Happy ending

I said to someone earlier this week that without a personal story, a quilt is worth nothing. And the quilt in question (yes the one in the beautiful pictures that I didn't take, not that I'm bitter) now has more of a story than it did before. In terms of stories, I think it's already had more than its fair share. Already to have grown from leftover scraps, to obsess its maker to the point of distraction and then to have a roller-coaster of a trip on eBay for charity (not to mention a little journey to be shown off at the village market, which sparked off a panic that it had been stolen), it all sounds quite enough in the short little life of this quilt, doesn't it? But no, there's more...

It turns out that someone did fall completely in love with it. Someone who would never have had the money to outbid anyone on eBay for it. Someone who I don't know all that well but I believe she would help anyone out in any way if they needed it and if she could. The someone who was grief-stricken that it might have been stolen when it went on its trip to market. And someone who started a course of chemotherapy for lung cancer just yesterday. 

Now I don't know very much, but I do know that our house is enriched by the quilts, hand made for each child, that we have draped on our sofa. I have one over my knees as I'm typing now (well I am soon to turn 46: a friend's husband was quoted as saying at the weekend, "@$%king hell, we're hanging out with people who are nearly 50!" ). I can't tell you how proud I am that when the children feel ill, they head straight for a quilt to curl up under and a hand-made patchwork cushion to lay under their heads. I've often thought of my quilts as a permanent version of a hug, and it's definitely true that when we, as a family, wrap ourselves in one, life just does feel better.

Of course it would be preposterous to claim any medical benefits that might come from owning a quilt, but what could possibly be better? A permanent hug, just when she feels she needs it. And, I hope, one for her husband when he needs it too as he goes on this wayward journey with her.

I've taken it off eBay. 

I was hoping to raise a fair bit of money for the PTA with this quilt. I woke this morning thinking I'd be gutted if I didn't get £200 for it. I was missing the point. I have been idly wondering in the last few days if there is some way I could make a living out of making quilts; at the moment it is all that I want to do. Again, I have been missing the point. Quilts are not about money. They are about love and care. They are a hug.

As a final glimpse of the Tree of Life quilt, I think it's a fine opportunity for a small smiling sun...

Transformation

Well if ever there was an extra shove to push me in the direction of a photography course, I had it this morning. A bit of expertise and equipment and something has been transformed into some of the most beautiful images I've ever seen. And he did it for free! As my quilt is to be auctioned for charity, the lovely Rupert Marlow donated his time and a fab cup of coffee to produce these. He has a blog too with some more treats for the eyes. So much for me throwing my quilt over the wall and trying to get a quick snap of it before the wind blew up! Anyway let me just bask in the glory: today, for one day only, my blog can stand as proud as any other textile blog and be totally, utterly, astoundingly beautiful...

A year of thoughts and no wiser

I have just realised it's been almost exactly a year since I started writing this blog. It has been an interesting journey and rather an enjoyable one. Call me vain but I do quite like the sound of my own (written) voice. I annoy myself when I'm talking out loud: lots of missed witticisms, words mixed up, no time to think through my sentences so I sound like an eejit. But written down or typed out, I have more time and it all gets a little bit better. I started out this blog in a vague attempt to publicise my felted pictures and make some sales but as time goes on I think I'm actually just emptying my head onto the computer screen, and then editing it a bit to make sure nobody sees the really ugly scenes. I don't know who my target market is. Sometimes I think it's just for me - but if it was completely private I'd write some very different subject matter. Sometimes I write with someone particular in mind, in my fantasy world where everyone finds me fascinating. I know of just a handful of people who do look in on me every so often, and I installed the map thingy down to your right so that I might be able to get a handle on who pops in - but it hasn't given me much of an insight at all. On down days I get the feeling that most people who end up here do so by accident whilst searching for something else. On up days I realise that it's all a learning process and once I've really found my groove, I will get some steady viewing and enthusiastic comments left for me at the bottom of my posts. In the early days I discovered that sometimes I got more viewings if I put in a recipe than if I showed some felted art ("there's a surprise", muttered beleaguered husband) but there are thousands of food blogs out there and only a handful of felting blogs. Food, though very close to my heart, isn't what I was meant to be flogging. Not that I've shown you much felt recently. Anyway I am very close to getting my 4000th page view so it can't be too bad.

So, to myself, or to you, a friend or family member, or to you, a passer-by who was expecting something more useful and informative and looked in the window by accident, here is what I can show you today. I've finished it!

