Sailing to Byzantium

I finished my page for this project week or so ago. See how quick and easy it is, once you get the idea? I've added the Greek text - the beginning of John's gospel, "In the beginning was the Word..." as a second sheet behind the first, so it's partly obscured. I'm hoping they look like a couple of old sheets of parchment.

I also have a structure for my book now. I had used the last two verses of the Yeats poem of the same name as inspiration for the participants. So I decided I'd use the same verse as the structure. The actual poem is probably now just out of copyright, as Yeats died in 1939, but I don't want to use the poem itself. I may use a few words, as focus.

I'm not sure how much further I'll progress with this now, because I have other more important things to get on with!

Rhapsody in Blues

Rhapsody in Blues is the theme for the ATASDA display at the Sydney Craft and Quilt Fair at Glebe Island in June. Six of the members of Fibrecircle are creating a collaborative work for this stand, shortly to be unveiled over on the Fibrecircle blog. This is my section of this larger work...

This is rather deceptive of me, because the main work looks nothing like this! Well, you'll see in a few days, when it's assembled for display and I put a photo over on that blog!

UFO Month

This month, I decided it was time to work on some of the unfinished things I have lying about here. OK, this has happened before, I know, but any progress is better than no progress. My stimulus this time was a post on SCQuilters from Prue. Her group was having a UFO challenge. Each person listed their UFOs of any kind - anything begun before this year. Then two numbers were drawn - one between one and twelve, the other between one and a hundred. You have three options with the UFOs chosen for that month; you can bin it, you can give it to someone else or a community quilt group or continue to work on it.

That seemed like a fun idea to me. I have had a list of all my various unfinished projects for a long time, so I chose all the ones that could be worked on, acquired a random number generator for my device and I was ready!

The first two numbers that came up were both quilt tops needing quilting. I am slowly hand quilting a quilt at present so I don't want to start a new one. I chose two more numbers and, unbelievably, both were also tops needing quilting. (I think I might have a few tops needing quilting, don't you think?) So much for that idea.

But as I was looking for things in my workroom, I found a UFO from Fibrecircle back here. It was a round robin book project, which had stalled because I couldn't work out what to do as my own page. (I much prefer projects that require you to make your own part first!) Once I looked at it after the passage of years, I could see that the book actually needed more pages and, in some weird way, that took the pressure off me to produce something incredible as My Page. Now I know it needs multiple pages, I could see an idea for stitching my first page.

It's based on a Byzantine church in Ravenna and shows Christ flanked by angels. I've chosen to make my image look like a leaf of a manuscript (this part yet to be stitched) and I may add some Greek text - not sure yet. More to follow... at least until I get tired of it!

Some other 2014 stuff

I'll come back to Africa in a bit. Here are some things I've done in 2014 that haven't made it to the blog.

Fibrecircle had a Birthstones challenge in 2014. The idea was to build up a resource that might be useful later on. I'm not sure it's going to work like that for me but it was a useful discipline, making pages on a specific theme all year.

I didn't want my book to be all about geology or folk myth, so each month I looked for a story about the stone. Sometimes it was a culture or time period in which the stone was important, which took me down some interesting byways!

My pages about garnet were mostly geological, but I found lots of fantastic examples of Roman garnet and gold jewellery.

 

 

My pages about amethyst also began with geology, but then I looked at all those websites that tell us the significance of birthstones. Amethyst was particularly valuable in many, often conflicting ways! I also found some beautiful amethyst amulets from ancient Egypt.

Bloodstone was commonly used for stone axes in Chalcolithic sites in Europe.

 

When I came to diamond, I was interested in the many different way of cutting them. There are also so many famous diamonds. I focused on two, the Koh-i-noor and the Regent Diamond, both of which had a bloody past that reflects the history of the times and the great value placed on diamonds.



 

 

The story I found about emeralds was fascinating. It led me via the Romans, especially Caligula, to an emerald mine in Egypt near the Red Sea. In turn, I learnt about a French explorer called Frederic Cailliaud, whose amazing discoveries in the region were dismissed as fantasies until recently, when his claims have been confirmed by archaeology. I also investigated who wore the emeralds that were excavated from the Egyptian mines.

Agate was often used for bijoux like snuffboxes, cuff links and small vessels, but throughout history, it was also used for administrative and personal seals. I found some images of ancient seals and then used this as the springboard to create my own seal.

