Sending off a Quilt
August 31, 2008 at 8:34 pm | In Museums and Exhibitions, Patchwork, quilt | Leave a CommentRemember this beauty?
While beauty is in the eye of the beholder, the judges seemed to like my snowflakes/stars as well, because it was choosen to be displayed in the “Mathematical Quilts” exhibition. From 93 submitted quilts for this challenge, 24 were selected for exhibition. 
So a couple of days ago, I carefully wrapped it up, put it in a parcel and sent it away to have some fun and travel for the next months together with 23 of its brethren. When I get it back, it certainly will be a well-travelled quilt!
The first stop will be at Erlangen at the German Mathematician’s Association’s conference from September 15 till September 19. There will be further places where the exhibition will be shown next spring, but the details are not completely clear yet. I’ll keep you updated as soon as I find things out!
Counted Cross-Stitch—Celtic Cross
August 27, 2008 at 8:25 am | In Embroidery | Leave a CommentTags: Counted Cross-Stitch
I promised to post about my holiday stitching, so here goes: On my first day in Inverness I run across two very nice shops carrying needlepoint kits. Similar to last year, I wanted something fairly typical that could be carried around with no problem. I ended up with a cross-stitch greeting card showing a Celtic Cross:
Celtic Cross
The pattern is produced by Textile Heritage, and the kit was nicely prepared with good instructions. There was only one thing I didn’t like in that pattern, and that is the splitting up of single cross-stitches to be worked in different colours at the diagonal lines. Sure, it gives a very neat effect, but in this tiny size it’s a pain to work, and since all of those lines are backstitched over anyway, I don’t think it would have been very visible in the end result if the cross-stitches were worked in one of the two colours meeting there. I still need to mount the embroidery on the card, which is dark green.
All in all, this was an easy and fun holiday project, with the added advantage it weighs almost nothing, which is great when you’re backpacking.
Hyperbolic Crochet — The UK Reef
August 8, 2008 at 5:43 pm | In Crochet, Museums and Exhibitions | Leave a CommentTags: Hyperbolic Crochet
In London I had the opportunity to see the Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef Exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, and it was just great! There’s a very good picture gallery of the whole exhibition on the IFF’s website, but of course nothing beats to see the whole thing in 3D! I saw the exhibition on Saturday afternoon, and found out there would be a workshop at the beach just in front of the Royal Festival Hall the following Monday. Since it was way too hot for sightseeing, I decided to go have a look, and found a lot of people sitting in deckchairs in the shade under Festival Pier around a box full of yarn and crochet hooks and having a good time doing hyperbolic crochet. Of course my fingers started to itch, and I was invited to join in. Here’s what came out of an afternoon of crochet:
Those workshops are organized to make contributions to the UK Reef. This little piece will hopefully become part of it, and I’m proud to have made a small contribution to what I think is a great project! Here are a few pictures of the UK reef in progress at the day of the workshop:
The exhibition is still running till the 17th of August, so if you have an opportunity to visit, it’s really great!
A visit to Bath (and not for the spa)
August 6, 2008 at 7:35 pm | In Embroidery, Museums and Exhibitions, Patchwork, quilt | 1 CommentTags: Fashion
Bath, Royal Crescent
Bath was one of the places on my must-see list. Due to the price of accommodation I only stayed one night and thus had to fit both museums into one day, which isn’t easy since the opening times are skewed towards the afternoon.
The Fashion Museum was said to open at 11am on the guide I got at the hotel, but luckily when I found it after having a walk around town at shortly before 10:30, it said on the door that it would be open by 10:30. That’s half an hour saved already! The museum concentrates on fashion in different contexts, thus not giving a strictly historical account but mixing things up, setting i.e. evening dresses or swim-wear from different periods next to each other. I had the feeling that the older exhibits got lost on occasion in the middle of the 20th century stuff. But there was a big room showing dresses from the Elizabethan, Regency, and Victorian periods sorted by period as well, which I really enjoyed.
But the grand prize definitely goes to a rather small exhibition of 17th century gloves currently on display. The gloves on display have richly embroidered gauntlets and were surely not worn in everyday life. They were used as representative presents, and for example worn when getting one’s portrait painted. The embroidery is exquisite, and one of the souvenirs I brought home is a set of postcards from this exhibition.
It was lunchtime when I finished there, and then I was off to go find my way to the American Museum. I enjoyed the whole museum very much, there were a few highlights for textile lovers. The American Heritage Exhibition on the lower level has quite a few craft objects made by the native peoples. The Period Rooms are of course having quilts in all the places where they would have been in the real houses. And the Textile Room is ingeniously set up in a way that allows as many quilts as possible to be shown in a rather small space. Let me see if I can explain this: There are two half-round columns installed at opposite walls, and on each of those are numerous wooden frames fixed like book pages, each with a quilt or rug mounted under a protective cover on both sides. So you can just flip through the quilts like book pages, and have a close look at a lot of them. Just great!
