Halloween

Specially for Halloween I photographed this art piece of mine (A4) which was made some years ago and was quite significant in the development of my work. It has never been exhibited as I know that not everyone shares my taste for death and its rituals, the macabre and strange. In the Victorian era the only time children were photographed was very often after their death to provide a lasting reminder of them. So many children died in their infancy (as can be seen in any graveyard) and for the parents such a photograph must have been worth the money that was needed to take it (almost always by a professional photographer). I've incorporated some of these on this piece (from a collage sheet from Alpha Stamps), as well as other death related symbolism. This piece is close to my own heart and is on show on a permanent base in my studio. So for today I'm giving it a public showing here and as my blip for today.

Gladhouse Reservoir

Today is my 700th blip anniversary which means that I have posted a photograph consecutively for the last 700 days. I've only had to back blip (i.e. upload the picture after the actual day had passed) once, when our dial-up wasn't working due to a power cut. During that day I've blipped mostly from home but also from a nearby farm and the Penicuik library, both due to internet and/or power problems. Since the end of May this year I've been using our WiFi at home (oh the relief!). Blip celebrates some birthdays in style but the 700th isn't one of them as within 30 days you reach your 2 year anniversary. But I didn't want the day to go by without having my own little blip party and for that I needed to come up with a good if not great photograph.

I also am very, very busy so didn't want to venture too far from home. This morning was rather dull and grey for photography but the afternoon promised a bit of sun and so we drove to Gladhouse Reservoir, about 15 minutes drive from home, where I took a previous blip last year in April.  And it proved to be a very good choice. There was hardly any wind. The surface of the water was undisturbed by any ripples and thus the reflections were out of this world! In the end I took so many photographs that once again I had a very difficult time settling on the one I wanted to blip. The photograph at the top of this post won, although the one at the bottom was a very close contender. Let me know if you think I made the right choice.

 From the reservoir the water is led over stone steps (seen below) into a trench, under a bridge. You can see that in the above picture and then, not too far away, seems to plummet down a steep dip. A very strange sight giving the illusion that all the water stops in mid flow.

We drove on a bit further and came upon more fantastic photo opportunities. The interest was not just the water or the reflections, splendid as they were. but also the wonderful cloud formations. They changed from second to second, and the sun kept appearing and disappearing, producing ever different effects. 

All the pictures seen here were taken within a 20 minute time frame but some look like it's very light and others very dark. It just depended on whether the sun was on view or not.

It's a Moo day

When in doubt, blip a cow! That's my motto and I greatly prefer it when that cow is a Highlander. Somehow they are so majestic and seem to be a lot more intelligent that your everyday sort of cow. It may look like I'm close here and yes, I was quite close, touching distance in fact, but there was that all important fence in between the two of us. Good thing as there was a calf in the field which means you have to be extra careful how you approach the mother. She however seemed fairly relaxed about my presence and was more intent on getting to her food.

My blip for today! Somehow I managed to capture that bum right in the middle of the head. Cool!

Not an easy task when you have two huge horns on your head but she was very adapt at turning her head sideways, slowly moving forward and once past the railings moving her head straight again so she was sort of locked in. She used the same method to get out again. John and I drove around the neighbourhood as I finally got around to signing up for mobile broadband via a SIM card on my iPad with Three and I wanted to test the strength of the signal just in case I need to use this should our electricity and/or WiFi at home fail during the winter. Imagine my excitement when I discovered a spot where the reception was 5 bar i.e. full strength. I took the opportunity to download 2 magazines which I had previously given up on as they took virtually all day with our 1/2 Mb download via our WiFi. On the mobile broadband they took a mere 15 minutes during which time we sat in the car by the side of the road enjoying such unheard of speeds (to us!). I'm not sure John enjoyed this as much as I did, specially as the magazines were called Collage in Colour and In Stitches..

I discovered afterwards that I had used up my entire download allowance for a month in one go. Should I be tempted to sign up for the 10Gb instead of the 1? I'm trying to be good and will try and wait till next month to do the next issues! The mobile broadband is meant to be for emergencies only and should we have a lot of snow I very much doubt I will be able to get to the 5 bar site anyway, even on foot. However at the top of our garden I can get 1 bar reception! But oh the joys of such speed. Not quite worth moving house for (I love the place with all my heart) but nevertheless great to discover that it is within my grasp if I want it!.

Return to Fly Agaric

I retruned to the exact same Amanita Muscaria that I blogged and blipped about a few days ago here. Since then I have been reading up on their development and it seems they travel from their beginning to their end in a very short period of time. That was enough to take me back into the forest today. This time I stepped into a ditch in the process getting my walking boots wet through and even my socks. But it was worth it!