My Ruby pages documented a group challenge to create a Ruby artwork. I made a small book, which I've already talked about here, here and here.

 

 

I had a choice with this month so I just had to choose sardonyx, probably the birthstone of the sarcastic. I found out all about cameos, which frequently use the layers of the stone to create wonderful colour effects. 

 

In September, I found that sapphires were often used for brooches. I became interested in medieval amuletic brooches, a subgroup of the ubiquitous cloak brooch found across all levels of society. These brooches were from the wealthier classes and often had magical or mystical meanings. These symbols were drawn from the medieval lapidaries, which explained the "scientific", "magical" and "symbolic" meanings of gems. Most of these lapidaries are not more, but their contents have been referred to in later texts.

When I came to opals, the most interesting aspect for me was opalised bones found in Australian opal mines. Lots of different fossils have been discovered but the most amazing was the Addyman Plesiosaur.  The remains of this 6.5m long creature are on display in the South Australian Museum.

 Topaz came into its own in the 18th century. I was fascinated by the "stomacher" or "devant de corsage", a triangular brooch on the chest of a dress, ending in a point on the stomach. The other  great user of topaz was Faberge and I just had to record his little piece of two cockatoos. He apparently kept one as a pet himself.

 

 Turquoise was the last stone of the year. Like diamond, it was used throughout history, famously in North and South American cultures but also in Europe, imported from Iran via Turkey (hence the name). A few years ago I made a small work based on the mosque at Isfahan with it's beautiful turquoise tiles, so I included an image. I also found examples of religious and later secular jewellery in Europe, from the 17th century onwards.

 

I really enjoyed the process of working so systematically in my journal, and I certainly learnt about a whole lot of different things!



Busy busy

Who'd have thought I'd get busy in December? Can't imagine why...

However, I'm glad to say that I have managed to make a few things in the midst of the crazy.  First the things I'm most proud of...

I recently became a great aunt, twice over. My only nephews and their respective partners produced offspring within a few days of one another. That was pretty clever of them and the boys are called Caleb and Callum, as befits their almost-twin status. (Of course, that's also going to be a nightmare for the old and confused at family gatherings, but they are already demonstrating their individual personalities, so I guess we'll cope.)

In honour of this splendid news, I made the sprogs a toy each. Yes, I could have made them quilts, but at least one grandma is a quilter, and I am 100% sure she's got that covered! So, despite my general aversion to making small fiddly things, as a result of making far too many Cheltenham Girls High pink signature elephants as fundraisers for The Shack back in the day.... tada!

 ...or if you prefer...

Yes, I admit it - the overalls are reversible. I didn't have to do that, but I thought it might be fun. The face is embroidered - no buttons to be chewed off and choked on.

I didn't make up the pattern or anything - it's from Hop Skip Jump by Fiona Dalton. I made mine brown-faced monkeys, as the wool fabric I used for the bodies was fairly light. The original also had a pompom on the tail, but I pondered on what a pompom is going to look like once it's been chewed and sucked a few times and decided against it!

And now for Idea No 2. As I scrabbled about to find in what sketchbook I'd written an interesting idea I came across, I had an epiphany. What if I had a special book for writing down all these Very Useful and Clever Ideas? Enter My Little Book of Clever Ideas. It's just an A6 sketchbook but it already has several Clever Ideas in it. I made it a pretty cover from my breakdown printing.

I liked this idea so much that I made each of the Fibrecircle girls a Little Book of Clever Ideas too.

I also made a little pincushion for the ATASDA display at Epping Creative Centre this month. I loved the brilliantly coloured birds in Africa and I figured they needed brightly-coloured nests.

I do plan to put up more Africa images and stories over the coming weeks - it all got a bit derailed by ATASDA admin and Christmas presents.

Speaking of which, hope you all have a great Christmas!

And while we're talking about books...

Here's a book I made for Fibrecircle recently, as part of a challenge I created for them.

Running challenges for that group is always interesting. We all work in very different ways and we pretty much know how we want to work, so there's no good setting a challenge that requires people to work in a specific way. Experimenting is one thing; making work is another.

The challenge was a Scavenger Hunt. Each person had to bring along:
a second-hand piece of paper - i.e. paper that has been used for something else, by someone else (not you). It can be newsprint, advertising, an envelope from a letter, a page from a magazine... whatever you like.

