Andalucia-Granada

Today we were bussed to Granada and spent the morning in the city. The Cathedral and the Royal Chapel where Eleanor and Alphomao are buried are Baroque in gold and very ornate. After lunch we went to the Alhambra and had a guided tour. The number of steps did for my knees!

The Sierra Nevadas behind Granada - with snow on them. The amount of snow visibly increased over the day.

The world's most wonderful street lighting - Art Deco fixtures on the whole of the main street. A visit to Granada is worth it just to see these.

The pavements are decorated in this technique everywhere. It is a combination of yellow/brown pebbles and dark grey pebbles. This piece is about 8 foot square.

Then to the Al-hambra which is every bit as beautiful as everyone says. This is a doorway - just a little doorway, nothing special, not something the Sultan would use.

The fountain in the Court of the Lions. No two lions are the same.

And the view out of a window into a small courtyard. I have not shown photos of the intrictae decoration on the walls and ceilings. There was a lot of climbing up and down steps and my knees protested a lot. We sat for 20 minutes in a lovely garden at the end. There was silence on the bus going home as everyon snoozed. Where are the textiles you may ask. I saw a few in the Royal Chapel but nothing to catch my imagination. I would prefer to go round the places we saw today at my pace but this will have to do. Tomorrow we are meeting up with a friend of Dorothy's. The day after we have Cordoba.

Andalucia - El Torcal

Rocks and Limestone Pavement - on a large scale in El Torcal, a park not far from Anteqera. And yes it was very foggy. Visibility down to about 10 metres. What we (my sister, Dorothy, and myself) could see of the landscape was spectacular.

The central structure above is about ten foot tall and there were many such shapes about, some even taller. Lichen on the rocks and some flowering autumn crocuses growing wild in amongst the rocks which was very nice. We were taken up to th  top of this massif in a bus - hair pin bends and all - from Anteqera where we are staying for a week.  Then it was  down the mountain where we got good views once we were below the cloud level.

This is a view of Anteqera fortress, built by the Moors and strengthened by the Christains. The white houses in the foreground are the Old Town. The modern town is to the left.

 This is just on the edge of Anteqera and it is a 2000BC dolmen. You can see the scale of it from the person-sized date. It has a passage 25 yards long into a central section. Some of the stones involved weigh 70 tons. There was a video about how these were built which I found unbelievable since it requires an amazing organisation. So that's it for today. Tomorrow we are off to Granada and the Al-hambra.

We went round to a supermarket yesterday after eating lunch here - poor and very expensive. So today's lunch was cheese sandwiches made by us- good - and a Spanish mango which was marvellous.Dinner was okay-ish. Tomorrow we are going to try eating out in Granada although Dorothy is very dubious and thinks our cheese sandwiches will prove to be better. So it is my job/duty tomorrow to find a good place for lunch.

I should have said that we are with a conducted tour organised by Page and Moy. There are 32 people on it. It is the first such a tour I have ever been on outside the UK. I went on the Martin Randall tour in the Midlands earlier this year but that involved fewer people (11). The Page and Moy organisation seems rather better than Martin Randall. When they say ' we shall leave El Torcal at 1100', some how everyone is rounded up and on the bus and there is never any sense of pressure to swallow down the hot coffee.    

Two Exhibitions and a Crab Curry

Yesterday I went through to Leamington Spa to spend the day with my daughter and her family - not Madi who is in Arizona. I must say she gets interesting school trips. The Grand Canyon and a dude ranch!! In the morning I went off to the Leamington Spa Art Gallery where there is an exhibition of art quilts 'Through Our Hands'. Even I recognise  some of the internationally known names. And it was all stunning. I talked about an exhibition at Redditch by the Kemshalls where I was not impressed. They had works at L Spa and they were very impressive. As were Elizabeth Barton's art quilts of mediaeval buildings at twilight. The windows lit up were done with tiny squares of fabric ( 1 or 2 square cms) in all sorts of shades of yellow and orange with spots of red and brown. Alicia Merrett had maps of villages. Linda Kemshall had two portraits in her quilt and the quilting made up the contours of the faces.There were 10 quilters in all. Anyone who canget  there should go.  It is on till 13th January 2013.

In the afternoon, we all went to Compton Verney to see an exhibition of tapestries from teh Dovecot Studios. They ran from a pseudo-mediaeval The Lord of the Hunt to pieces done last year by way of a large piece by Paolozzi and and a 1950 one based on a design by Bawden called 'Farming'. The first Archie Brennan was for Aberdeen in 1964 and was innovative in its use of different yarn types to get texture. There was a very 3D one designed by my hero Bernat Klein which included knitting, crochet and whipping. My favourite was 'Overall' by Harold Cohen.

'Overall' based on a design by Harold Cohen 1967. No photos were allowed so I have downloaded this from the web. Cally Booker told me about this exhibition when it was on in Edinburgh. If you can get there, do so.

The local Guild had set up a tapestry loom and if you go on Tuesdays, Thursday or Sundays, you can have a go. 

In teh evening, we went roudn to Kayal which is a good Indian restaurant and I had parathas and crab curry. All very pleasing and made a good end to a good day.

A Few Completed Projects

My grandchildren brought back two scrolls from China on which a scribe had written their names in Chinese calligraphy. There was a family discussion on how these should be framed and it was decided that I would mount them on nice paper and add a holder top and bottom. The children were offered a choice of anything from my paper stash. Madi chose an elegant Japanese chiyogami paper while Alex went for owls (not sure about this myself). Here they are completed and ready to go to them tomorrow.

