Week 3 Things continue to improve

This week has been fun! I spent a happy afternoon on Tuesday, starting a sculpture in my Visual Studies class, which provoked an interesting response from my tutor, but wait until she sees the finished piece on Tuesday! It is produced using found objects, in my case found at home and include: pipe insulation, left over curtain lining, various braids, ribbon, threads and wool found in my sewing room, rope purchased from Poundland (ok I cheated a bit) and our fruit bowl (which Mike doesn't know about yet!) For those of you with artistic sensibilities, my inspiration came from the work of Hepworth, Rothschild and Aboriginal Burial Poles (it makes sense to me ok!)

My intention had been to use figure of 8 lashing to lash the elements of the sculpture together, however there is a bit of a difference between lashing reasonably well behaved canes together to make a draining board for washing up at guide camp and badly behaved bound pipe insulation foam which is starting to bend under the weight of its own fabulousness. So, with a bit of lateral thinking, I decided to liberate the fruit bowl (a wedding present from Mike's good friend- but we have been married a number of years now!) and use it as the perfect base for my sculpture. I've added a photo below.

On Wednesday, we had a whole day working on free machine embroidery, using applique and reverse applique and translating marks from our sketch books into stitches. It was great and I could have stayed there all night! I've also finished my first hand embroidery sample, which is of Reg Butler's Young Woman Standing 1951-52 (must practice referencing properly!). See below:


 V excitingly, I have signed up for the once in the lifetime experience of a field trip to New York in January- OMG! Will I survive in a hotel room with two young girlie students for a week? Also may need to sell Mike to pay for it... and maybe some other stuff.

Its lunchtime on Sunday- I promised myself that I would spend all of today working on the Craft Fair- but I haven't quite started yet. Double OMG!.. the fair is what seems about 5 minutes away and I have a very small collection of things to sell. However, I just needed to get my university blog up to date- this records what academic skills we're learning, and reflection on what went well, what could we do differently etc. I have now written a series of what feels like short stories! We have a lecture tomorrow about blogging so I guess I'll be doing some serious editing then! I wanted to upload some images to it- but my nice apple browser doesn't support it- what is any ordinary person meant to do with such error messages? Why is it beyond the wit of those apple genii to provide a link to the bits of the help pages which suggests how I might put it right without just throwing the laptop out of the window?  I will not let it beat me!