I have read every bit of advice online I could find about taking good photos of quilts, and this was the best I could do. Draping it over the wall on my own on a windy day in between showers was no mean feat; I had to weight it down with stones and was terrified I'd get concussed if the wind blew up any harder and the stones flew off. I'm still thinking I might need something professional done to really do it justice (and make it sell well in auction). But I am really rather pleased with it, and I have well and truly got the patchwork quilt thing back in my head. I have a new bit of inspiration, in the form of Malka Dubrawsky whose quilts are like the most fabulous SAD light, and whose fabrics I have been snapping up online left, right and centre. I am wrestling with the fact that I really need to finish my other brown quilt first and am trying to get my heart back into it. And then of course my head keeps coming back to the felting. Can I incorporate patchwork into my art somehow? Is the quilt above Art, as much as my felted pictures are? Could I try to amalgamate the two in some way? Would I want to? An identity crisis ensues. Or at least it will do when half-term ends and I have some headspace to myself. 

My funny valentine

I have a confession to make. My head has been turned. It has been a while but there is a new love in my life. I couldn't help myself. I have been succumbing to bed-related fantasies, and every waking moment is consumed by my new passion. It's been two full-on weeks now and the relationship is developing very well. Blossoming even. I will be devastated when it, inevitably, has to end, as they always do. It is so frustrating to have to be distracted by silly fripperies such as dealing with the children, cooking, housework... I know, I know, I should be thinking about felting and making my next break in the art world, but it feels so yesterday.

So it's probably time I introduced you:-

Yes. A beautiful double-bed-sized quilt. It's actually come on a bit since these photos: it now has a border and I am about halfway through the quilting. I hope to get some professional photos of it once it's finished, to do it justice, as taking pictures of quilts is really not easy. Technically it's not the greatest and it wouldn't win any prizes, but when passion takes over, who wants to be measuring perfect quarter inch seams?

Aren't the fabrics great? I wish I could take credit but I didn't choose any of them (apart from a few around the border). In fact, in my darker moments, I think that the reason it looks so good is BECAUSE I didn't have any creative input with the colour scheme. Random is often so much better than a thought-out plan. The fabrics were in fact chosen by 28 lovely people who were making lampshades. My friend Ruth, from Quincy Lampshades, offered to have a Mass Lampshade Make at school to raise money for the PTA and everyone loved it. And I asked for everyone's leftovers. And here we are. It is an odd mix: about 50 per cent quilt fabrics, 45 per cent furnishing fabric and 5 per cent fine Liberty lawn, so some areas are a lot heavier than others. Until I had finished cutting squares out, I had no idea how big the quilt would be and whether I would need to supplement it with some of my own fabrics, but in the end only a few extras were needed for the border. And most of those were supplied by Ruth who kindly let me help myself to her lampshade-making scraps (cue the kid in the sweet shop, I tried very hard to look cool and not hyperventilate).

When it is finished, I shall take a big gulp, steady my wobbly lip, get some sleep and then publicise it with all my heart, and auction it off for the PTA. And yes before you point it out, I am fully aware that normal people have no idea of the true value of a home-made quilt, being used to buying things made in Chinese sweatshops, and that I will not raise the amount of money that this baby deserves to get. But I don't care, it's been a wonderful interlude and it's given me a tingling sense of being alive when the weather and the time of year were trying to suck that life away. 

Artful dips and the view from Portishead

I've just been having an improvised lunch of leftovers. Mostly dips. Which sounds pretty unhealthy doesn't it? Well actually they're probably not that bad, given that I made them myself out of vegetables that might otherwise have made the compost heap in a week or so. North Somerset Arts had an Artsmeet this week, and I was in charge of Nibbles. I do hate that word; it makes it sound like food for rabbits and guinea pigs and not the sophisticated array of delicacies designed to make people drink more that I had in mind. Anyway an Artsmeet, if you've never encountered one, is a meeting of artists: the idea is that being an artist is a lonely old business and that it's rather lovely to meet others in the same position and have a bit of a social event. And it was. It was really heartwarming to see how happy everyone seemed to be to talk to each other, share experiences, talk techniques, discuss the future (how often do we do that?!) and for some, to agree to meet up again. People brought the most wonderful things they had made, in order to get a little feedback on their work. I met new friends and old and am certainly meeting up with some again. We had wine, beer donated by Butcombe Brewery and beautiful soft drinks donated by Lovely Drinks. And my dips. I do normally hate beetroot, but this was terribly moreish:-