2. something from a plant - leaves, flowers, roots, twigs, fruit, tea leaves.... use your imagination! It has to have come fairly directly from a plant, without much processing - mulberry leaves are fine, mulberry paper isn't. You don't necessarily have to incorporate it into your work, but you do need to use it in making the work.

3. words - three words from your life during these three weeks, i.e a book title you've read during the time, a sign you've seen, a headline... anything from these three weeks. Be prepared to explain!

4. something, anything, blue

5. three embellishments: beads, buttons, metallic elements, small samples or embroidery, stamping ... to become part of your work. It doesn't have to be three of the same thing.

6. an insect. Any insect. (No, spiders are not insects.) This can be a picture, a fabric, an embroidery, a three-D model, a stamp, a real insect....

7. something long and thin. Yarn, ribbon, braid, paper strips, embroidery thread.....

The idea was to make something from your elements on the day, in whatever way you like to work. A finished item or a part of something else...

I brought along used envelopes, a twig, the words "dancing in silence", blue card, dragonfly and gold brads, a dragonfly punch and some wire. I also grabbed some net yarn that Helen was trying to rehome.

The cover was a monoprint from a glass board, using acrylic paints and drying retarder. I marked the paper size and painted quickly on the plate in blue, black and white paint, mixing the colours a little on the plate. Then I printed, burnishing with my fingers and a spoon. I touched up a couple of areas on the print while the paint was still wet.

I made the envelopes into book covers, with the patterned side out. I added a layer of gesso, which, I was told, can make the blue stand out more. 

I'm not sure it did, but it was an interesting effect, especially once I added a layer of folded blue card inside them. I made some signatures and used more blue card as a concertina spine. Helen, who had nothing to do, sewed the booklets into the spine with a simple pamphlet stitch.

 I also made an envelope as a place for more private things.

 I added some words from a song by Leonard Cohen that seemed particularly resonant.

I'm really happy with how this one turned out, which is unusual, since I'm usually not happy with things until a little time has passed!

What's on my mind? Emeralds!

OK, most girls love a pretty piece of jewellery, but why are emeralds on my mind?

It started with the Fibrecircle ongoing journal challenge, Birthstones. Emerald is, of course, the birthstone for May. When we first started working on the birthstones theme this year, I found it really hard going. It isn't hard to find out information about birthstones and what people think is important about them, but I found it hard to see how that kind of information was going to inform my future artworks. Then I realised the pretty obvious thing - that nothing makes its way into what I make unless I have an emotional connection with it. Emotional links often come through stories, which I guess is another way of saying through people.

So I decided to follow what interested me about each birthstone. My interests include ancient history and archaeology. So it was a pretty small leap to start looking at the cultures who have valued each birthstone in a big way. For each birthstone, I've practised my skills by drawing my own images of cultural artefacts (you can see some of these drawings over on the Fibrecircle blog) and I've sought out stories and historical sources about people using that birthstone.

I started out thinking emerald would be the same. What culture loved emeralds? The Romans. Check out Roman artefacts, draw a picture. So far, so good.

 

I found my story too. Pliny the Elder, in a tone of disapproval, described Lollia Paulina, consort and third wife of the emperor Caligula of ill-repute, as, "covered with emerald and pearls interlaced and shining over her head, hair, ears, neck and fingers, the sum total amounting to the value of 40,000,000 sesterces." That's about 33,000 times the annual pay of a Roman soldier. She must have been a sight to behold! I hope she made the most of it, because she had been forced to divorce her husband to marry Caligula and then, not much later, was divorced by Caligula for failing to produce a child. She was later exiled and forced to commit suicide by his sister.

 



That's when it all got a bit derailed. I read about the Mons Smaragdus, the Emerald Mountain, from which all the Roman emeralds are believed to have come. Some say it's the earliest known emerald (or strictly speaking, beryl) mine, operating since 1500BCE. It's more likely that this is mixing up emeralds with amazonite, and the Mons Smaragdus was really just from some time after 400BCE. In either case, where was this fabulous mountain? Well, it was in Egypt.

