The bottom left hand corner.

Last things

Mmm, it's going under wraps, I think. My English teacher said to me when I was 17, 'Vivienne' you are transparent'; maybe I ought to opaque up a bit. Just bits of it might apear from now on. This is the bottom left hand corner, starting to come together. A lot to do on it yet, there will  be no raggy edges on display such as you can see.  Only some of the bits are stitched on here, some are pinned roughly in place. The last pieces of the jigsaw were made today; they are really important. The coathangers came too, and they are more than just a frame. I'm hopeful that it'll fly.

The collections.

The collections.

I'm cheating. I've got my friend Sheila to make me two covered coathangers for this project, and it's taking her all week, she is so conscientious, and they are beautiful; they are as important as choosing the right frame for a picture. I've almost finished 'the collections', which means I've been generating Stuff, and now there are two heaps that might add up to enough for the project to go to its next stage. There are things I haven't done that I intended - symbols of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, for example; they will get there.

But now I see it all laid out: it's a record of constantly living with a text and sewing what has come to mind. Now I have two heaps of stuff which I call 'collections', one for Sarah, one for Hagar. They look much like the start of a 'collection' in the fashion sense, and that isn't accidental, as the process has been very much like the work I did while doing the design side of my City & Guilds fashion course. Now it's all together, and if there is any sense of direction, coherence, it ought to be showing. Of course, the way it will be all put together is very important, and that is in my head, with various strategies planned which will heighten the symbolism of what is already there. There's a huge risk that the whole thing will just look awful, but I'm hopeful that it will come together coherently, and also with a bit of beauty thrown in. It's exegetical all right, no worry about that.

So I'm in bed very early, as I've been up till 1 am on several occasions lately. I need a good day tomorrow, which will be one of those make or break days...... wish me luck.

From Ashley to Ashmolean

Mumsnet! Not something I'm in, but I expect if it'd been around in the olden days I would; but it might have been bad for me; "in my day" I found that mothers were roughly divided into those who perpetually congratulated themselves on doing a great job, and those whose errant children made their status quite clear. I was in the second category. So while whirring away on some fabric for Hagar, I was listening to Woman's Hour on R4, and hearing how there's a new description for some mums, those who have all girls: 'Smug Mothers of Girls' and the other sort I forgot the name for, and had to invent ones for me 'Apologetic Mothers Of Boys'. I see the correct title is 'Defensive Mothers Of Boys'. Anyway, Hagar's fabric was, I knew, going to look like something out of Laura Ashley's 1984 collection, all lovely little flowers, and in reality it was inspired by the colours of an Egyptian embroidered hat from 1925 in the Ashmolean museum. I'd written down what colours were on it, but before it came to applying the black, it was very definitely Ashley and not Ashmolean. Note that it is anything but random; it's hard work to make it look this random.

It became clear that to prevent the Laura Ashley look (remember the big skirt in tiers? Cornflower blue? Cost a fortune, but was worth it for the wear it got) it needed something doing to it, and so, with a mindset much like I imagine the recent rioters began their 'work' with, I attacked it, muttering 'Destroy!' and was immediately pleased with the effect. Somehow it made the fabric look both more contemporary and more ancient at the same time, and certainly more like the design I'd seen in the Ashmolean. (Evoke is a word I use a lot; it is meant to evoke Egyptian fabric.) Lucienne Day, homage to you  and your wonderful fabrics. http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/feb/03/lucienne-day-obituary

I also was musing on women dressed in Laura Ashley prints, and thinking that Hagar would not be of that ilk; but then, those of us who were were not all stereotypical sweetness and light, and you could experience to your cost something of that divide mentioned above, me being among the Apologetic/ Defensive ones. So Sarah and Hagar's rivalry sounds like just another spat that would sound absolutely contemporary on Mumsnet of today. 'My husband has had a child by our au pair, as we were infertile for many years.... now she...', and 'I lent out my womb to my employers, and now find myself cast out by the very couple for whom I had the child. They made very poor provision for us....'  Perhaps we old mums can all remember some incident which ended up with a trip to casualty for someone, and I remember one child apearing with the end of a finger hanging off, and his mother livid (before driving off) demanding 'Who did this?!!' and feeling relieved it wasn't my child who'd done it, and feeling very sorry for the mother of the one who had slammed the door or whatever caused it..... I wouldn't want to go through all that bit of my life again. I find it very hard when reading the stories of Sarah and Hagar to suss out exactly why there is such enmity between the two women, where does it start? Was it all Abraham's fault? The fault of patriarchy? God and his idea of 'blessing', which results in favourites? Was there any way that the enmity could have been avoided or repaired?

