Spring is here

Textile Map Making

This Saturday I attended a conference on Maps and Mapmaking organised by Textile Forum South West.  A very good day, with excellent speakers, showing many different points of view on maps and making, and other related activities - among them the Pompom Project.  This is a networking project, involving several stages:  making the pompoms, hanging them in and around the place where you live, photographing them, and bringing them to the conference, together with the photographs.  Also, miniature pompoms were pinned on a map of the South West of England, on the places where group members live, and string was used to link the pins on the map with Taunton, where the conference was being held, to study the network of textile makers.  Very interesting!

I tied my pompoms to an old fashioned street light and photographed them against the background of Wells Cathedral.

There will be an exhibition of members' work next March/April, 2012, on the theme of "Mapping the Future: Where are you now?", at The Brewhouse Theatre and Arts Centre, Taunton, Somerset.

I shall be taking part!

Alicia

I'm a cover girl again!

This was a great surprise when I received it this morning - my Journal Quilts 2009 are on the cover of Kludemagasinet, the journal of the Danish Quilt Guild.  The magazine was sent to me by the British Guild's International Rep (thank you Fiona!).

My orchids glow in the late afternoon sun...

...the only time the sun touches them - they need lots of light, but not direct sunlight.

First balloon of the season!

Magnolia Stellata - my garden and colour

This is the magnolia shrub in my garden.  I always wonder why the flowers come out first, early in Spring, and the leaves only very much later, by which time the flowers are all but gone.  The flowers are mostly white, but white for me is a colour too - in the sun, they shine with a velvety touch.  The shadows give a variation of different whites.  The centres have a peachy colour to them.

There was a gigantic magnolia tree (the grandiflora type) at the bottom of my childhood garden in Buenos Aires.  The tree was in the neighbour's garden, on the other side of our back garden wall, but the tree was so large that most of its crown showed over the wall.  In spring, it was covered in imposing large white flowers (sometimes with a touch of pink) which gave a wonderful smell. In the summer, the dark green leaves also offered a lovely view.  The neighbour's garden and house were huge - its entrance was on the next street to ours - and I never met them, nor visited the garden.

In our house in London we planted a magnolia tree in the front garden, which also flowered beautifully, but it was much smaller than the one in Argentina - somewhere between a tree and a shrub in size.  Not sure what type it was - not a strellata, but a bit smaller than the grandiflora - possibly a soulangeana, from I can gather by googling 'magnolia types'.  I'm not really a gardener - the point of a garden for me is colour!  In Wells I choose the flowers for our garden by their colour - and they do not always survive the winter...  We only have a few daffodils flowering now - the snow drops have gone - but the whole garden is in bud, and the rose bushes - my favourite flower - are shaping up beautifully.

I just discovered that magnolias originate in Japan...  Glad of having the internet...

Thanks for reading - have a nice weekend!

Alicia

ArtePatchwork

The Spanish magazine ArtePatchwork has published an article about my work.

Other gardens have more daffodils...

This beautiful bunch of daffodils is a present from a friend.

First daffodil of the season in my garden

Pericallis

This is my new flower, Pericallis - it is very purple in real life, but the photographs show it rather blue...

One of the swans in the Bishop's Palace moat, Wells

The swans are supposed to be able to ring a bell placed on the wall of the moat, when they want some food.

 

A Thursday photo

Photo of the day