So, the day was a big success in terms of the museums. Time to move on. My next stop was to meet a friend in Cardiff, and then it was off to London! Lots of things to see there, and I’ll probably need more than one post to cover it all.
Hardwick Hall – Textile History Come Alive
August 4, 2008 at 6:44 pm | In Embroidery, Museums and Exhibitions | Leave a CommentTags: Hardwick Hall
Hardwick Hall
Hardwick Hall was one of the places I absolutely wanted to see during my trip to the UK. As a short recap, here’s the quote from their website again:
Inside the atmospheric Hall you can see Europe’s finest collection of 16th- and 17th-century embroideries and tapestries. The award-winning ‘Threads of Time’ exhibition tells visitors the story of Bess and the collections in the Hall.
And no, they weren’t exaggerating a bit. Most of the walls that aren’t glass are covered by tapestries. Not only in the rooms, on the staircases, too! I really had to remind myself to stop gaping a couple of times. The “Threads of Time” exhibition is situated in a few rooms on the ground floor. It isn’t big, but there’s lots to see and quite a few explanations next to each piece, so you can actually learn a few things about what you’re seeing. The needlework exhibited is excellent, and it’s very seldom that you see so many pieces in one place that have not fallen apart or faded completely. The highlight of the exhibition is the Tobit table carpet, which has been restored over a period of 18 years. You can read a bit more about it (and see a few pictures), if you scroll down a bit on this site. In the room were the carpet is shown there are a few different folders. The one I found most interesting tells about the conservation history of the carpet. If you have the time, sitting down and having a look into some of the folders available is well worthwile. One I looked at describes the day-to-day and year-to-year measures that are taken to protect the textiles at Hardwick Hall from the effects of light and almost 100000 visitors a year.
Another one told the story of a particular piece of modern-day embroidery. 2008 marks the 400th anniversary of the death of Bess of Hardwick, the fascinating woman who we owe Hardwick Hall and its textile collections to. A group of volunteers at the hall decided to create a piece of embroidery inspired by the Hall and its exhibits to celebrate the anniversary. After having found the folder that detailed how much thought, trial and error and time had gone into that piece, I was able to admire it much more when I finally saw it on display. The story behind a beautiful piece of needlework usually makes it even more interesting to me!
Leaving Hardwick Hall with lots of good memories and a few postcards to remind me, I went on to Bath. More about that next time!
Textile Journey, Part 2: A Trip through England
August 2, 2008 at 8:18 am | In Embroidery, Lace, Museums and Exhibitions, quilt | 1 Comment
York Minster
After leaving Edinburgh behind, I headed for York. Not much there in the textile department (at least that’s what I thought), but the Minster is just mind-blowingly beautiful, and there are lots of interesting things to see around there. I took the picture from the gallery halfway up on the way to the tower. I spent quite a while exploring the Minster, including the exhibition in the undercroft, which is really well done. Inside the church I found an unexpected piece of needlework: An embroidery project done by the York Minster Broderer’s Guild, consisting of small individual panels showing different symbols. While the panels were executed in lots of different traditional embroidery techniques, they were all the same size and used the same thread for the background, tying them nicely together as a group. The individual panels were mounted on a larger piece of fabric, making a very nice wall-decoration. I think this is a very good method to have a group project with individual contributions that still work together.
The day before I went to York I received a message from a friend that a new Quilt Museum had opened in York. I would have loved to see that, but since I was in York from Monday to Tuesday, that unfortunately didn’t work out. Fighting with opening times to fit everything I wanted to see in was one ongoing theme of my week of travelling.
The next morning I took a train to Nottingham, hoping to be able to learn about the lace making history of that town. To my disappointment I soon found out that the Lace Museum in the historic Lace Market district of Nottingham doesn’t exist anymore. There’s a small lace shop near the castle which has a wall with a few pictures and some samples, but not much else in the city anymore.
Wollaton Hall, Nottingham
So I decided to have a look into the Industrial Museum situated at Wollaton Hall, and I was richly rewarded for doing so. The Museum shows quite a few lace-making machines, and I’m always amazed at the ingenuity of those machines producing lace that remarkably looks like hand-made bobbin lace. The main house has a very interesting natural history exhibition, which is also well worth a look.
Lace Machine at the Industrial Museum at Wollaton Hall
After that I still had some organizing to do to be able to see one of the things on my must-see list the following day: Hardwick Hall. I’ll give this one a post of its own, lets just say for now that I was absolutely blown away.
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