There's the completed fabric above. It was necessary to go round each daisy-thing with black thread precisely twice, or else it would have been bad luck. Why? I don't know; it just would. It's a girl thing. (I'm so inadvertently superstitious). It's also done with one complete and unbroken piece of black thread.  I told myself it would be good luck if that also happened, so let's hope this thing gets done on time.

Lair today

Back to the lair.... I know.. two sewing machines..... wonderful.

Something to laugh at

...and then there WAS something to laugh at! Because, having done Sarah's hand pointing to the right, I discover that there's a hieroglyph that means 'return' which is a pair of legs walking off to the right, so that means that when Sarah sends Hagar away, she needs to go off to the left, and then she can return by walking from the left to the right. Geddit? The pic will maybe make it more clear. Never mind that it's 12.30 am, some things can't wait, or you just can't sleep.

Anyway, I can use both hands, 'cos Sarah is a bossy woman.

While I was hieroglyphing on the Bernina - I now know 500% more hieroglyphs than I knew before - imagine them done out big on a Dorset beach, visible from space - I was thinking about the effect of the riots on Barton, and whether we had any, and I remembered that we almost did, as this morning after the eucharist, we were drinking coffee in the church hall, and the bobbin lacemakers were on the other side of the room. I could see the lacemakers making gestures with their hands over their ears, and I went over to ask if they were OK, and they told me that the eucharist-goers were being too noisy and it was making it impossible to concentrate on getting the lace made. So I went over to the eucharistis and indicated that this was so, then left hurriedly to get back to My Life's Work. I don't know how it ended; perhaps there were ugly scenes involving lace pins and coffee cups. It's probably not quite in the same league as Clapham Common and so it'll never get reported; that's the problem with living in the provinces. Come on, Barton, you can do better than this!

The gospel reading was about not storing up treasures on earth where moth corrupts, and it could have added, looters loot and all that, and I hope that no clergy will have done some naff sermon based on it against valuing material things, pointing out how vulnerable they are to present events. We aren't in the mood for that kind of thing at the moment, I think. T'owd man was a lot more subtle of course and talked about having enough capital in the bank of things we say we value in order to write cheques against, like martyrs did, if I understand him rightly. They put their money where their mouth was, and their money was there first; that's me carrying on what he said, really.

Oh dear! I've left something a bit risque up there in the pile of hieroglyphs. (You are going to scroll up, aren't you?)

Bleak stuff

The idea is probably clear by now. This hand is telling me it's time to go to bed, but I've just spent 20 minutes learning hieroglyphs, so I want to try some of them too. It's mostly about text just now. Here is me transferring the design by pricking through tracing paper on which I've drawn the design. This is Sarah's (my) left hand; I hope she was left-handed when she pointed, silly me I ought to have reversed it, but I want Hagar to go THAT way. It is the counterpart to 'Thy maid is in thine hand', as shown. Bleak stuff. Technical problems occur from time to time, some cloth doesn't work so well, or one cuts a piece too small and the letters fall off the end; that's me being careful and not liking waste, which only results in more waste.

There's the apple crop to see to, too. Trying to make juice, and the occasional pie. Not to mention riots going on that the radio is telling me about while I work, and at mealtimes I'm reading a book about apples from the Common Ground stable (they invented 'Apple Day' on or near Oct 21st), http://www.amazon.co.uk/Apple-Source-Book-Clifford-Angela/dp/0340951893 eating, growing, history, varieties, and wonder wistfully whether I could save the world if every person had access to an orchard in which to play, eat, tell stories, make love, all the things romantic liberals dream about. But these things do get taken up, occasionally. We seem to have gone down a wrong road or two somewhere, and everyone has their idea of the cause and the solution. Mine is: not enough orchards, accessible to all; plant more.

Not much for Hagar to laugh at just now.
 

The uses of theology

Ohh dearrr! 1.30 a.am. before I got to bed last night. I got stuck on 'God's eye'. It was 'finished', but I was really cross because God's eyeball has space round it - you can see the whit

Pages from the Holkham Bible

e/pink of his eye. Is God that kind of person? He is now. I spent ages thinking if I could rectify it, but 'for technical reasons' it is not possible, believe me. Thus at breakfast, the answer emerged in conversation. The pupil of the eye is supposed to be God's thought, him thinking up the idea of the up the idea of creation, which is why it is all whirly; I think I had in the back of my mind images from the Holkham Bible http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/sacredtexts/holkham.html which has some gorgous rather abstract illustrations. It is so much illustration that some think it may have been a kind of pattern book for mediaeval wall painters and/or embroiderers. (Rotten pic, I'm sorry, just now in artificial light). Oh crikey, I've unwittingly used it again too. Read on, if you can...

