Went to the opening day of “taking time: Craft and the Slow Revolution” at the BMAG today and here are my initial thoughts:

The Interactive piece from Shane Waltener and Cheryl McChesney Jones is still fairly new and blank, and encouragement needs to be made for the browsers to actually interact with the piece. There is a certain reticence for people (with many having been brought up with a “Don’t Touch!” mentality in Museums) to actually pick up some knitting/crochet needles and add to the piece.

Having an old fashioned typewriter as a piece of interactive art was a great idea, and I loved playing with it -  you are invited to type a letter (or review, or just general words), and if you wanted to leave it for the artist as an archival piece, then great.  Downside is that the typewriter doesn’t actually work (the page doesn’t move, resulting in each letter coming out on top of the previous one), so no letter to leave!  The amusement factor of having the typewriter linked up to a computer monitor was shortlived in that the monitor didn’t show anything either.   Have no idea as to whether what I typed has been captured anywhere or has been lost to the ether…..

I immediately clicked with Sonya Clark’s “Climb” – millions of tiny blue beads, linked together into a amazingly tall ladder leading us upwards…..time, effort, attention to detail, imagination (even if it’s a deceptively simply item). I like to think I got it immediately!

I do have a certain partiality for china, so Ann Linnemann’s commission with Paul Scott has resulted in some delightful blue and white china pieces.

Esther Knobel’s items for “Mind in the hand” series are lovely as are the rolls of hand printed wallpaper – made as part of a community effort with older Black women in particular in a great bringing of people together (and the workbook near by was a good thing to rifle through to see where/how people got their inspiration).

David Gates’ “In our Houses” series unfortunately for me embodied the “what?” part of installation art.  Stuff. That looked like nothing I could correlate to. Which made me think “why?” “huh?” “what?” and “where’s the next thing…?”.   I was also unable to put the large floor installation of pottery into context of  “Taking time”….only one piece attracted me because of the colouring, but overall I had a feeling of “you’re showing me this because……?” (there was nothing around the installation that could give me a clue, so a little help please?).

There is an interactive touch-screen on the way out that allows you to provide additional feedback (although pictures of the items up for “what was your favourite section” question would have been better for me than just presenting the names – the assumption is that I’ve paid more attention to the artist’s name than the item, which in my case is an incorrect assumption).

Overall, nice time spent, and if I get the chance to go back I will, if nothing else to see how the interactive pieces have come along. I appreciate that it was the first day of the exhibit, so things were still moving along, and I may have missed on some things by being early.

Been pulled into the time-suck that is Twitter, and on a recent follow-through on other people’s followers, I came across some other crafty people.  One is tweetcraftspace, who have a website, unsurprisingly called Craftspace.

They are involved in the staging of  “taking time: Craft and the Slow Revolution” tour, which starts in at the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery on 17th October 2009 (tour details here).  Craftspace is offering a preview day on the 15th – next Thursday – to those craft bloggers, and whilst I’d like to go, I doubt I’ll get the chance to take the day off, so will just have to wait.  There’s a sister website over at Making A Slow Revolution.

Meanwhile same people have pointed out Sarah Ditum’s recent article in the Guardian about teaching children crafting at school.  Looks like I’ve found another potential timesuck in the Guardian’s crafting section – damn!  They also have a number of photos from the Festival of Quilts that was held in Birmingham earlier in the year

Ok, I’m putting it out there in the hope I can get some feedback.  If you were in New York, in December, for 4 days, with non-craft people – where’s the two places you would go for your crafting fix?

Answers please….!

The people at Twisted Thread have started putting up some of the photos from this year’s show for some reason on Facebook – thankfully you don’t need a logon to see many of the photos.

The “Best in Show” – ‘Tea at Tenby’ by Pat Holly and Sue Nickels – is here, and I can honestly say that photos will never do it justice as it’s all in the detail that you can only see when up close.  There are also videos posted up, but for some reason my computer has decided not to show them, so I dont know the quality!

I have about 5 wips on the go at the moment, and earlier in August, I had 2 weeks holiday where I planned to make tracks into at least one.  I had hoped to get the “my big toe” design finished before I went back to work, but that didnt happen, unfortunately.

However, it looks like I’m going to finish today! Hurrah!.  It’s not perfect – I gave up trying to do that after I spent as much time frogging out as I did actually do the stitching, so in the end gave up and just plodded on.

