A personal touch at Little Chef, Okehampton

Set off for London from Cornwall, very early. The full moon still visible over St Ives.

Snow on Dartmoor. Stop for coffee at a rather bleak Little Chef near Okehampton, and see that someone has tried to cheer the place up with pale green ribbons (the colour matching the icy landscape outside).

Machine-stitched pictures at the National Theatre

Another interesting exhibition spotted by a blog reader... this time at the National Gallery.

"Just a suggestion; if you haven't visited the exhibition of stitched pictures by Lalla Ward at the National Theatre, I can recommend it.  They are mostly machine-stitched embroidery pictures of the flora and fauna of exotic places.  Really worth a visit..."

Will try and make it before it closes on 14 February.

An embroidered bag in the queue in a Truro bookshop

The owner says it was a present, bought in Accessorize. Elaborate beading and embroidery. Am buying Arabic tapes to listen to in the car, as am spending a great deal of time on the road, driving from place to place on meetings for I Packed This Myself. And am trying to learn Arabic, just to exercise the brain...

An embroidered tablecloth from Portugal

Spot an embroidered tablecloth on display in the Portuguese shop in the main street in Bodmin, Cornwall. There are around 3,000 Portuguese in central Cornwall, mainly working in meat processing factories. Traditional Portuguese embroidery and crochet or lace-edged tablecloths are a source of great pride.

A trip to Harlesden and plans for a year of embroidery

A trip to Harlesden, north west London, to see Meherun Ahmed of the Asian Women's Resource Centre. We plan two courses of Stitch (funding permitting) this year. We worked with Meherun and women at the AWRC in the early stages of the project.

Women and the imagined city

At a lecture at the Institute for Germanic and Romance Studies - meet Gill Rye, Editor of the Journal of Romance Studies. Ask her about Margaret Andrews, who helped inspire the British Sari Story project (the ideas all came together after a seminar on the Imagined City that Margaret organised in spring 2007).
Margaret no longer at the IGRS but copies of the journal on the seminar are still available and Gill very kindly gives me one.
Interested to read Liedeka Plate and Ells Rommes' paper on the ways people negotiate cities - and their ideas of  what the city is.  They talk about the things carry in their bags. This is what got me thinking about I Packed This Myself and the idea of travelling suitcases reflecting the background of migrant workers.

"The things we do or do not carry with us - money, bus tickets, condoms, something to eat, nappies, a pocket-knofe, a map, a camera - all these things attest as much to who we are and how we identify ourselves as to what we think we may need in negotiating the city..."

Minimalism Massimo and interesting connections

At the opening of Lorenzo Belenguer's show Minimalism Massimo at the Gallery at Willesden Green - a great coincidence and very nice to meet Kate Keara Pelen, whose ink and embroidery on paper is displayed.

Just before Christmas, someone told me about Kate's work which is on display in Ealing for the next few weeks. Need to go and see it. She is interested in the 'conventions, rituals and structures of spiritual practice', as we are in Stitch. Interesting connections could be made.

Otherwise... Lorenzo's show is a triumph. It's been two years in the making. He says he was waiting for the right credit crunch moment so that the exhibition, showing contemporary responses to minimalism, would have the maximum impact. With works by Joseph Bueys, Carl Andre, John Baldessari, Martin Creed...

When Stitch leaves York Gardens Library. Though new venues are possible

Sarah Crowe, Bridging Arts intern, and I take down the Stitch exhibition from York Gardens Library, Battersea, this morning. The library looks bigger - but bleak without the colour. It is quite sad to say goodbye to Angela Emmott, librarian - she says she has learned a lot about her local community through the project.
Later a meeting in Shepherds Bush in the Old Library with David Hampshire from Hammersmith and Fulham library service about bringing the show to the Borough. And possibly the British Saris too.

Ripping rococo in the Hotel de Soubise

The Hotel de Soubise in Paris - one of the best preserved examples of rococo decoration in France. Hannah mentioned this in her talk about the Turkish rococo motif of a horn of plenty, that she desighed for one of our new embroidery packs.
Having never been v interested in rococo, try and find out more.

The Princess's salon (1737-49) is full of the ornate scrolls, tendrils, creeping fronds and shells that Hannah described when she presented the motif last November.
I confess - up to now, I had always thought rococo was stuffy, overpowering and hard to warm to. But the spiralling curves and mirrors of this oval room lift the spirits.

The Hotel de Soubise now houses the French National Archives. In the bookshop discover that there was an exhibition - some years ago now - of swatches of Marie Antoinette's dress fabric. Only a postcard left as a reminder. Though the book (with images of the patterns) is still available on Amazon, it seems... Gazette des atours de Marie-Antoinette, Queen's wardrobe 1782.
She was beheaded in 1793.

The big thaw, finding an old friend, making new contacts

The snow is, at last, beginning to thaw. From John Bett's House (sheltered housing run by a charity in Hammersmith and Fulham) you can see people walking with umbrellas on the pavement. The residents are relieved that the ice is melting.
Have gone to talk about Stitch and to gauge interest in embroidery demonstrations - and possibly classes.
But the highlight of the morning is meeting an old friend, Stella, who I  have not had a chance to talk to properly for years. Had not realised that she had moved from her old house. Her new flat is full of embroidery she has collected over the years. Cushions arrayed on the sofa with a variety of histories.....     A tapestry kit bought at a French stately home some years ago...                                                                                          
\

A cushion won at a Royal School of Needlework raffle
....









 
Another bought in Austria, with eidelweiss in each corner


Embroidered and beaded cushions bought in Malta when visiting her sister















A tapestry of a canal scene, worked by her sister. 
 The star of the show (not pictured) is one of Stella's most prized possessions. A Christmas bauble worked by Ruth Chamberlin, who lives in Rutland. Exquisite gold work, beading and applique - the star of Bethlehem and the Rose of Sharon.  Ruth Chamberlin is going to embroider the new vestments at Holy Innocents' Church, Hammersmith, which is where I met Stella.