching. I am not handy with a pencil – the peak of my drawing skills came when I was 12 and Mrs Allan gave me a B- for my pencil sketch of my mum’s avocado plant. I would love to be able to draw, and one of the things I’d like to do is urban sketching. I love artists like Michael Powell, Phil aka @maltzcreative and Kate Lycett, particularly their buildings and streetscapes. I started with a photograph of Aberaeron that I took when we were on holiday in 2018, as it’s a place I know well, but I need to work a lot more on proportion and perspective! I suppose its another one of those things where practice makes perfect.

Unlikely that Mrs Allan would give me a B- these days!

I think I need to put in guidelines with a ruler first, and then fill in the gaps. Still, I am enjoying the learning process!

I had better go and feed Kevin and think about dinner….

See you in week nineteen!

Kirsty

What I’ve been reading:

V I Warshawski series (yes, still – but I’m on the last one!) by Sara Paretsky

Last Act in Palmyra – Lindsey Davis (Falco series – Audible)