patchwork quilts are strange

I was lucky to take part in a quilting workshop with the wonderful Kaffe Fassett at the Fashion & Textile Museum in London a few weeks back. I'm new to the world of quilts and I find it a strange process in regard to material use. Cutting  up new fabric and rejoining feels a bit un-thrifty, but I am planning to glean the remnants from the cut off corners. A slow arduous gleaning task coming up!

wakened hands

I recently finished reading Christopher Frayling's "On Craftsmanship - towards a new Bauhaus"... a very nice tome which unpacks many of the tensions between craft, art and design.

Hence, this charming piece of prose is on my mind:

Things men have made with wakened hands, and put soft life into
are awake through years with transferred touch, and go on glowing
for long years.
And for this reason, some old things are lovely
warm still with the life of forgotten men who made them.
Things Men Have Made, by DH Lawrence (1929)

Have a nice weekend and try to enjoy braving the continued cold...BTW...I did finish the socks :o)

winter moments

Hello after a big winter hiatus!  I'm at the point where I'm through the conference and teaching preparations and back into semester two...where did the time go?!
Winter is idling along...it's been so very chilly...but punctuated by lovely moments that can only happen at this time of the year.

There is broccoli in the garden and I'm looking forward to Spring and time to plan and plant!

I'm still crocheting away... thinking about the anatomy of known forms.

solstice greetings!

Winter solstice here today and it's a suitably cold, miserable and wet day.  But I'm happy as the house is toasty and warm (I blocked some holes in the yet to be renovated skirting boards with some junk mail :P).  See how great a salutation "solstice greetings" is?  Now I get to say it twice a year :o)

now I know where time went...

@ berg publishers

I'm reading "When Clothes become Fashion: Design and Innovation Systems" by Ingrid Loschek...while still working on some writing for the PopCAANZ conference next week...all writing/reading for me at the moment and only a little bit of sock knitting in the evening while watching prerequisite telly.
Anyhow, Ingrid has finally explained to me why I always feel so time poor: "sensory monotony explains why the impression arises of time passing faster and faster" (p. 142)
This is part of a discussion about why fashion is perceived to be so fast - and explains why fast fashion is so boring, but also explains why I feel like I never have enough time while I wear away these monotonous PhDing days...
The first sock is nearly done!

afters

When I haven't been around here for a bit you can most likely guess by now that there has been some demanding stuff going on PhD wise.  I was told by my lovely hairdresser today to update the blog (ta S xx), so here I am!   Our graduate research conference was weekend before last and I spent all of last week in recovery mode.   It took some serious wrangling in the last month or so to get ready to present my work, but the most interesting thing I got up to was making a sampler constructed out of this stuff...

Anyone for box chain?!

I will show what I made...just haven't got around to photographing it yet, but as a teaser, I will tell you that it is all about revisiting my making skills from my previous incarnation as a fetish wear designer!
Part of my post GRC recovery was spent on sock knitting...my feet have been so freezing during this very chilly wintery season that I decided to use some of my sock yarn stash to actually make socks rather than the usual baby cardi's.

This is the first time I've attempted sock knitting...so far so good, I'm nearly up to the heel shaping.

Other stuff...the lovely drawing salon semester finished last night...I'll get around to showing some more drawings soon...and the magnificent Ms Rehe is going on a drawing adventure to New York, so do stop by Patsyfox in the coming weeks to see what she is up to.

Not much happening garden wise...some winter planting and planning for hopefully a better warm season in a few months...I did pick some carrots yesterday...they were yum :o)

orange and a coat

Agnes Varda discussing a poignant moment when observing a gleaner at a market (from here)...

And here is my biggest valencia for this year, happily ripening alongside new shoots and the promising buds for next years fruit :o)

sunlight and blossom

Beautiful day today with a real hint of spring in the air.  The damson plum is blossoming and it brings some other sunlight and blossoms to mind...

hand picks a lemon

Kamakura-Shobo Publishing Co. Pattern Drafting, vol. 2, p 154

mulch ado

I've been doing lots of thinking about gleaning with the aim to tighten up how I am using gleaning actions in the research.  More to come on that...aside, on the weekend my reward to myself post exhibition, after not having a free weekend for a couple of months, was to order a big pile of mulch!  This could be seen as gleaning, but since our council discontinued our free mulch service I had to buy it - if it you pay for it, it aint gleaning!

That's the view down our street, our faithful 10 yr old hyundai, and our lovely deco front gate on the left which I will get around to renovating one of these days.
P and I replenished the rotted and depleted mulch layer in the back yard, around all of the fruit trees.  It has been maddening over the winter as the dampness had reduced it to mostly mud and the dogs trail it in after their nightly trysts with the possums.  I'm looking forward to maintaining a clean floor, once I get to cleaning it!

You might be able to spy the last washington navel orange on the tree in the background too, I might eat it today!

window gleaning

 More sneakies of the summer gleaning cloth - yay!  I've had another exhausting but fruitful day at the hothouse.  Time for serious zzzzzzz

summer gleaning aprons

The aprons we'll be making on gleaning day will be based on a lovely vintage organdy apron loaned to me by my sis and bro in law.

I've made a sample in the plain non-printed poly voile I'm using for my gleaning cloth.  It's giving a sense of what the gleaning cloth will do...it's gleaning the winter garden through the window :o)

floor for gleaning & winter dog days

Here's a little sneak peek of the floor for 'Summer Gleaning'...recycled carpet tiles from McMats recycled carpets.  The dogs loved it and had play fights like they do on the summer lawn.  Bodes well for a successful replica of summer underfoot!