Picture from an Exhibition

Mermaid Kite from my latest exhibition

£65

More soon...

More duck stuff

Here she is, and here her eggs, and as fierce an eye as I've ever seen...

Cycled past a small pond this evening and was amazed by the number and energy of the ducklings. All brown except one yellow one, and a sideways avalanche of feet and cheeping and water...

Ah, spring is here...

Catching up and settling down...

...to some work at last.. Not going to show them here yet, as they are for my next exhibition, but I am mightily relieved to have broken the back of the Creativity Monster...

Meanwhile:- a duck has nested in the next-yard but one - she has made a perfect nest from old string and feathers and is happily sitting on 6 beautiful blue eggs. You can just see the string in the picture. And the spring light is illuminating my carpets really nicely..

Rubber Postcards

If I had been asked if this was a good idea, I suspect I would have laughed..
Postcards class on Saturday was much enjoyed by all. Cards by Tina, using bicycle tyre, inner tube rubber, oddments of chain, and spoke nipples. Now that's going to do funny things for the hit rate...

Ada Lovelace Day

and I have pledged to blog about women and technology... So I am going to talk about sewing machines. Because that's what I know, and because I have a sneaking suspicion that, had I been born with different plumbing, I would have been an engineer by trade, not a sewist.

Picture here was taken in 2003, at a meeting of Old-Sewing-Machine Fanatics at my workshop. I have just worked out how to thread and adjust an 1880s machine of great beauty and charm, still working and doing it's bit after 12o-odd years.

When the sewing machine came into general use, in the 1860s and 1870s, it changed the world. Before this the average household would have had very few new clothes; what was made was made by hand and passed down and repaired until nothing was left. After the advent of the domestic sewing machine, came Fashion, Consumerism, and relative plenty. Household linenes could be made at speed. Clothes did not have to have several owners.

As the machines were too expensive for most people to afford to buy one outright, there was a system of "hire purchase" - not new but uncommon till that time. From this we directly get the Car Culture, because that too needs a time-delayed system of payments for ordinary people to be able to play. And sewing machines were pretty much mass-produced, on assembly lines, in factories, with a workforce dedicated to just that one job. Compare this with bicycles - also offered as a great liberator of women and the working classes, but mostly made in small workshops not much different from the village blacksmith's smoky hovel.

Then there is fabric. If you have a small market, hand-woven and hand-dyed will suffice. If the demand increases 100 or 1000-fold, than you must make factories to make fabrics, printing must improve, dyes will poison the river, and another workforce arrives. My grandmother was a mill hand in Lancashire, England at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century. She was well-paid, independent, and was regarded as having "let herself down" by marrying and giving it up. She ran huge, dangerous, dirty machines on a shift system, and, at 13, was a supervisor (doffer) over a whole floor of other (mostly female) workers.
Thread must be much better quality, so spinning mills must be made which can produce this. Needles and thread can be quite crude for hand sewing, but machines require precision...
And the Computer was, of course, preceded by the Loom... The first Punch Card systems were for weaving cloth, not crunching numbers..

My conclusion? Without the Sewing Machine Revolution, we would have so much less of out modern world. Maybe good, maybe bad, some of each perhaps, but different..

And me? I love machines. I like screwdrivers, oil, precision; things which work as they should. I like my car, love my bicycle, would not live without my sewing machines...

Voodoo people...

..awaiting their faces...
My armchair gets more like a nest every day. These little people are awaiting their features, before being packed in a box and winging their way to Raven...

Spirals and Trees

Teaching Spiral Thing yesterday. A good class, if a little overlong for some reason. Herewith Lin with her almost-finished creation..












One student (Sue) brought the Trees piece she had done in a previous class, along with the two she was inspired to make once she got home.. It's so nice when a student takes an idea and runs with it...