I found several more clumps of mushrooms by venturing further into the forest and it seems the mushrooms prefer the spots where the sun can managed to get through the thick foliage and shed its light down on the forest floor. As you can see it was another sunny day, but oh boy, it's certainly getting colder here in the Scottish Borders!

Contemporary Quilt book

I finally got around to ordering the book CQ@10 when I retrieved the piece of paper I had written the necessary information on to buy it. It had got lost among some other paperwork and I found it when I was trying to create at least some order in the chaos of my studio. I immediately (before I lost it again) ordered it (you can do so by following the info here) and I highly recommended you do as it's a lovely publication, beautifully laid out and produced. It celebrates the 10th anniversary of the Contemporary Quilt group that is a part of the Quilters' Guild of the British Isles. I can't quite remember when I joined but it was pretty close to the beginning and although I'm not a very active member I do always read the messages on their Yahoo group and of course I have been making journal quilts which is a project for which they took inspiration from the JQ exhibitions at the Houston Quilt Show. I only missed making them in 2010 and the colour-quilts-collage solo show I had in 2011 was the excuse. I needed all my time to make work for that. But as regular readers will know I'm doing them again this year, as part of my 52 Journals project. 

To my delight, when the book arrived today, I discovered that 3 pieces of my art were included. 

This quilt, called Daffodil Days and which dates back many years, was exhibited with the Contemporary Quilt group in the Beldam Gallery at Brunel University, Uxbridge in 2004. 

Two of my Journal Quilts were also included. The above one is A4 sized and was made for February 2007. You can read my blog post about it here.

And this one, sized 12" square for the next year 2008, when I dedicated all my JQs to Venice! As some of you know my Venice obsession is long-standing! It was made for the month of June and more information can be seen here.

Such a treat to suddenly discover them in this book and the whole book is a delight of colour and inspiration. If you're a quilter, whether traditional, contemporary or art, you should buy a copy! Click here to do so.

43. Burano Colours Journal Quilt

I talked last week about my retail therapy in the form of googling Venice in a variety of places such as Amazon and Ebay. It is something I've been doing for a few years now and as a result I have amassed a wealth of Venice related items including numerous books. So when I finally got an iPad, what could be more natural than using Venice as the first thing I searched for in the Apple Store. One of the items that popped up and was instantly downloaded by me was the Magical Venice app This consists of a series of beautiful photographs of Venice by the photographer Roberto Soncin Gerometta who was born there.. This app enables you to visit Venice digitally whenever you like (and without incurring airline expenses!) via his photographs and accompanied by lovely music by Vivaldi!  

One of the series of photographs on the app is dedicated to the colourful island of Burano where all the houses are painted in different glorious colours and as soon as I saw the pictures I remembered I had a book about the island which features these delights. You can see the book below and that too was the result of one of my Venice searches, that time on Amazon. A different photographer but equally marvellous pictures! I let myself be inspired by a detail of one of the app photographs and for my colour scheme the book was the leading influence. 

The rest was simple. I used solid colour cottons and machine applique with Bondaweb. After finishing I knew the journal quilt still lacked something but wasn't sure what it was. I had already sewn on the beads but still I knew there was a missing ingredient. Synchronicity came to the rescue when Gillian came to the book making class I was at too, last week and handed over a huge bag of orange bugle beads she had spotted in a charity shop and she told me she immediately thought of me. Would I want them? Would I ever! Thanks so much, Gillian! As soon as I brought them home the Journal Quilt almost leapt up from my work table and told me it wanted to be bugle beaded!

To my delight there were two shades of orange in the collection, one more pale and the other darker. I'm not sure if you can see this on the photograph but it certainly adds to the lovely effect when you see the quilt in real life. I'm delighted to report that I will have enough orange bugle beads to see me through the rest of my lifespan, and I have already put them to good use on another project.

Orange is one of the hot colours I adore! Sometimes things come together so beautifully that you just know it was all meant to be, somehow! Magic, that's what it must be.

A day out

A day that starts with a sighting of not one but two lovely pheasant girls is almost guaranteed to be a lovely one, and so it proved today. I tried very hard to get both of them to pose together for a group portrait but one of them was having nothing of it.

Every time I pointed the camera in her direction she scuttled away with great speed despite the temptation of the seeds I threw for them. So separate pictures it would have to be and moving ones at that!