That set me scratching my head. I didn't learn about this in school or university, when  studied Ancient History and I didn't remember learning about it when I studied Egyptology.  Egyptology is mostly studying Pharaonic Egypt, not Graeco-Roman Egypt. Or maybe I did and I stored it away as an interesting byway of history (which it is!). Either way, an ancient Egyptian emerald mine sounded intriguing, especially as it turned out to be located at Wadi Gamal and Wadi Sikait (Jabal Sukayt) in the eastern desert, near the Red Sea. If you take the trouble to look on Google Maps, you'll see what an isolated and unfriendly environment it is.

It turns out we know quite a lot about this area from several sources. The first is a French explorer named Frederic Cailliaud (1787-1869), who was sent out to rediscover the emerald mines by the Ottoman ruler in 1816. I found Cailliaud an interesting man, because he not only travelled widely in Egypt and the Sudan, describing what he saw, but he was interested in everything, the plants, the animals, the culture, the history, the geology. His Voyage a l'oasis de Thebes and dans les deserts situes a l'orient et l'occident de la Thebes (Travels to the oasis of Thebes and the deserts east and west of Thebes) described the mines as, "perhaps a thousand excavations" with long underground causeways, wide passageways and even stairs. He also found a village of about 500 houses, basically intact, with "stone grinding mills still waiting for grain", fragments of vases “of beautiful form” made of both bisque and glass, ancient wells with brackish water …an entire town “hitherto unknown to all voyagers, which had not been inhabited, perhaps, for 2,000 years and almost entirely standing".

For many years, Cailliaud was dismissed as a fantasist who saw what he wanted to see, as many explorer types like him did. Most subsequent visitors said the mines were just open cut scratchings in the earth, apparently without actually going inside. Then, in 1951, a survey by the Egyptian Geological Survey and Mining Authority actually went into the complex of mines. The report said, "some mines are very elementary, the galleries are narrow and torturous... other mines are nearly perfect, walls...cleanly cut, shafts and levels were systematically dug, tunnels and wide and high that it is easy to walk through...steps were carved in some inclined tunnels." So it turns out that Cailliaud wasn't such a fantasist after all.

What about the intact village? Was there such a huge village near the mines? Cailliaud drew pictures of classical temples with intact facades. Surely he made those up? Well, no, it turns out he didn't. A US-Dutch team have been excavating in the area since 2000, mostly because these days, tourists can visit the site from the Red Sea towns. Where tourists go, sadly, damage follows, and so do archaeologists. It doesn't help that this area is geologically active as well.

The team reported, "Sikait, the southernmost of the three settlements and by far the most impressive, preserves at least two identifiable rock-cut temples." One of these temples includes hieroglyphs, Greek texts and a Christian cross. They mention the existence of other rock cut structures which haven’t been investigated yet. You can see modern images of the temple and the surrounding area here and here. A lot of damage has been done over the intervening years, especially to the façade, but you can see the basics of Cailliaud's illustrations are still there.  The archaeological team has built temporary pillars from local stone to support the remaining structures, but they can't replace what's been taken away by visitors.

What the team found was the remains of a huge Roman-era industrial complex over several valleys. They found wells, the walls of buildings and the foundations of many more with doors, alcoves, and pantries, a settlement of several hundred structures with a beautiful temple to an unknown god.  As well as arrowheads, coins and armour, they also found jewellery and toys, indicating that whole families lived there.

It must have been a tough place to live, though. The archaeologists reported that, in summer, there were days when their thermometer simply didn't go high enough to register the afternoon temperature and even in the winter, daytime temperatures were 90 degrees F (32 degrees C) and 30 degrees F (-1 degree C) overnight. There are traces of what were probably gardens, watered by the wells, though most food was probably brought in. And not all the miners had lovely wide galleries to work in.

So we're back to people again. I'm not quite sure how this will find its way into artworks, but I feel a sense of connection with those ancient people, the ones slaving away in the mines and the ones wearing the emeralds. We know enough about those wealthier women through mummy portraits, like this one in the British Museum, the life of Lollia Paulina and in the emerald jewellery found at Pompeii, to know that their lives could be just as tough and short too.

OK, enough now! Thanks for joining me on my emerald journey.

And when I wasn't dyeing...

... I was making postcards.

