Competition!

I promised more about the competition I was judging yesterday.  It was the final of the Rose Bowl competition for the Welsh WI Federations, each of whom had held a “county round” earlier in the year – or so I thought.  Chatting to competitors later, I discovered that there had been only one entry in Clwyd-Denbigh, so they came straight through without the benefit of first round advice.  Very impressive!

The theme was “Space” and the schedule went as follows:

“A free standing display on a SQUARE base measuring a maximum of 30” x 30” when covered, placed on a table and to be viewed from the front only.  The combined exhibit shall consist of 5 items to depict the theme, items to include:

• Produce   one item of preserved food/foods and one cooked item (no meat or fish)
• Craft     two items showing a variety of skills
• Floral Art     one exhibit”"

Marks to be awarded as follows: Each item 20 marks, Staging and display 20 marks and Interpretation 20 marks (total 140) “

I was responsible for the judging of the staging and interpretation and found 11 entries awaiting me.  Of course, I have no idea whose is whose at this stage, but here they are, in no particular order.

Great use of colour, don’t you think?

Sorry, my photo doesn’t show the detail in the darkness (there’s a rather lovely felted necklace in there)

A young boy’s dream of space?

A different interpretation of the theme.

This is how the exhibit was when I started my deliberations.

And this is how it was when the steward spotted the sticky fixers had given way and replaced the rocket

This entry attracted a great deal of attention.

Battery-powered lights are very popular with exhibitors these days.

The papier mache base was a great feature!

Clever to use those glass spheres, wasn’t it?

Another interpretation of Space – “My Space”.

And finally, an exhibit featuring a moon and stars.

The results?  The winner was the exhibit scoring the highest total of marks for craft, cookery, flowers, staging and interpretation. 

1st Sir Gâr/Carmarthenshire Federation     (the display with the papier mache base)

2nd Glamorgan Federation  (the one with the glass spheres)

3rd Gwent Federation (the young boy’s dream of space)

What a great competition!  Congratulations to the winners

Around here

It’s a bit of a mess.

My studio worktable is barely visible through the piles of paper and assorted ephemera collected on our trip.

It’s time to get to work on the journal then and record a few of the stories.

I think it’s under there somewhere.

Around here

The rose petals are drying nicely and have kept their colour.  Of course, now I’m worrying about the possibility of fine clothes being stained by any dampness in the air and deep hued rose petals!  The airing cupboard has never been so sweetly scented.

In the meantime, I’m building up to our next road trip adventure with the usual journal prep.  I’ve been mooching about various websites, in search of paper for the pages but felt thwarted by an abundance of “cute” designs.  It’s not that I an anti-cute, but I was hoping for something with a little less personality than most and hopefully in a more sophisticated palette than primary colours.

I found the answer in my stash.

This morning, I’d decided to go with the “use what you have” concept and began to cut pages from a pile of paper leftover from other projects.  Deep into the pile, I was beginning to get picky.  Did I really want one pink page, a green patterned one, a black and white checked page followed by a turquoise blue stripe?  Not really.  But lo and behold, there, lurking at the bottom of the heap was a full set of 6 x 12 sheets left from a previous travel journal (this one)

Considering the itinerary of that road trip in the Pacific North West (a couple of cities, a bit of coast and some woodsy countryside) I could see why I’d chosen that design and colour palette.  This trip will be pretty similar – we are not headed for canyons or desert this time round, but to the state with the second longest coastline in the USA – 3288 miles.  We’re looking forward to exploring a couple of cities we’ve had on our list for a while and revisiting an all-time favourite, spending time with friends and, a first for us, experiencing lakeside life.

This year, we’re going to explore Michigan, driving a round trip from Chicago!

Having cut a good number of pages (which, together with some plain white sheets will be plenty), I needed to make the covers.  In my trawl through the paper pile, I came across a sheet of paper I’d created on some workshop or other which I thought would do nicely.

Ready to go.

But a girl’s got to do something whilst the paint dries, don’t you think?  A couple of my textiley friends have been pinning links to their pinterest pages that sent me looking for my Weavette.  I hadn’t opened that box in ages (or the other two, different sized looms!)

In less than fifteen minutes I was remembering just why I loved it from the minute I started.

Half an hour later, I just had to go and get on with things!  It’s so easy to get carried away with something like this.  It’s therapeutic in that mindless way, satisfying because it works so well and it’s so easy to achieve a great result from the off.

Surely, there must be a couple more projects I can get going in the meantime!?

I love my machines

With one exception, perhaps, because printers are the devil’s work!

Do you remember this?  I’d made a knock-off of a Moleskine Message following a few days in Stockholm and yesterday, whilst mulling over how to capture a few memories from St Petersburg, I decided to do something similar.

Except I’d forgotten how I’d done it and my blog post was a little sketchy on the detail.

I looked closely at those cut edges and knew they hadn’t been cut by hand but using my Silhouette, for sure.  If that was the case, that cut file must be on my computer somewhere then, but it was proving elusive.  Where might I have saved that file?  Not in my ‘Silhouette Cut Files” folder, sadly.