I then set off and had an enjoyable trip to Melrose today to meet up with an old friend and visit the Bernat Klein exhibition in Old Gala House (in Galashiels) as well as have another look at Helen Cowans' show in the same venue. If you want to go too, please note the gallery is now only open during the week (Tue - Fri) from 1 - 4 pm!  Fortunately I found a friendly face who was prepared to open the rooms up for us! The  Bernat Klein show was like diving into a sea of pure, joyful colour. Even the names of the pieces were a delight such as Ecstasy, Seventh Heaven, Blue Moon, Swan Lake, Dreamland. Infinite Moon, Sunspace, Gold Dust, Chartreuse, Caramba, Firedance and Golden Fleece. I was also very interested in the way he had mounted his pieces which were all the same size. Now that the end of my 52 Journals project is in sight I've started to think about how to present them all! No photography allowed inside the gallery (but you can see one of the paintings by clicking on this link!) so below a close-up I took in the gardens.

Afterwards we had lunch at Jenni's house and on my way home I could not resist a picture of Melrose Abbey! A wonderful way to spend a lovely day. Thick fog did not spoil the day but I did have to take a detour to avoid an accident scene close to home. Just hope no one was seriously injured.  I had such an enjoyable day and had been thinking while driving back that life was beautiful, so it would be so sad if for someone else this day was their last.

Toadstools

I'm shamefully ignorant about mushrooms, fungi and toadstools and not even sure what distinguishes them from each other.  But  via googling  I'm pretty certain the one above belongs to the Amanita Muscaria and even if I had felt the inclination to eat them (no, thank you!), all the information I could find online advised against it! But I love the look of these fairytale growths. They seem to have sprung up from one day to the next as I could swear they weren't there yesterday when I walked the dogs and yet today I could see those splashes of red among the trees.

Seeing them was one thing; getting to them to take the photographs was quite a different thing altogether. It involved donning wellies, wrapping myself in a coat and diving into the thick evergreen forest where the trees are so close together that their branches are interlinking. With the coat wrapped over my face and virtually on my knees I crawled in until I sort of guessed I had reached the area where I had spotted them. Then I unwrapped my head and looked, and they were all around me. 

Not just the red ones either, but these much larger brown ones too! They have a very interesting texture but don't make for a very good photograph. I have no idea whatsoever about their name and I'm definitely taking no chances of bringing them home with me for consumption!  It dawned that I also didn't know just how these growths ensure there will be a future generation but I guessed that by leaving them where I found them there would be a much larger chance of seeing more of them next year!
I haven't photo-shopped these images in any way. The light was sort of magical in between the dense trees with the sun penetrating where it could, specially near the edge of the forest, and it managed to make the mushrooms look like fairies should be sitting on their edge! Didn't see any though.

Trees in Colour

Some days are so full of beauty that they take your breath away. Today was one  such day. The sun was shining, there were white wisps of cloud in the blue sky and the trees were dressed in their full autumn glory. Words are simply not adequate to describe such sights and days like this don't come around often. I'll remember this one for many years to come. Striving for beauty is my main aim in art but seeing the amazing loveliness of nature makes me aware that I will never get close to achieving it as well as the earth does it. That won't stop me trying though!

We were in Dawyck Botanical Garden and my camera never left my hand. It took more than 100 photographs which I will treasure but here are the absolute highlights. I'll shut up and let you enjoy them in peace like we did. I've only added a few tree quotations that I particularly love.

It is not so much for its beauty that the forest makes a claim upon men's hearts, as for that subtle something, that quality of air that emanates from old trees, that so wonderfully changes and renews a weary spirit. (Robert Louis Stevenson).

Trees are poems that earth writes upon the sky, we fell them down and turn them into paper, that we may record our emptiness. (Kahlil Gibran)

Trees are the earth's endless effort to speak to the listening heaven. (Rabindranath Tagore)

I hear the wind among the trees playing the celestial symphonies; I see the branches downward bent, like keys of some great instrument. (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow).

There is always music amongst the trees in the garden, but our hearts must be very quiet to hear it. (Minnie Aumonier)

The sights of autumn

Dahlia

I've had a very busy few days, filled with various activities such as a bookmaking class, as well as a Christmas decoration class today. I'm not into Christmas in a big way and contrary to what many people expect I'm not really a crafter either. I simply use it to achieve my art. So I was not expecting all that much but in fact it was a hugely enjoyable day and I even ended up with several ornaments for in the Xmas tree when the time comes, and some very pretty decorated boxes. I do wonder though why all my activities always tend to happen within short timespans and then I have periods where absolutely nothing of note occurs. Specially this year with my 52 Journals project this makes life very difficult from time to time and I don't want to miss a week now that the end is definitely in sight. Only 10 more  Journal Quilts to make.