Yesterday I had a good long session on No 2 Drafting session which is on twill. I think it is better. I have put it to one side for the next few days as I am away in Andalucia. I will mull it over while away. Another completed project is dealing with our glut of apples especially the windfalls. They are being turned into apple jelly as I write. 

And I created a totally different draft to use up the rest of 'Texture' warp from last weekend. The warp is tied on again and I have woven the header and a few inches. It is NOT to shrink. I am using the same wool in the weft as is in the warp - which did not shrink. It is an ornamental stitched double cloth. I have always liked the stitched double cloth shown on Page 173 of Ursina Arn-Grischott's book on Double Weave. I have woven 90/2 silk in stitched double cloth because it allows you to get the detail of a pattern on a very small scale while being a robust cloth. But I have a sneaking feeling that sooner or later I will weave a wool length and make a reversible jacket. Rosie Price and I had a long discussion recently about how you would do the seams. She thought a French seam. I thought bind every edge and sew the bindings together. We decided I should consult with Gill Arnold before starting such a project.

And on the domestic front, one of Michael's instruments has been sold. And someone on Freecycle wanted a microfiche reader. So I dug mine out, checked it still worked and offered it. It was snapped up by one very happy man who was not expecting a dinky portable one.

Mixed Fortunes

I finished off the wooden dowel to hold this up at the exhibition next week. It is at The Public in West Bromwich and is the Midlands Textile Forum's 'Festivals and Celebrations'. It is on from November 10th to February 3rd. This piece is in Diversified Plain Weave with the candle flames overpainted with gold. It is backed with thick ecru cotton and has a quilter's sleeve to hold the dowel rod.

And this is the finished 'Fireworks'. It is in DPW with gold paint, machine and hand embroidery. Backed with black cotton and with a quilter's sleeve.

The cover finished and ready for use on Volume 1 of the Jules Verne.

The paper I used for the Verne endpapers was too thin and so I pasted it down to the textblock - forgetting that the endpapers had been printed on the inkjet printer. The result is the ruination of all endpapers - see photo - and the plain paper is badly stained. There will be nothing for it but to cut these pages off. I have remembered that I have a big roll of heavy duty cartridge paper and will cut some pieces bigger than A4 from it and print on those. I would rather use the inkjet than the laserjet as the colours are nicer - and you can print right up to the edge of the paper. Depressing - especially as I have made this mistake before! 

Today I must start on the next session of the drafting course. It does not happen for some weeks but I had a long talk with Chris Wright at the weekend and she had a lot of very useful suggestions. So I must do as much as I can before going off to Spain next week. 

Texture Samples

The results of tumble drying the weekend's samples. From the top, stitched double cloth where the warp wool did not shrink but the weft did giving a stripey effect. The turquoise and dark green sample is in overshot and is very 3D which does not show up at all well in the photo. The lowest one is the shibori where the weft was polyester and that has crinkled up nicely. I am unsure what to do with the remaining stitched double weave warp on the Voyager. I don't want to do any more texture with it and might just weave it off with more of the non-shrinking yarn. I am taken with the idea of doing overshot. Stacey Harvey-Brown had a wonderful exmple of Blooming Leaf in white on white which I fancy.

Yesterday was mostly spent coping with an unforeseen problem with binding the Jules Verne books. The text block came from the States and so is in States-size paper and, when I printed out the endpapers, they did not fit. Fortunately I had some US size paper and managed to use that. It is not high class paper but will have to do. A bigger problem is the cover. I designed the cover as a complete wrap around and had intended to  paste it onto book cloth but there would be a margin all the way round - even if I used my US paper - which is certainly not strong enough for a cover. So after a bit of thought, I printed out one cover onto JetFX paper and applied it by way of a hot iron to a large piece of cotton. When it had cooled, I painted a wide gold border all the way round. Today I need to paste this to paper and tomorrow I will make up the cover and see if it has worked. This took most of the day yesterday what with trying things out.

Residential Weekend

On Friday I went to a Bourneville class and helped to finish off everyone's book. I decided I would have to demonstrate the sewing up again and made an A4 book up for use as the next Bookbinding notebook. The first one has beach huts and boats on it so I selected a farm scene for this one. It looks nice although the fabric is not as flat as I would wish. I did do the same fabric earlier in the week and threw it out because of the wrinkles. This is  still wrinkled. This has not happened to me before so I guess the fabric is a mixture of cotton and ---. If this book were not intended for me, I would start again with a different fabric. The weekend was spent at Wokefield Park Conference Centre weaving under Stacey Harvey-Brown watchful eye. We did Texture - methods of producing. Three methods were used shibori, overshot and stitched double weave. I have lots of photos but none of the finished fabric because the samples are currently in the tumble drier.

My Burmese friend, Soe Min, came over to the centre on Sunday and brought me another fabric elephant!! Because I had remarked in my blog that I could not turn the previous embroidered elephant into a cushion because it was too thick, he brought me a thin one back from a recent trip to Rangoon!! Here it is and it will be a cushion just as soon as I have the house tidied up.

He also brought back a length of achiek which is a complex silk fabric made only in a few places these days. This wavey design is very traditional. The length is for a wrap around skirt. Even men wear these to weddings.  It is quite like songket (without the gold thread) in that it has long floats on the back of the fabric. It is about 1meter wide by a bit more than 2 m long.

And here is a close-up of teh pattern. There is a silver thread in there.

And on the way home I diverted to Didcot, met someone I did not know and transferred to her car a four foot stack of sheet music for viol consorts. I reckon that is about 20% of Michael's holdings of printed music. Now I must try and get rid of some more.

And now to sort out what I should be doing! It will not be gardening as it is raining again.