two exhibitions

On Saturday we took our weekend visitors to two local exhibitions.

First up: Drawn at the RWA. The added frisson here was that my talented husband had had a piece of work selected!

Yes that is a red dot! (picture credit Steve Broadway)

It’s a really lovely exhibition showcasing the skill which is the foundation of artistic practice. For me the striking thing about the show is the sheer diversity of artistic expression. I was intrigued by the contrast between artists who employ a few spare lines and those whose pleasure is to render what they see in minute detail. To quote the RWA’s press release: “Far from being a traditional drawing show, works included vary hugely in materials, subject, and style. From iPad life drawings to chalk drawn directly on the RWA gallery floors, from embroidered drawings to flocked screenprints, the works push boundaries, taking drawing to new heights.”  Drawn runs until 2 June and I recommend a visit. 

After a civilised break for coffee, we made our way just down the road to Bristol City Museum where, tucked away on the top floor at the back of the building, is a small but delightful exhibition entitled “Stitching and Thinking”. Starting with samplers of darning and mending from the museum collection, this show then moves on to examine ideas of mending and repair – from the straightforward repair of stitched artefacts to the more costly business of repairing broken hearts.


(Picture credit: Bristol City Museum & Art Gallery)

The discipline of limiting the colour palette to white cloth and red stitching creates a simple and poignant overall effect, which makes it a very appropriate companion to the largely monochrome exhibition of drawing at RWA. There are only a couple more weeks of this lovely exhibition and I’m hoping to get to the final gallery talk on 3 April.

lucky me!

Receiving this bundle of tea-time goodies in the post on Friday morning got the weekend off to a very good start!  I was lucky enough to win Liz's giveaway to celebrate her blog's fifth birthday.  When I first came across the concept of blogging I thought that it seemed a bit egotistical like writing a personal diary with publication in mind.  But I've come to see it in quite a different light.  My own tentative steps into the blogging world were also about five years ago and although I'm by no means prolific and haven't got a vast throng of readers, I've discovered a lovely world of shared interests, supportive online communities, plenty of fun and masses of information and inspiration.  Thanks, Liz!

Sadly the light wasn't good enough to make a decent photograph.  No snow here to intensify the light; just wall-to-wall grey.  That didn't stop us from having an excellent weekend with visiting friends - food, natter, mooching around galleries and shops, reminiscing, laughing, a brisk cold walk round the harbourside, more food; the best kind of weekend.

getting shirty (work in progress)

At the back end of last year I had an idea for a quilt.  I was inspired by Morwhenna Woolcock’s lovely screen-printed bags made from recycled men’s shirts and by the memory of a quilt I had seen in a book many years ago.  So I put out a call to the men in my family for their cast off shirts and I also went hunting in charity shops.  Charity shop shirts are surprisingly expensive when all you’re planning to do with them is chop them up!  I asked a couple of times whether they had a stash of shirts that weren’t good enough to go out on the racks, but I always seemed to have turned up the day after the ragman had been!   It’s ironic that buying brand new fabric might have been less expensive, but the important point about this project is to re-use and at least my money was ending up with a charity.

 

Last week it seemed like time to make some progress, so I set about cutting up my pile of old shirts (“pre-loved” as the saying goes!).  It felt almost sacrilegious; men’s shirts – even the cheap and cheerful brands – are amazingly well-made and constructed to last.  I chopped off cuffs, collars, yokes, button bands and ended up with rectangles of cotton, polycotton and linen from backs, fronts and sleeves and a whole tangle of discarded pieces.  Surely there’s something I can still do with those!

A little bit of play with my harvested fabrics made me realise that the lovely blues and greys of my chosen shirts were a little bit pale and bland when viewed en masse, so I had another shopping session and came back with a couple of shirts that had red in the pattern. This was better, but still worryingly dull. I like borders on quilts, they provide a sort of frame for the patchwork within, but I had been hoping that this could be a really simple quilt just pieced together in large pieces, with maybe a bit of contrast colour in the binding. However, as I laid out the pieces and looked at them it came to me that one of the reasons that traditional quilts often have a contrasting inner border is that if a quilt is draped over a bed the binding is largely invisible.

Fortunately this was design on the hoof and I pieced together an inner square and Ruth’s fabric stash yielded some plain red fabric. It’s fantastic what a splash of contrasting colour can do to bring the whole thing together and give it a bit of excitement. I'll try to bring some decent photos to the blog when I've finished it. I've left some pockets in place (for little notes or treasures) and it's going to have quite a few buttons added as the quilt "ties".