God's eye (with Hagar's)

So God with his eyeball floating in space didn't matter so much, as we decided it could be like the earth spinning in space. All that time I studied theology, and now it shows its worth! And D assures me that he thinks this kind of use is not at all out of the ordinary too, i.e. finding ways to justify the accidental. Anyway, I stopped fretting about the thing, and moved on.

The pupil of Hagar's eye is in silver, as she seems to see God, so the reflection there would be pure light, perhaps???

Today's helpful household inspiration

Making a start

Jumped a bit - 'here's one I made earlier'.

So today I got to work on the equivalent piece for Sarah - her pocket, basically. I thought about tents, and domesticity, and onto carpets, and looked down from the landing for ideas, and then set about my work. Then tonight, I had one of those exegetical leaps! I'd already added the Pink Thing, which is.. well what IS it? Shall I leave it to you? Is it Sarah's ear, overhearing? or is it a foetus? After all, the OT is full of begetting, and there is Isaac to come. Then I thought - that's homage to Grayson Perry too, as he did a quilt featuring aborted foetuses, shown in the open book underneath. I saw the actual thing at the V & A last year; brilliant. Then, hell, things came thick and fast today. The tent flaps - well they ARE in colours that are a bit... anatomical, mmm? I won't go into it here, as you may be reading this before 9 pm. That was kind of accidental but you-know-how-the-mind-works on these things; homage to Tracey Emin too. I had been thinking of her tent as a bit of a womby place, and what with the Lord visiting her there and look what happens to her! And, hell, it went on... I saw a piece of cloth I'd made in 2008 in celebration of marmalade, and thought - flames - just what I need for baking Sarah's cakes over, so I slapped them in there. And then I thought - are you hanging on - hell, that flame is under that baby-thing - that's Isaac - and oh crikey, that's what nearly happens to him!!!

So it all got a bit too much for me, and I'm feeling all , well, excitable.

Out in the garden, I was sent to fetch in some plums. Honestly, why ask a bohemian to do that? 'Cos I just stood there and ATE THEM ALL. No, really, I tried to save one or two for t'owd man, and then I DID go and get a bucket of windfall apples. But it made me think, wasn't it NICE of Eve to hand over that apple to Adam? Wasn't she a KIND woman? Compared with me, very much.

I spent a little time sewing by hand, and as this is such a rare thing, I got t'owd man to photograph it for posterity. With my little dog Mimi. I didn't sit there long, as he brought me some beer, and two wasps got drunk and nearly drowned in there, and were fished out by embroidery scissors, which did them no good at all. If the half-bee is called Eric, what would half-pissed-wasps be called?

Anyway, the Sarah thing is just about done. I'll put a ribbon on to tie the tent flap back when it is on display. As usual, you might have to wait for tomorrow's gripping episode. But I managed not to put too much on it; I avoided words. But I did wonder, in view of her story in Genesis, whether Sarah might put one of those notices you can get on the front door of the tent: 'No Jehovah's' (sic).

God's eye

'Thou God seeset me' says Hagar, and so God has to have an eye, which has been my job this afternoon, after finishing what I call her bib. I brought out the best silks for some of the colours in God's eye, and both my sewing machines were used, as they have a different set of stitches. The Bernina ones are limited, but there is one particular wavy one that was just right, and a brill one on the Pfaff for edging the iris. I will always think of it as the eyeball edging stitch now.  But you don't need a great range of stitches to do some nice work; the piece here is some I did more than a decade ago just using a very limited number from the Bernina's small selection. It's not what you've got, it's how you use it; but it's good to have a good range when you get a bit more ambitious.

On the Bernina

Using a very few stitches

My source material for the Eye is a picture of a piece of pottery like an 'evil eye' in a shop in Crete. The other source is the artist's robe by Grayson Perry. http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/arts/review-23902373-gsk-shows-what-fashion-can-say-about-art.do is a good pic of it. The eyes are a symbol for the artist, and not long ago I was thinking about God as an artists, so everything fits together. In homage to Grayson, I am making the white of the eye pink. Has God got a hangover? Somewhere in the psalms he does - wakes from sleep like a man after drink. There's green and several blue in the pupil of the eye, as though God has in mind the earth, seas and skies.The eye is embroidered onto Hagar's pocket. I have an idea for what will form Sarah's pocket of course. Do I run out of ideas? So far, no. And yes, I CAN sew in a straight line, or a curved one - whatever. But probably not chew gum at the same time.

See that useful stitch - a satin stitch, but straight on one edge, and random on the other.