Beetroot Dip (adapted from Yotam Ottolenghi's Jerusalem)

400g beetroot
1 small garlic clove, crushed
1/2 red chilli, deseeded and chopped
100g Greek yoghurt
1 tablespoon maple syrup
1 tablespoon olive oil
1/2 tablespoon za'atar (this is the first time I've ever seen the point of this sesame and thyme-based spice mix)
Salt

Heat your oven to Gas Mark 6/200c. Wash the beetroot and put it in a roasting tin, and bake it for around an hour until a knife goes into the beetroot easily. When they are cooler, peel them and chop into smaller pieces. Put them, along with all the other ingredients, in a food processor and whizz. Check for seasoning: nothing worse than a dull dip.

The next one was roughly based on something I had at the Watershed in Bristol, but ultimately came out of my head:-

Butternut Squash Dip

1/2 a large butternut squash (no don't ask me for weights)
A smallish onion
A clove of garlic, unpeeled
A sprig of rosemary (about 3 inches)
A couple of spoonfuls of olive oil
Salt and pepper

Heat your oven, again to Gas Mark 6/200c. Peel the butternut squash, deseed if necessary and chop into pieces around 1cm square. Peel the onion and chop it into 8 segments. Take the leaves off the stalk of the rosemary and chop. Mix them all up with the olive oil on a baking tray, and season well. Bake for around 50 minutes until everything feels soft, stirring occasionally to get the caramelised bits off the bottom. Then let it all cool a bit. Take the skin off the garlic and put it along with everything else in a food processor and whizz. (At this point, after doing the beetroot as well, I was reminded of my days of lovingly and endlessly preparing baby food, only to have it spat across the room by a reluctant child. Ah how things have changed.) Check again for seasoning and I had to add a bit of water, just to ensure that it was the right consistency to adhere to a breadstick, rather than break the breadstick in two and suck in the bottom half like a welly in the mud.

I regretted not taking a piece of my own work along for a little feedback myself. We had specialists giving advice on painting, printmaking and ceramics, so you'd think a felted picture might be out of place. But it didn't feel like it on the night. The picture in question was based on the resident ceramicist's view from her house in Portishead so it may have been interesting to see what she would have to say about it. Tean has the most wonderful house perched on the side of a cliff overlooking the Bristol channel. Maybe I'll show her my paltry version of her view next time I see her if I feel brave:-

I'm not sure whether I like it yet. Time will tell. Or it might not be finished yet. More thinking needed.

Stars and flowers

This year has been hard so far. I have been trying to be focussed and get creative and haven't managed to make it happen yet. The only making I've been able to do so far has been some patchwork that has been hanging around for a couple of years and weighing on my conscience. It is actually completely obsolete; I started making it as an extra cover for our bed on really cold nights, but we have since had double glazing put in and don't seem to have really cold nights any more. I started picking the fabrics for this just before my eldest started school - and he is now 8. Still, yesterday I finished the last of 21 stars. Want to see? Here you are...

The fabrics are all Kaffe Fassett ones; the vibrancy of the colours and the patterns is life-affirming (and I need a bit of that in the winter). I was wary of using such large patterns and chopping them up but Material Obsession 2 showed me that I needed to relax and enjoy the clash of it all. This one is my favourite - it may sound odd but I love the way the two patterns compete with each other and make your eyes jingle:-

Each block is made from 24 pieces, and each block is 12 inches square.. It is good to know that I'm now around half way through piecing the quilt (even though it's taken a good 2 years to get this far), but the other blocks that will go between these ones are just a mixture of two brown-toned fabrics so I know I won't feel the urgency to see them done in the same way as with these lovely bright stars. 

Positive things to focus on for some inspiration: a visit to a house balanced on a cliff in Portishead today with the most wonderful sea view, just nothing at all but sea, sky and a hint of Wales in between the two. Then oddly a visit to Windmill Hill City Farm yesterday. Usually parents are to be seen following their toddlers around there, loudly narrating "Yes, a goat, oh look chickens..." but my six-year-old has still not quite grown out of the place and never tires of it. And she's probably got good reason to love it: we always unwind there and there's always something to lighten our spirits. And yesterday it was a cute bit of yarn-bombing...

I'm really hoping these will be enough to get me inspired enough to do some more felting in the next week.  And if not, that I'll see some other things that help me get back on track...

Happy New Year!?

Happy New Year to you if you are reading this. I was full of hope for 2014 but if today is anything to go by, I have my doubts...