I’ll get it finished, washed, ironed – may even get a photo before long, which I will look to post up here – and then consider about framing.  It’s a big item, so professional framing will be expensive, but after putting the effort in I say why not!

I had heard of Amy Butler in episode 88 of Jennifer Ackerman-Haywood’s Craftsanity podcast, so when I saw that there was going to be a light meal and then a talk last saturday night as part of The Festival of Quilts up at the NEC, I decided to go along. The meal started at 7:30, and this time there was no set seating, but I managed to get one seat on a table of animated ladies from all over the country and there was plenty of chatter and sharing of what people thought about the show and the quilts in particular.  There was mention of some designers/sellers that I didn’t know about, but that’s down to the fact that I’m not fully into the quilt world (yet!).

The food was ok – some of the sandwiches were beginning to dry out a little, but that’s a hit that had to be taken I suppose.  What wasn’t clear was that the talk was actually going to be in the next room – the first we knew anything about it (despite some of us having been in the room from the beginning) was when others near the front suddenly got up en masse, and started leaving, which caused a little bit of a “well where are they going?!” moment.

We all sat down in the next room and on each chair was a freebie handout – the pattern etc for Amy’s “Bed Bug Pillows” which are simply too cute for words.  Amy then gave a talk about her recent trips to India and Thailand, where she had picked up a load of inspiration for her new fabrics, and she had also met up with the people making some of the Amy Butler rugs.  She is trying to licence these into John Lewis in the UK at the moment.  They look stunning, and I wonder which, if any, would fit into my place (the colours are just amazing so it would be a case of whether the colours, rather than the size would go into my current decor).  Her next set of fabrics look great, and you can see where the inspiration comes from.   There was no scaling, and I haven’t seen any of her fabrics in real life, so I don’t know how big some of the images are. The templates for the Lady Bug cushions are on an A3, so I guess the patterns are fairly large.

Amy has also announced a competition – Entries to be accepted until September 15th, to mark the one year anniversary of the Midwest Modern fabric line.    There is 1 rule – make a sewing project using  her Midwest Modern fabric producing any sewing project of your choice.  A picture of your completed project should be emailed to contest@amybutlerdesign.com (NOT ME!) by the 15th September.  The top 10 winners will receive:  Fat quarters of her Midwest Modern Fabric. a signed copy of Amy Butler Softwares and a selection of her newest sewing patterns. There is also a flickr board at:  www.flickr.com/groups/1131229@N23/

I think she did do a Q&A session, but to be honest, I nipped out to get the half hour bus back to the train station. 40 minutes later I found out why the Metropole dont actually advertise the times the free bus does go (apparently every 30 minutes, on the hour and half past).  That’s because it doesnt and it costed me a £7 taxi ride to the station.  Hmmmm.

The dampner for me for the weekend was the hotel itself – drinks were overpriced, the food was average at best and the shuttle service was definately not what I would expect and overall spoilt what was otherwise a well organised and enjoyable exhibition.

Well travelled up early to Birmingham International, with a hope to catch the free shuttle bus to the Birmingham Hilton Metropole.  Whilst the website tells us that it runs every half hour, it doesn’t actually say *when* every half hour, so i could potentially turn up and have just missed it, so have to wait a half hour until it turned up again.

It turns out it’s on every hour and half hour, and I turned up just at the right time, and was the only passenger. Get to the hotel, and it’s crowded with people, mainly women (of course!), most 40 or older and what ever they were wearing virtually all of them were wearing very comfortable shoes.  No crocs in sight, but there was a group of women wearing girly skirts and Jesus sandals which the horrible snob in me thought it was taking comfort just a little too far (sorry!).

Go to the bar, order a glass of wine – £7.95!   £7.95 for one glass of a very average white wine!  Look at their wine list and no bottles under £24 and certainly nothing spectacular – their markups must be ridiculous!.

It’s a long walk to the room where the dinner is held, and I get out of a potentially aqward situation, by being allocated to a table.  I end up on a nearly full table and my nearest neighbours are very friendly, very well speaking Dutch, including a couple (she being the quilter, him over to Birmingham for a few days on a break in the UK for the first time).  Give him a few tips of what to see in Birmingham on his “day off” today,  and then get to talking to the woman on my left (Marijke Van Welzen) who was wearing one of her own designs.