I've made two postcards for swapping at Fibrecircle. I really enjoy making this postcard each month, because I usually begin with one of my paint rags. The paint rags are really one-of-a-kind pieces of cloth, mostly cotton, usually given multiple processes. That can mean dyeing, block printing, monotyping, screen printing, painting, resists, deconstructed screen printing, being used as a drop cloth or as a clean up rag. The result is usually very complex.

My first postcard this year was called Faerie: The Bonny Road, a reference to the ballad Thomas the Rhymer, about Thomas of Learmonth. Thomas met the Queen of Faerie and went with her to Faerie. She shows him the "broad road that lies across the lily land", the Path of Wickedness which leads to Hell; "the narrow road, thick beset with thorns and briars" called The Path  of Righteousness leading to heaven, "though after it but few enquire". The third road is "the bonny road that winds about the ferny brae", which they will take to Faerie.


I thought it might be interesting to share the process. I began with a not-quite-square piece of quilters' muslin. It was used as a paint rag back in 2010.





It looked a bit pale and the white was too stark, so I threw it into the wash water after a dyeing session in 2011, to add some colour.






That made it look a bit forest-like, so I filed it away with that in mind.  Then it got used as a paint rag again.






In April 2012, I grabbed it to add as a top layer on a stack of sun-painted fabrics, to hold the top layer of resists in place. I hadn't tried that sandwich method before, so it didn't occur to me that all the colour from the stack beneath would migrate into the top layer of cloth.

 

It was very dark and full of pigment.

I thought about screen printing over it with white Supercover, which has given me good results before. But somehow that didn't happen.

When I was looking for the basis of a postcard, it appealed to me because it had the suggestion of a forest, but the heavy pigment made it misty and vague. I imagined the road to Faerie would be not very clear to human eyes.

I cut a 7in x 5in section from the cloth, tacked it to a Timtex base and began to paint it.  


I added the Timtex at this point, because I intended to add stitch, once I had shaped out the general form, but as I went along, I felt this would be too hard-edged. The painting was mostly adding dark shadows and highlights, to draw out what was already there.



This photo was partway along, when I was still shaping out what was there into a coherent landscape.





Once I had the image the way I liked it, I cut a backing fabric from another piece of cloth. I folded the edges of the front around the Timtex and folded the edges of the backing fabric in. I like to mitre the corners by folding the corners in first, ensuring the edges are at right angles, and then folding the edges into a neat mitre. I hand stitched the edges together with embroidery thread, making a delicate picot edge.

Faerie: the Bonny Road

It doesn't photograph terribly well, but it's just as I imagined it.

My second postcard was inspired by some journal work we did at Fibrecircle last year. We took turns to choose themes and one was Under the Sea. I wanted to look at unusual things under the sea, so I researched the strange creatures in the Marianas Trench and did some sketches in my journal.

On the basis of those, I wanted to create my own sea monster. I was interested in the Kraken. As a child, I was told that the sea monsters mentioned in the bible, that rise from the deep, included the Kraken. I was interested in the way ideas of the Kraken have changed. Nowadays, influenced by Hollywood, we think of the Kraken as a kind of giant squid, but originally it was a Norwegian monster that surfaced from the deep occasionally, fooling sailors into thinking it was an island. I see it as a mammoth creature with a confusing structure, so that when it comes to the surface, it's not immediately clear what it is.

I started out with a paint rag again. This piece of cloth was originally block printed with a stamp lent to me by Erica Spinks, about a decade ago. It was used as a paint rag in the intervening time. It looked a bit unfocused so, in early 2012, I started drawing black lines on it, to add pattern. It finished up looking like this:

I cut off the bottom left hand corner section, which seemed to offer possibilities for my sea monster. I painted a dark blue background because this is a creature of the depths, but you can still see traces of the original textured stamp.

I wanted my Kraken to look enough like an island to fool sailors but also to have some of the scary features of the Marianas Trench creatures; the spikes and teeth that make them look so fearsome. I'm not sure I achieved that, but I like what I did.

I cut a backing and some Timtex and trimmed the front to 6in x 4in. I layered the front, Timtex and backing and held the lot together with paperclips, which works much better than pins for these thick items.

I didn't want the edges to be too neat on this one, because the creature itself is not neat or limited too much by boundaries.  I took two textured yarns and attached them to the edges with a row of satin stitch in machine embroidery thread, and then added another round of satin stitch inside the first.

So that's it. Just a bit of fun, really!