String Revolution

Why, why, why did I think it would be easy to write blog posts while we were away in California? I even drafted some (of which I managed to publish just one), but all thoughts of a regular habit – of any kind, not just blogging – went quickly out the window once we got there.

Blame the residents’ pool and jacuzzi. (Look, it’s more fun than blaming a small apartment and turbulent children.)

And on the other side of the coin, why did I decide to wait until I got home to write this post? Eastbound jet lag, my friends, is bad enough when you’re left alone to get over it in your own body. When you’re sharing it with your children, it’s. Hor. Rific.

Actually, there’s another reason why I’ve been so silent here. I’ll get to that.
Continue reading What I Did On My Holidays

This is my beloved Singer sewing machine, in which I am well pleased.

I think it was my friend Caro who first told me that you can go to the Singer site and enter your machine’s serial number to find out where and when it was made.

Mine’s a 1953 model, it turns out, made at the Clydebank factory in Scotland.
Continue reading A Girl’s Best Friend

I’ve always struggled with the elastic dimensions of future time.

You know – the way Next Tuesday, say, can attain such mythical status in your mind that it becomes a cauldron, a vat, a veritable corrie lake of possibility, just waiting for the giant sponge of your swingeing creative efficiency to come galumphing over the horizon and suck out every last drop?

Maybe that’s just me.
Continue reading The Revolution So Far

I was amused, last October, when I asked the Oyster what he wanted to dress up as for Hallowe’en, and he said, “A ghost!” He went on to specify how I should make the costume, by getting a sheet and cutting it into the right size and then cutting two eye holes. Moreover, the Feaster would need one exactly the same.

But-but-but! I thought. How am I going to blog about this? Because I have my priorities straight, innit.
Continue reading Dragon

I’ve finished Alice McAnnally’s bonnet!

My lovely reader Emma commented on that previous post with loads of additional information about Alice: she was apparently born in Louth in 1809, and convicted of robbing a person. She worked as a housemaid and washerwoman, and may have married a man named Manville.

The convict women of the Elizabeth were held in Cork before they sailed in 1827, and had a pretty difficult time, according to this account on ancestry.com.

(Emma, I’d love to know more about how you found these details – they are fascinating!)
Continue reading Alice’s Bonnet Completed!

Hey, it’s Sunday, and I have Stash! Happy coincidence.

This is a sample pack from OrganicCotton.biz – a total of fifty-eight pieces of fair-trade and organic cotton fabric. The range includes plain woven cottons (solids and patterns), denims, velvets, corduroys, crossweaves, prints, textured weaves, and jersey.

I am making plans. Oho yes. Watch this space.

I’m making a bonnet for a woman I will never meet, a woman who very probably died before my great-grandparents were born. Her name was Alice McAnnally, and she was a convicted criminal.

I don’t know what law she broke (although I imagine that anything I’d consider really bad would’ve got her hanged). Maybe she stole Trevelyan’s corn so the young might see the morn – something like that, anyway.

All I know about her is that she sailed to Australia in a ship called the Elizabeth in 1828, a transported convict.

Why am I making her a bonnet, of all things?
Continue reading Alice’s Bonnet

I live in a bubble. I mean, we all do, obviously, and the Internet allows us to accentuate the effect as much as we feel like. But really. Big bubbly bubble.

It’s kind of nice to be reminded of that, when it happens in a gentle way.

Take the other week. I’ve posted about my recent trip to London to see the Quilts 1700-2010 exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum.

We flew over the previous day, and I had dinner with my cousin, after which we met a couple of her friends for a drink.

“What brings you to London?” asked one (an Irishwoman a few years younger than me).

“I’m here to see the quilts exhibition in the V&A,” says I.
Continue reading Craft Bubble

A week after my visit to the Victoria & Albert Museum’s current exhibition, Quilts 1700-2010 (which, as you see above, occasioned the purchase of some fat quarters, oh yes!), my abiding memories are of shape.

Scallops on an incredible set of chintz bed hangings that opens the exhibition. Feathered quilting on an eighteenth-century wholecloth quilt. Squares and circles, stripes and triangles, stars made of diamonds. Hexagons from Wandsworth Prison and from a WW2 internment camp in Singapore, and their frighteningly tiny cousins sewed by a wounded soldier in (as it might be) the Crimea.

The exhibition is divided into five sections, which are broadly chronological.
Continue reading Quilts 1700-2010 at the V&A: Review

Back in September, I joined the Irish Patchwork Society (Eastern Branch). Tomorrow, a group of us are off to London to visit the Quilts 1700-2010 exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum.

Tomorrow, people! I’ve been squeeing about this for seven months! Eeeeeeeee!

Ahem.

I’ve avoided reading reviews of the exhibition, because I don’t want to go in with too many preconceptions. I’m really wondering what I’m going to make of it.

The Revolutionary Horde: Why’s that, Léan?
Continue reading Patchwork, Society