The food was fine, nothing too exciting (likewise nothing bad) and suitable for feeding ~300 people all together in the space of just over an hour and a half.

After the coffee was served, there were the various awards for the quilts, for which the photos presented on screen gave only some indication of how good the quilts looked.  I hadn’t seen the quilts “up close” and in real life, so when I saw the “Best in Show” on the screen, I did think “meh!”, but then I got the chance to see it after the show, and can certainly see why it got awarded the big prize – the detailing, that you can only see when up close – was/is amazing.

Sue Prichard, from the Victoria and Albert museum, gave the final after dinner speech (on her 21st wedding anniversary, bless!).   Late next year, the V&A are holding an exhibition of quilts dating from 1700 – 2010.  Some are specially commissioned for te exhibition, some are from the V&A’s own stocks and others have been leant from other museums around the country.  Again, sitting at the back of the room, the photographs probably did no justice to any of the quilts or the work that went in to them, but they still looked excellent.

I caught the shuttle back to the train station, that thankfully still had trains running into town at 11:30 at night and collapsed into bed at just before midnight!

It’s the Festival of Quilts show up at the NEC this week, and looking out the window this morning at the grey and windy weather I’m glad I dont have to leave this morning to go for any workshops!  Like I dont have enough WIPs to be working on without taking on another hobby!  I do go through spurts, in that I have plenty of fabric, plenty of patterns, a working sewing machine etc, but for years I’ve managed not to start something – however, I’m sure there’s stuff sitting in the back of the cupboard that should really be finished off!  I might go up during the day tomorrow and see what’s happening – the show finishes on Saturday, but I have other plans so wont be able to go…..

I’m going up there later for the “Gala Dinner” (more of which later) as well as a talk tomorrow by Amy Butler (again, more of which later).

After several months and not much looking*, I finally found the charger for my digital camera, in time for a short break away tomorrow.  Now the question is: What should I take with me, considering I will be away for all of two nights/three days and will involve me carrying everything myself?

I currently have:

1 Canon EOS300 film body.

1 Canon 28-90 mm AF lens

1 Nikon D50 Digital body

1 Nikon AF 18 – 55 mm Lens

1 Nikon AF 70-300mm zoom lens

1 Sigma AF 100 – 300 mm lens

I’ll probably take the digital with me, and a couple of the zoom lenses. Don’t know how many photographs I’ll get to take – much depends on the weather, if not the will!

* It was pretty much where I left it, in the cupboard and in the box designated for “cables etc required for stuff to plug into computer that I wont use everyday”

This year will be only the second year since 1996 that I havent been to a “Knitting and stitching show”, run by twistedthread.

I went to the shows when I lived in Dublin, as they were the primary source of stash for me in a country that had very few bricks and mortar shops that were designed for crafts (and cross stitch in particular).  Most of my shopping was done on the internet, so shows like this were a great opportunity to meet vendors and producers, even if many of the UK based shops decided not to make the effort to come over for the week. (although I’m sure that I saw Mary Hickmott there at least once, bless her!)

I returned to the UK in 2006 and went to the first couple of shows they did there. It was the first time I got to meet many of the UK based designers and producers – I do remember chatting with a guy on one stand, only to realise that it was Bill Greenoff, when his wife Jane came round the corner (someone who looked appropriately shamed when I expressed disappointment at her stopping her magazine, since it was one of the few that made it over the water to Ireland).

However, this year (2009) they are not producing a show at the NEC for (and I quote) for the following reasons:

“Normally we also stage The Knitting and Stitching Show at the NEC, Birmingham but this year, to avoid overstretching our commercial exhibitors, we have decided to postpone the next NEC event until 2010. This will help ensure that the quality and size of our other events remains as vibrant as ever.”

I dont know if this is a good or a bad thing.  Probably a good thing.  I didnt go last year as I had more than enough stash to last me another year. I didnt buy much the year before – much of what I did buy was out of guilt – for much the same reason (though having a freebie ticket helped!).  Anyway, twistedthread are doing a show up at the NEC next week (Festival Of Quilts).  I’m going to a couple of the social events, dont know whether I’ll go to the show itself – I’m not a huge quilter – yet! – and all the tutorials are already booked up.