Life-drawing at Candid Arts, Islington

Life-drawing at Candid Arts, Islington

Not much to say. It's been a while, hasn't it?

Skull

The skull that hangs at the entrance to the fascinating Old Operating Theatre Museum by London Bridge.

Resized top

When I put this costume together I thought that I'd wear the dark red vest quite often. This turned out not to be the case as it was too long for my taste. Instead it was relegated to the increasing pile of things that need fixing “when I have time”.

Today I had time!

On the right is the problem top. On the left is a sleeveless top I wear all the time. Look at how long it is! And in addition to having a much longer body, it turned out to have longer straps than the comparison top.

I removed 2.5 inches from the shoulder straps and four inches from the bottom. When I rehemmed the bottom I folded the edge up twice, reducing the length by a further inch. It is now wearable, (I am wearing it right now), and the fixing pile has been reduced by one.

Kaffe Fassett: A Life in Colour at the Fashion and Textile Museum

I feel that perhaps I should have heard of Kaffe Fassett prior to visiting this exhibition. He's a quilter and a hand knitter! He's created knitting patterns for Rowan! Never mind though, this show did an excellent job of introducing me to his work.

At £8 it's a more expensive exhibition than I usually go to, but I felt as though I got value for money. There's a huge selection of Fassett's work on display and it's all so colourful and dramatic that you could spend hours taking it all in. It's thin on details accompanying the works; there are some pieces of text that touch on the main points of Fassett's career, but not much about the individual pieces beyond titles and dates. However, the bright, bold patterns, the unexpected images and the varied textures did a good job of cheering me up during the grey English summer.

Karl Blossfeldt / Gert and Uwe Tobias / Black Eyes and Lemonade at Whitechapel Gallery

Entry: Free

Whitechapel Gallery currently has several free exhibitions on. I saw the following three this weekend and would recommend them all.

Karl Blossfeldt (ends 14th June)
This was my favourite of these three exhibitions. Blossfeldt was a photographer working in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He developed his own cameras, allowing him to magnify and photograph plants in great detail. The 80 prints in this show are phenomenal; huge close-ups of stems, leaves and buds that show every hair and vein. Completely context-less, these images seem little like plants and more like buildings or bones or microbes or aliens. It's hardly surprising that Blossfeldt's ideas were taken up by the Surrealists.

Gert and Uwe Tobias (ends 14th June)
This exhibition of work by contemporary Romanian artists, Gert and Uwe Tobias, is filled with menace. Their work is a mixture of large paintings, smaller collages and pieces of sculpture, all brightly-coloured and often drawing on a folk-art aesthetic. However, there are skulls hidden in the abstract patterns and dismembered bodies everywhere. Amorphous blobs of coloured clay, decorated with dead flowers, rise from pieces of crockery. In one memorable painting a woman with an insect where her head should be sits at a spinning wheel, watched by an owl with human hands and a heron's legs. It looks like a fairy tale before the happy ending.

Black Eyes and Lemonade: Curating Popular Art (ends 1st September)
This is little exhibition is about a much larger exhibition of the same name held at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1951 as part of the Festival of Britain. The original exhibition was curated by Barbara Jones, an artist, designer and writer. It was expected that Jones's exhibition of “popular art” would focus on folk art and hand-crafted items, and while it included some of that, Jones also added mass-produced items. She mixed adverts, packaging, toys, furniture and a host of other things in what looks like it would have been a thoroughly enjoyable mish-mash. This show uses archive material of the original exhibition to look at the way Jones challenged ideas about art.

eReader case

My sewing machine is set up in the spare room in my flat. Sadly, the spare room has also become a dumping ground for every piece of junk that doesn't really have a proper place elsewhere in the flat. I'm currently in the process of clearing it out, but it's very slow going.

However, I have finally cleared the desk and made my sewing machine accessible again. To celebrate I made myself a case for my new eReader. I used this pattern, but made my own template rather than use the one that came with the patten. This naturally meant that I got the template wrong on the first attempt, (not enough seam allowance), and ended up with a very nice, but slightly too small pouch, which is currently keeping my whiteboard markers in one place.

Star Wars street art

Seen on the back of the Great Eastern Street NCP car park (corner of Curtain Road and Holywell Lane). They're made out of tiles.

Cake pops

This is a bit of a change from what I usually blog about, but I don't have any textile craft projects that I can write about at the moment and these came out looking so good that I wanted to share them! I made cake pops this weekend for a friend's birthday. They're basically lollipops made out of cake. I followed this video tutorial, but there are plenty of other sites with instructions for making them.

Entrelac

It's been hard to find some downtime to devote to craft projects this last month, but this weekend I started learning entrelac. I used this video from KnittingDaily and this post from KnittyOtter to show me the basics. The piece above is knitted with two separate colours and the diamonds are five stitches wide.

I've been meaning to learn this knitting technique for years. I love the effect, but progress is definitely slow and using separate colours means lots of ends to weave in, (I've been doing them as I go, which is why you can't see any in the photo).

Scaly gloves, second version

This is the second version of the wristwarmer pattern I'm working on. This was knitted in the round and is a larger size than the first one. Both patterns are typed up so I just need some people to test them for me now.

Ultimate trousers class at Sew Over It, part 2

My trousers are finished! Here they are, looking not that much different to the picture I posted in part 1:

Made 2013 at Morley Gallery

Entry: Free

I'm at Morley Gallery every other week these days, but I'm very neglectful when it comes to writing about the exhibitions. As soon as I walked into the Made 2013 show I knew I had to post something about it though.

The dress is even more incredible in person!

The show features student work from the Fashion, Film, Digital Design and Photography departments. The standard of work is incredibly high. If you're in the area between now and the 15th March then you should definitely stop by the gallery and admire it all. (More photos after the cut.)

Ultimate trousers class at Sew Over It

I'm doing another class at Sew Over It, (you can find a short post about the first one here). This time I'm taking their ultimate trousers class, which is split over two sessions. After the first session the results already look pretty much like a pair of trousers:

Yes, I did pick the most ridiculous fabric I could find.

Next week should just be about finishing everything off - adjusting the fit, hemming the legs and putting in a zip. I'm looking forward to having a decent trouser pattern as I've had to shorten every pair of trousers I own!

Scaly gloves

This is the knitting pattern I've been working on, wristwarmers with a scaly pattern on them (check the previous post for a close-up of the pattern). The plan is to have two versions of the pattern: one knitted flat with the sides sewn together and one knitted in the round. This is the flat version.

Textures

These are pictures from the knitting pattern I'm currently writing. The right side of the work, (top photo), should look like scales, which I think I've managed pretty well. The bottom photo shows what the wrong side of the work looks like.

Colette Peony dress

I made a dress!

Life-drawing at Candid Arts, Islington

Happy new year!

I spent the first day of 2013 in Brentwood with James and we encountered a little piece of yarn bombing outside the Chicken and Frog Bookshop.

It seems to be the work of Claire Mackaness, proprietor of craft business Beautiful Things, who teaches classes at the bookshop. She has a blog post about the yarn bombing here, although the wool in her photographs is quite clearly different to the wool in my photographs. Presumably it was replaced at some point, but I can't find a second post to confirm this.

Here's to a fun and warm 2013!