I have taken a very literal response to the items we handled from the Museum's collection, with particular reference to the samples made by young girls in the 1860s and 1870s. I have always wondered how much they enjoyed (doubtful) making all these samples and how useful (probably) they were in their adult lives. I am making four small framed samples: stitched letters, darning, a buttonhole and rows of embroidery stitches. It's made me realise two things already - my eyesight is not brilliant in working so closely with or without glasses so possibly doing this kind of work at age 8 was a bit easier, and also it is very time-consuming in our "modern age", i.e. who ever sews buttonholes by hand these days?? although I think if I practised more and made them better perhaps I could incorporate them into my textile art ...... we'll see.

Taplow Vase - Progress

Inspired by the idea of drawing the Taplow vase on cotton organza and building multiple layers of the images, I've been experimenting with how I might display them.  From the sales table at the last TVCQ meeting I had a couple of copper/brass rings - perhaps I could suspend them in some way?

I'd been led into the idea of 'secret books' of the images when writing up Novembers activities in the pages of my sketchbook

Trying to see how they looked suspended, I enlisted the help of a spare airer tripod (which normally collapses with the weight on even 1 coat hanger). Not for the final display I think!

The Orginal Taplow Vase - the source of inspiration

New exhibition dates: 18 May - 11 June

The suspense is over, we now have the revised dates for our exhibition - 18 May to 11 June 2011. This period will include the May half term, so we should get plenty of people popping along to have a look at our work. But the earlier date means the pressure is on ... all the work must be finished on or before 14 May and then we will immediately be installing the exhibition. Nothing like building up a bit of momentum ...

Further work on "sky birds"

I'm thinking "book". For the first mock-up, I crumpled up the bottom of each strip of tracing paper, and then traced flying bird silhouettes on non-crumpled parts -

Inspiration, plenty of inspiration! Once you start looking, you see relevant images everywhere - for, example, in a print by Scottish artist Douglas Robertson - see it here, and more of his work too -

(It came from the artpropelled blog, which is not to be missed.)

A wrought-iron gateway in Melbourne -

The sequence with flocking seabirds in Suki Chan's film, Interval II - in fact the film has two sequences of flocking birds -

Yet more relevant images -

This one is by Rowena Hughes and opens new trains of thought - cutting into the pages of the book, perhaps? -

She has also printed birds on a found dictionary page, and fastened it to the glass with magnets - clever and elegant -

The words of the poem are written in stone -

Stitched samples

Further thoughts

I was given a pair of wooden wings as a present and considered making a panel to fit in the negative space between the wings, based on the previous work that I'd done from drawings of a wing in the stained glass window in St Lawrence's church.

I considered this approach

but didn't like the scale of the panel.

So I returned to the scanned in and repeated image to consider this:

I liked this much better and decided to work more on this.

The literal approach...

I headed towards the history of Slough and its environs initially, and was dallying with the idea of the famous dianthus 'Mrs Sinkins Pink' (not great), brickfields (better) and the Cox's Orange Pippin (fairly promising, as I have been exploring trees in my work for some time) when I came across the nugget that was Upton having appeared in Domesday Book as "a wood for two hundred pigs" - gold!

My four panels therefore feature an apple tree with, respectively, the dianthus, a brick wall, pigs (had to research how to draw those) and a nightful of stars courtesy of Herschel (William, not School). I drew the designs onto freezer paper, cut them out and used them as stencils for oil sticks, brushed on in many fine layers. I then formed traditional quilt 'sandwiches' - top fabric, backing fabric and a layer of wadding or 'batting' in between - and am in the process of free machine quilting them.

These are atrocious photos taken late at night under rotten light with a mobile phone, but better ones will follow!