Billy Budd

I made several mistakes yesterday - all in timing. I had not realised what a distance I had to go so instead of arriving at Brighton at 1430 I turned up an hour later. However we got to Glyndebourne by 1645. Time enough to get a glass of champagne and wander round the garden, admiring the flowers and the people. It was a fine evening so the people having picnics were lucky. I had opted for a bought dinner since the last time we were there we had a very wet, windy and cold picnic.

But to the performance. It was first rate with Mark Padmore singing the Captain, all the singers very good and the layout magnificent as the inside ribs of a wooden ship. There were cannon to be rolled out too. And yes I did cry in the next to last scene. A wonderful performance. I have seen five or six productions of Billy Budd, maybe even more but the only one to equal this was at Birmingham with the Welsh National Opera where they had Robert Tear as Captain Vere. And a whopping great mast centre stage where the sailors shinned up and stood on the yardarms.

And now I have to return to earth. Going shopping in the Brighton Lanes this morning. Looking forward to seeing what the knitting cafe has in its window. I have seen a knitted model of the Brighton Pavilion and a working Ferris wheel! I will take a photo.

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Progress towards Sunday

On Sunday I leave for 12 days on safari in Africa with the time split between South Luanga and Botswana (for meerkats for my grandson, Alex). So I have inspected suitable clothes and washed most of them. They are all ironed and laid out ready to pack. I have a list to which I am adding items as I think of them, like binoculars. Michael bought a good pair but they are heavy! I have also answered urgent letters, paid bills and gardened madly. I got round to planting the plants I bought at Hampton Court Show some weeks ago.

Today I am taking a loom back to its owner and going on to Brighton - Billy Budd at Glyndebourne this evening. I have warned my daughter that, if the production is any good, I shall weep buckets in the last act.

I have finished weaving a scarf on the Summer School warp but have not cut it off as I want to weave a substantial length in lambs wool to put through my washing machine at various settings.

Oh and I finished preparing the Guild Newsletter and it went off to the printer at 11 pm last night. Since no blog is complete without a photo and since my garden has never looked so good as it has done this year, here are some highlights of the moment.

The campsis is even better. This is the best it has ever been.

And the hibiscus ditto.

A garden pot from France with a background of two sorts of crinum, pink and white and agapanthus. The roses are having a second flowering, the hollyhocks are rampant. There is crocosmia everywhere blazing in orange and scarlet and there is an enormous crop of pears and apples. What a summer!!!

End of Summer School

The Summer School is over and I am back home with a huge list of things to do, mostly leading up to going to Africa next Sunday. So I inspected the clothes I want to take, putting them to be dry cleaned,washed or as is. Two loads of washing have been done and a lot of tidying up. I have not unpacked the stuff from the course as I must mend an error or two in someone else's warp. I brought it back from Guild eight days ago and would like to return it (mended, of course) before  I leave.


I learnt a few new techniques at the course by Laura Thomas. False leno, a technique which involves incorprating random skips into tabby which produces a nice textured effect and a bit of fulling. The photo below shows my samples after being put through Laura's washing machine at 60 degrees. They have shrunk by 50%. The effect is rather nice and I will try this again to which end I bought some of the   same lambswool as Laura uses.

The draft is of three blocks and floats of lambs wool have been created which, when washed and shrunk, pull the bamboo/cotton warp up. I like the one at the bottom best. I threw a weft of bamboo/cotton with every weft of lambs wool so that is pulled up into little loops. It feels really soft.

More on the Summer School

Yesterday we had a half day off and most people went to see the Welsh National Woollen Mill. Debbie and I went to the Botanic Gardens instead. It had rained hard on Sunday but was bright and sunny yesterday and we enjoyed the walled garden, the photographic exhibition and the dome. But we enjoyed the tree trunks most.

This is one of the seven or eight tree trunks. One of them had small children climbing on it. They were all immense and seem to be African. Each had an informative plaque telling the name, locale and uses but there was no overall explanation of why they were there. Anyway wonderful.

Everyone seems to be progressing steadily. I have about run out of things to do and I think I will weave a scarf tomorrow on the grounds that I might as well do something useful. Others are weaving damask linen, making bags, weaving on Inkle looms. This evening there was a Silent Auction at which I acquired a nice book on Art Deco textiles.

Still at summer school

I got ticked for implying that the KV Guild was a collection of wine-swilling play girls. We are not like that at all. Last evening was spent in helping two members decide what to weave for the rest of the week without much success. In other words, we made frivolous suggestions and they rejected them.

Yesterday I was warped up and ready to go by lunchtime. But I had brought my loom with the warp wound on as had one other person whereas everyone else had to start from scratch on an unknown loom. They are mostly 16 shaft table looms (Harris?) and quite unwieldy. So I spent the afternoon weaving a few samples from the yarn I had brought for weft. This morning the tutor is going to talk to us all about the lift plans. Three people by the way are on computer controlled AVLs with 24 shafts. I have some photos but they are for the record, not very pretty. My choice of weft yarn has so far been yucky.

At the Summer School

The Indigo vat went off well.This is the remnants of the vat used for the Newbury coat in 2011. I perked it up with more indigo and sodium hydro sulphite and lots of people went off happy. Although one person complained that it was too dark a blue! I dyed a couple of skeins myself, one cotton chenille which has turned out well. At the end of the day, I threw out what was left in the vat as I think two years is quite long enough.

Rosie brought me some fine wool as in 2/30 from the sale at the Whitchurch Sale Mill. Lovely stuff. I must use it. I have plans for a number of scarves which I want to take to an exhibition in September.

On Saturday evening Cally Booker arrived from Dundee and we spent the evening eating curry and gossiping about weaving etc. On Sunday I finished off a load of small jobs and we drove to Carmarthen by way of the Welsh Botanic Gardens. It rained all the time and the only thing we appreciated was a photographic exhibition of flowers and gardens. Then on to the Summer School where the next few hours were spent chatting, finding out where we were supposed to be and generally sorting ourselves out. There are six Kennet Valley members and Debbie Richardson managed to get us all into the same flat. Result, six people sitting around in the kitchen late in the evening, eating biscuits and drinking wine and knitting!

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Ever Decreasing Circles

On Thursday I decided that I had to ignore completing my jacket and get on with preparing for teh weekend. So I warped up the Meyer with bamboo/cotton in chocolate, mint and raspberry stripes. By 11pm I had wound on about 4 metres of the warp and by 9 am on Friday, I had it completed. Threading will be done next Monday when the tutor gives me the draft.

I went into deepest Herefordshire later to look at a venue the Midlands Textile Forum is going to use. It is a large secondhand bookshop in a couple of barns in a very small village. Interesting! And intersting books too. It is called Aardvark Books.

The rest of the day was spent getting ready for a Guild Day which is today and collecting everything needed for the Association Summer School which starts tomorrow (Sunday). I had to get up early this morning because I am running an indigo vat today and needed to make up some more indigo mix ready for use this morning. A fine thing  - to be in the garage cooking up chemicals at 0630am! It is a lovely morning and I walked round the garden and realised

that the campsis is in glorious flower all over the south wall and the roof.

Here is a close up. Each flower is four inches long. And also

one of the hollyhocks is black! A red black I grant you but that is only obvioys if you peer at it closely.

This is what happens in you turn the four colour double weave in black and white in both warp and weft. It looks slightly better if red and white are used in the weft.