I resorted to the search programs and files facility, but was unsure what to search for.  After a few no files of that name were found reports, I hit gold!  There it was, <moleskine envelope book.studio> in my photo folder for May 2013.  In no time at all, I’d cut out the cover and six pages.  Love my Silhouette!

My next step was to create a few photo collages in Picasa.  At this stage, I didn’t know how many, but simply found a few themes to work on and ended up with nine.  I opened them in Photoshop and resized them all so they’d fit in the book.

It was about now I realised that printing them wasn’t going to be easy.  I took another close look at the Stockholm book and knew I’d printed directly onto the pages and not simply glued in photo collage pages.  Hmm.  Now, how did I do that?

I created a file in Photoshop with the size of the double-page spread and placed a piece of double sided tape at one end.  I set up a print file with the collage sheet in the right place, lightly adhered the cut page on the sheet of paper and fed the whole thing through the printer.

The first one worked fine.  The second one didn’t.  Never mind.  Try again.

I managed to print three or four pages, doing my best to work out where each collage page would fit in the finished book (not easy!) sometimes needing to turn a page to get it in the right orientation.

And then I tried to print on the reverse of an already-printed sheet.  The double sided tape pulled away part of the print.  Better do that one again.

And then the printer began to add a stripe all on its own.  It does things like that from time to time, just to annoy me, I think.

I decided it was time for tea and switched everything off and thought I’d had enough for one day.

I’m not quite sure how I achieved the next step and can only think it was the inspiration fairy who visited me in my sleep!  When I went downstairs to my studio the following morning, the obvious answer to my challenge was staring me in the face.

Print and cut using my Silhouette!

In no time at all, I’d imported each page of photographs into the cut file I’d already designed and sent it to our pesky printer which purred and printed the pages perfectly.  After printing, I fed the sheet of card through the Silhouette for cutting and, amazing machine that it is, achieved a perfectly accurate result.

I love it when everything comes together like that, when the seamless process works perfectly and I can get a great workflow going.

But it was time for the intermediate technology.  A sharp pencil and ruler was the best way to measure and mark the centre fold of the little book.  I clipped all the pages together and, before folding, I switched on my sewing machine and took a deep breath.

I threaded my machine with heavy thread, fitted a jeans needle and lowered the speed.  Slowly, carefully, my lovely machine stitched a beautifully sewn spine.  I wanted the needle to pierce the paper from the right side in, which meant I was working “blind”.

I hardly dare turn it over and look at where the line of stitching had worked out on the other side.  (At this stage, I hadn’t quite noticed that I’d sewn the pages into the book cover the wrong way round!)

Look!   (I couldn’t quite believe it how neat that sewing turned out)

I carefully scored the foldlines to complete the assembly of the book but as I did, I realised my mistake.  Would it matter?  I opened and closed it, flicked through and showed it to my hero, who agreed with me.

It mattered.  It just didn’t “work” with the flap going the wrong way.

So I treated that one as a practice effort and started over again.  I’d saved all the files and it took no time at all to print and cut them all out once more.

I stitched the spine more confidently, for after all, I’d had practice!  When it came to that part though, I double checked it was the right way up, needless to say.

The book was soon finished and ready to have all the bits of ephemera stuck inside.

Yes, of course the Turkish Map Fold features!

Second time around went so much more quickly.  Not only had I worked out the process, I’d managed to avoid the pitfalls too. 

I thought I’d better write a few more details down in my blog this time as well, just so that when I next want to make a little book, I have something to refer to!  After all, I’ve got to keep all those machines working.  I even feel a little warmer about the printer, which worked perfectly with the Silhouette software, leaving me to wonder if it’s the Adobe Photoshop software which presents the problem.

But I’ll leave that one to my Hero.  I know my limits

A rich textile heritage

This area of Switzerland has a long history of textile design and manufacture and the story is wonderfully recorded in the Textile Museum in St Gallen.  I’d noted what promised to be an interesting exhibition on the website and opening the curtains on a rainy Saturday morning we lost no time in making our way there.

Of course, the tickets are made of fabric.

We headed straight to the top of the building, with the intention of working our way down through the exhibits.  The first exhibition was Fast Fashion.

The term “fast fashion” denotes a corporate strategy which aims to bring new fashion into the shops at ever shorter intervals. Classic fashion segments such as haute couture, ready-to-wear and medium-priced off-the-peg clothes limit themselves to two collections a year, whereas cheap labels launch up to twelve collections within the same period of time. These companies aim to draw the media’s attention to themselves, to lure primarily young customers into the shops and to animate them to make purchases.
If consumers and commerce profit from the masses of fashion articles put on the market at bargain prices, many of those involved in the production process have to pay a high price: long working days with minimum wages determine the lives of the textile workers who produce cheap fashion under sometimes disastrous conditions. They have no social security and educational opportunities. Health problems and environmental pollution are the consequences of a corporate policy that is ruthlessly geared to profit maximisation.