Potentilla

When I drove to class this morning it struck me that autumn has reached it's zenith. All the trees have turned colour, there are lots of leaves about and red, orange, yellow and brown dominated the landscape.

And some trees are completely bare already. The one above is situated in our lane and the photograph was taken on my way home when as you can see I discovered it had turned into a lovely day. Now I'm really ready for a glass of wine and Inspector Montalbano tonight!

42. Out of the Waves Journal Quilt

Sometimes many different strands come together and  merge into one Journal Quilt. And so it was for no. 42 in my 52 Journals project where I aim to make one Journal Quilt for every week of 2012. This one is A4 sized. It started with a piece of counted thread fabric I had hand painted some time ago simply because I had paint left from another project and fabric paint is too expensive to waste.

The next strand was the above picture I took of a piece of  old Indian embroidery during the talk by John Gillow at the World Textile Day back in the summer. It struck me that the counted thread fabric would be a good background to use to replicate this stitching but in a more contemporary way. So I started by cutting the pieces of green and red felt, appliqued them on by hand,  and continued with the hand stitching. But somehow I knew this piece required something more to serve as a focal point. Also it had begun to look too much like Christmas and I needed to get away from that! A quite long thinking process followed as well as a hunt through my supplies and images.

I was over the moon to discover this postcard of a canal in Venice (Canale Albrizzi to be exact), which had the same colour scheme. As you may have surmised from this blog I'm fairly Venice obsessed and in idle moments (not many!) I sit behind my computer and search for Venice on places like Google, Amazon and Ebay. It's most amazing to see what pops up but it's a sure way to also find treasure among the dross! Postcards are a firm favourite, specially vintage ones where I don't have to worry about copyright issues.Also they are usually quite reasonable in price which cannot be said for some other Venice related goodies I dig up digitally! 

The postcard was scanned and then printed onto cotton fabric and for once I felt that the centre of the piece was the place for it. As you can see I added a lot more hand stitching and beading and also embellished with some tiny red buttons. The text was applied onto fabric using a Xyron Design Runner. It reads: "Out of the water came Venice"

The fabric on which I wrote that as well as the binding use a cotton sheet that was originally behind the counted thread fabric when I painted it and was also used to mop up afterwards. In fact I ended up liking it better than my intended painting. Random always works better for me than planned.

Somehow the Venice canal imagery took away some of the Xmassy atmosphere although I did make a mental  note to be even more careful next time I feel the urge to play with red and green together. Honesty demands that I tell you this is not one of my favourites out of the journal quilts I've made so far, by a long shot. But that's okay, I knew in advance that not all my 52 journals would end up being master pieces. I am aware already of some of them that are, but coming up with one every week is simply too big an ask. It can however stand on its own merits quite well.

Remember if you're new here you can see all the previous journal quilts for this year by looking at the slide show in the side bar or alternatively if you want to read more about each one by clicking on the 52 Journals label befow this post.

Beastly Photographs

One of the great pleasure of living where we do, is the wealth of animal life all around us and in the past few days I have made animals the stars of my daily blip photograph. In case you're new here, Blipfoto is a website where you can upload one photograph every day. You can only upload it to the day the picture was taken but that's the only rule. You don't have to do it daily but I "do it once a day" as their logo states. I started back in November 2010 and joining Blipfoto is one of the best decisions I've ever made. As a visual artist I'm already very trained in looking but Blipfoto has taught me to open my eyes even wider in the hunt for the daily picture. Very often that picture will also appear on my blog but somehow these animals never made it as I was simply to busy some of the days to write a blogpost as well as post my blipfoto. And I know that some of you look at my blipfoto page too (thanks so much!) but for those of you who don't, here are the recent animal ones. 

This is the pheasant girl who has become a regular visitor to our garden. She knows that first thing in the morning I will appea,r to fill up the seed and nut containers for the birds and since her visits I now also deposit a handful of seed on the ground specially for her. After the first few days when she was very skittish, she has become used to me and thus was quite happy for me to take her picture.
The muskovy duck above is a resident of the nearby Whitmuir Organic Farm where we were on Saturday for a car boot sale and afterwards for a drink in the coffee shop to warm up. These ducks get lots of visitors and are very relaxed about it. The picture was taken without a zoom so you can imagine just how close I was.

Then finally this morning I went to the village to document some more gravestones in the West Linton graveyard for my blog, dedicated to that place, and on my way passed this nearby field and spotted the above delightful Highland Cattle calf with his or her mother. What a treat and I took many pictures of this lovely twosome, of which the above picture and the one at the top of this post were my favourites. The top one also became my blip for today.