Dreaming Spirals

There are a lot of Neolithic and other prehistoric remains in North Wales and I found quite a few to inspire me. 

This was a stone at an entrance to Bryn Celli Ddu dolmen on Anglesey.  I love the squiggles and spirals.  This was what it was like on the reverse:

This is the dolmen itself:

There was another megalith a few miles away - Bodowyr.

Getting a bit more modern, I love this engraved image which appears on a lot of gravestones in this area:

And I couldn’t end this post without the most iconic railway station sign in the UK!

And just in case you wonder what it means, here it is translated underneath the nearby shopping outlet:

I’m helping with crafts at the holiday club at church next week so I’ll probably be exhausted the rest of the time, so if I’m quiet you will know why.  Had a great time at the Festival of Quilts yesterday - I will blog about that next…

Sorry for any confusion regarding my posts at the present! I’m not actually on holiday still, but I wrote them when I was so I’m posting them just as I wrote them ….

A few months ago I wrote an article for the Computer Textile Design Group magazine, Design It and it has recently been published. The CTDG is a UK based organisation which was started by the embroiderer Valerie Campbell Harding for people who use the computer in textile design. My article is about using the Print Gocco to create unframed thermofax screens to print on fabric with a squeegee. From manipulating the original image on the computer to making the screen, to printing it. So if you’re a member, look out for it! I haven’t seen it yet but it’s my first ever magazine article so I’m pretty excited about it!

I have a second article coming out in the next magazine too!

Finally, I’m going to the Festival of Quilts at the NEC in Birmingham tomorrow and am hoping to meet a couple of online friends who are exhibiting there. Woo hoo!

This afternoon (as I am typing in the cottage in Porthmadog) we went to the island of Anglesey and one of the things we did was to go for a walk along a pebbly beach.  I was struck by the colours and shapes of the pebbles and rocks - they were really varied and colourful.

There were some amazing textures and patterns on the rocks.  I don’t know what made this pattern but it looks almost like a symbol.

I love the holes in this rock:

And the ridges in this one:

We also saw this poor jellyfish stranded on the beach:

Just to put this into context, this was the view across the water - Caernarfon Castle and the Menai Straits:

And up the beach there were these wonderfully weathered wooden posts:

I’ve been taking LOADS of photographs over the holiday, which I can see myself using as inspiration for work over the next few months. 

We went to the Swallow Falls at Betws y Coed - the waterfalls were awesome but I also looked at the overhanging trees and the moss on the stones….

I love this tree and the moss on its trunk.

Just so you don’t think I ignored the waterfall completely, here is one shot of it!

Before I went on holiday I wrote about myself for the Ecoetsy Team blog and it is posted there today! Featured sellers also write eco tips or tutorials so I also wrote a photo tutorial on printing with waste materials, which is also published there. If you want to see my playtime with bubblewrap, pizza bases and paint on used envelopes, go and check it out! I think they turned out quite well and I’m going to use them as wrapping paper for art bought in my Etsy shop.

As I type this, we are still on holiday but on my only access to the internet yesterday, Windows Live Writer didn’t want to publish my last post so I doubt if you’ll get to read it until we get back.  But I thought I would write a few posts while what we have seen and visited is still fresh in my mind.

Wales has lots of hills.  Lots of hills with lots of sheep.  So it has - or had in the past - lots of woollen mills to process the wool from those sheep.  We visited one of them near Llanwrst in the first week of our holiday.   

Trefriw had lots of different sections.  I forgot to photograph them all - there was a lady hand spinning on a spinning wheel and several buildings where the different parts of the process such as carding, dyeing and weaving, took place.  I took a photo of this warping mill as I had heard a lot about them and couldn’t quite visualise them.

And here is a mechanized loom.

We saw this one being operated:

One of my favourite parts at the mill was their Dyer’s Garden. 

As you can see, it is well labelled and organised.

Here is a general view from the side of the mill.   It was all powered by hydro electricity using their own generator - we could see the stream of water and the engine which ran it. 

There was also a good sized shop with clothes, woollen bedding, wool, and also woven tweed woollen fabric by the metre.  Definitely well worth a visit!     My haul consisted of a couple of balls of wool spun in the mill, a natural dyeing book and a book on Textile Machines.  

I’m actually back from holiday now but I wrote a series of blog posts on holiday so they’ll be popping up over the next few days! I tried to publish this while I was away but for some reason Windows Live Writer wouldn’t let me publish it via the various wifi connections I managed to find.

I’m on holiday with my family at the moment.  I’m writing this without a wifi connection but if I manage to find one anywhere I shall publish it.   We are staying at a cottage in Porthmadog, which is great for both Snowdonia and the Llyn Peninsula.   And we shall probably venture into Cardiganshire too …. so far we’ve been watching the weather forecast carefully and trying to avoid any predicted rainfall!

On the way there we stopped for lunch in Llanidloes.  Imagine my delight when I realised that it is the home of the Minerva Arts Centre which houses a quilt museum and at that moment had its summer exhibition which included the Six Group (including Linda and Laura Kemshall).  So I stole 20 minutes to go and see the quilts…

We are staying just opposite the harbour station, and terminus, of the steam railway to Blaenau Ffestiniog.  This is a narrow gauge railway which was originally built to carry slate from the slate mines in Blaenau to the coast.  Now it is entirely tourist orientated.  We travelled on it a couple of days ago.

Here’s the station with the train we had just travelled down from Blaenau on, to the left.  Our cottage is just behind those houses in the background.  The actual engine is out of the picture being refuelled.

We went down a slate mine at Blaenau - it was very chilly!    While I was there I eyed up some rusty machinery …. it would be wonderful for a spot of rust dyeing!  Pity it was too heavy to take home…. and the museum might have missed it….

The piles of slate make an interesting picture too…

Back at Porthmadog, the harbour is looking very picturesque:

I loved this colourful arrangement of boats pulled up on the slipway….

More travel nuggets to follow….

This is some stitching I did a few weeks ago.  For a while now, I’ve been thinking of making something in a labyrinth design, and I pulled some hand dyed fabrics out of my shelves which seemed to work well together.  They are loosely pinks and greens.  I enjoy layering fabrics, stitching a pattern into them and cutting back random layers to make the design emerge serendipitously.  I did this with quite a few of my favourite pieces of work - Dreaming Spirals, the namesake for this blog, is one of them.  My Landscape Series is another.

My design is loosely based on that of the labyrinth in Chartres Cathedral in France.  I drew the design and altered it so that it would work when cut back, and, using my light box, transferred the design on to tissue paper.  I then layered the fabrics, pinned the design on top and stitched along the lines using free motion stitching.

The next job was to remove all the tissue paper.  Here it is half done:

Next I started cutting away to reveal the labyrinth design.  I chose to keep the green as the labyrinth and have the other fabrics poking through in the spaces between but I could have done it the other way round.

This was laborious, but meditative at the same time.  I listened to Brenda Dayne’s knitting podcast, Cast On to while away the minutes.

Here it is three-quarters done.  Some of this got cut away a bit more to reveal an extra layer beneath, until I was happy with the finished piece.

And this is how it stands at the moment.  Not sure if I’ll cut away any more or if I’m happy with it as it is now.  Nor what I’m going to do with it next.  I think it reminds me a bit of the formal gardens with box hedges and roses planted between.  We shall see.