It was indeed a thought provoking and rather troubling exhibition and the true cost of cheap clothing was set out clearly in no uncertain terms.  I made notes on some aspects to follow up later, in particular the role of young people using social media to post their “haul videos”.  I’d not come across such things before, but foresee an interesting if rather shocking evening’s viewing.

The contrast with my parents’ generation of thrift and make do could not have been better explained than the case of ideas for making a new dress from two old ones.  It also highlighted the high level of technical skills which have been lost in the meantime: I’m not sure I would have the confidence to create some of those alterations!

The exhibit was indeed interesting and presented some good points, but possibly overstated the general issue: we soon got the message and were ready to move on.  But as ever in such places, I was as interested in the mechanics and design of the exhibition itself, in this instance, how the information and examples were shown in two languages (English on this side, German on the other) and hung in a kind of production line setting.  Very clever.

Down one floor, there was a more general exhibit entitled “dreams and realisation”.  Here was more than half a millennium of textile heritage.

Pieces from the Middle Ages were so well preserved and began the story which continued on a kind of timeline, through the introduction of turkey red dye

to printed patterns and detailed designs.

The motifs were accurate and precise and right from these early stages, it was clear that the strengths of the Swiss textile industry were precision and quality.

The samples were so well documented and archived, creating a marvellous resource for contemporary designers.

Displayed in large glass cabinets, one could spend days here, just looking, marvelling and imagining the technical skills and tenacity that went into creating these masterpieces of hand work.

One cabinet was devoted to a single piece of exquisite whitework, approximately one metre square.

I’m not sure that I could have listed all the specific embroidery techniques which were evident in that one piece of work alone

and clearly I was not the first to marvel at and appreciate the skills involved, for the gold medals awarded to the maker were also on display in the cabinet, including three gold medals from Parisian Exhibitions of the 1870s and a mere bronze from London.

Such high quality workmanship was valued worldwide, as evidenced by account books showing exports to the USA

and bills of sale, including one for 32 embroidery designs, 32 sketches and 32 card copies of such, totalling 169.60 SFr. 

The exhibition continued to the present day, with fascinating and very typical samples from the 1960s and 70s.

Shown alongside were pattern cards and pictures of modern industrial embroidery machines creating the high tech fabrics the area specialises in today.

Metal fabrics and laser cut designs, specialist and technically precise, for whilst the industry here has capitalised on the heritage it has also moved with the times and remains a world class centre for high quality, innovative textiles.

Now, I’d already thought I could spend a whole day here, possibly just in that one exhibition alone.  To explore the next part fully, I’d need at least a week, for on the ground floor is the library.  I mentioned it in passing in my previous post when we were last here, but today I had a little more time to look around.

The open pattern books on the counter are just a clue to what lies behind those glass doors in the cabinets which line the walls of the room.

Each sample, carefully referenced and labelled, each drawing or sketch a small masterpiece in itself.

Flicking through the books, each page invites us to linger and marvel at the beauty.  Could this one really be better than the last?  Or the next?  My Hero and I were both captivated by each page in the book and couldn’t decide whether to spend longer looking at this amazing catalogue or move on to the next…

Because there were more.  Hundreds more.

Contemporary magazines too.  Every one concerning fashion and textiles you could think of, from all over the world, in every language.

Plenty to demonstrate that I’m not as au fait with British textile magazines as I thought I was, too.  PomPom was a new one for me.

I was now going to investigate around the corner, but as I passed by, I couldn’t resist another look at that catalogue of edgings.

and my Hero wanted to know the difference between this lace and this lace – a subject about which I know not very much at all!

Though I’m sure the answer isn’t far away…

Much as I’d have loved to have taken the time to research the answer to his question more fully than I could explain from my own knowledge and experience, I don’t think he was really *that* interested and anyway, there were further distractions.

Shelves and shelves of books I recognise from my own collection alongside many I don’t.

Some, I’d like to read more closely and yes, possibly chat as well,

but then I discovered the accessories section, with details of gloves, shoes and buttons.

I’m sorry, I didn’t have time to explore upstairs as well.

The library was so beautifully organised with everything in place and on each shelf was a small plan of the sections together with the advice “please don’t replace the books yourself, you can leave them here”  (ie don’t mess up our system by putting a book back somewhere that we’ll never find it again!)

We couldn’t leave the museum without a peek in the other ground floor room, but sadly, the embroidery machine wasn’t in operation today, unlike on our last visit.  Never mind, there were a few more things of interest around,

like samples of couture fabrics for the Autumn Winter 2017 collections,

one of which was rather interesting.

Further couture samples and a video of a catwalk show from AKRIS which we sat and watched, recognising that were we to sit there any longer, we might not feel much like getting up and moving again!

So we gathered up our bags and belongings from the cloakroom, leaving the cute tailcoat with the St Gallen tailor’s label hanging there.

At the end of April, the museum will stage an exhibition as part of a wider, regional textile project which looks remarkably interesting.  The fun continues here and though we will probably be back in Switzerland in the Autumn, whether we will have a chance to see it remains to be seen.  For now, I am thankful for a marvellous morning here!