Waking up at 5.30 with a hangover, hearing a scuffling in the attic and then realising that it isn't your son in his attic room as he is having an impromptu sleepover, but the elusive mouse that we can't get rid of.

Waking later and although both children are at someone else's house, not being able to have a lie-in as I need to go to tend to some chickens as soon as it hits daylight. Normally I love these chickens (I am part of a chicken-share scheme and look after them on Thursday mornings but did an extra day as someone else was away for New Year's Day) but in the pouring rain it has its downsides. There has been a lot of rain recently and the field has been getting worse and worse; on the footpath to their patch up to my ankles in water and their patch itself just mud itself, not a chance of staying clean. Still, plenty of eggs, still warm, spur me on. In fact it isn't until I get home that I realise my new wellies have a leak.

Children tired and grumpy today, of course not enough sleep.

Bit of a respite before a lunchtime trip in more rain to clean the chickens out. Yes it stinks but this is nothing compared to the misery of the cold and the water and the mud and some of the roofing over their run has blown off. I do a makeshift effort of putting it back and weighing it down with logs. I know this isn't going to be good enough. Back home to change out of wet clothes.

Return to grumpy children. Argument over what film to watch. We all settle down to Narnia and all is good. I have organised a treat for later: a trip to the theatre to watch The Little Mermaid. Of course we have to cut short the film to get ready, cue the moans. And I need to put the bloody chickens to bed before we get to the theatre. The rain is still pouring. The roof has blown off again. Can't stop to do much about it. I will try to face it tomorrow when I go back. Back to car, changing my wet socks as we are going along. Boy starts whinging about how he hates mermaids and doesn't like the theatre. We get there and the queue is horrendous, nearly out of the door into the foul rain. And then someone mentions that the play has been cancelled as one of the actors has been taken ill (I finally take on board the ambulance parked outside). The mortification of having a son who cheers at the news.

All is not lost: I have managed to cheer myself up a little with some good food tonight...

Huevos Motulenos (courtesy of Thomasina Miers)

Serves 2

1/2 onion roughly chopped
2 garlic cloves
1/4 tsp ground cumin
Pinch of ground cloves
Sprig of thyme
Olive oil
4 tomatoes, roughly cubed
Tortillas (husband had 3, I had 2)
Eggs (husband had 2, I had 1, thank you chickens)
Refried beans
Roast tomato salsa (see below)
3 slices good ham, each chopped in 2 (we have some really great smoked ham thanks to my brother for Christmas, from Pipers Farm)
Guacamole (this wasn't in the original recipe but I had the ingredients and I love it)
You could also have some grated cheese - I didn't but I've just spotted it in the recipe.

Start by making the roast tomato salsa:-
2 tomatoes
1/2 small onion cut into wedges
1 garlic clove unpeeled
1/2 green chilli
Small amount of coriander chopped
Juice of about 1/3 lime
I also added a teaspoon of chipotle paste

Put the tomatoes, onion, clove of garlic and chilli in a dry hot frying pan and keep turning them occasionally until they have blackened spots on them. Put them all in a mini blender, taking the skin off the garlic, and blitz. Add the coriander, lime juice, and chipotle paste if you have some and season. Mix and chill.

Then on to the main event: blitz the onion, garlic, cumin, cloves and thyme with a tablespoon or so of water. Heat a little olive oil and fry the mixture until the raw onion smell has disappeared. Add the chopped tomatoes and season, cook for a few minutes. Some recipes have peas in at this point. Thomasina mentions spinach. I had neither.

So to multitasking and assembling (much swearing at this point): 3 frying pans on the go at once: in one you need to briefly fry your tortillas, in another I fried the ham slices (not necessary but this ham we have is just soooo good fried, it gets really tender), and in the last fry your eggs. Oh and warm up your refried beans. Cue more swearing as something inevitably gets forgotten. Put the tortillas on your plates and then put everything else on top, in your preferred order. Don't forget anything: tomatoey sauce, refried beans, salsa, eggs, ham, guacamole. I would have taken a photo but it really didn't look very pretty. Lots of dollops.

It sounds like a lot of faff doesn't it? Terrible lot of work and the last 5 minutes were manic. The pan I was frying the eggs in turned out not to be non-stick. But I can report that the combination of flavours was remarkable. Really complex and a lovely mixture of hot and cold, and plenty of different textures. I wish I could put into words everything going on on that plate. I will be making it again very soon. Happy New Year.