Wednesday 21 April 2010

Birthday weekend (2)

Sorry folks, that was a long time coming and I'm not especially sure it will be worth the wait either!
Here are lots more photos:
Cafe Uno - The whole building was covered in tiles with an Egyptian theme:
Cycling skeleton in Libertys pharmacy - a comment on models these days perhaps?



 










Himself had booked tickets for 'The Infidel' with  Omid Djalili (bloke from the MoneySupermarket.com ads), Richard Schiff (Toby in The West Wing) and Matt Lucas playing a Rabbi at the Empire Leicester Square cinema - somewhere we used to (easily and quickly) drive to and park just around the corner, on the street, for free, before we were married - We would  nip into 'town' for the Saturday midnight movie - the seats reclined and it was rather nice after the then somewhat scruffy provincial Ealing or Wembley cinemas.
Considering the price of our tickets I would have expected more, true we were on the back row with plenty of leg room and true the seats still reclined, but since the seats in front also reclined, Himself and I had a couple who insisted on bouncing back and forth on their chair backs throughout the entire film - thus spoiling our comfort value by 99.9%, looking around other tall people suffered the same way. However the film was both enjoyable and funny, just a shame about the cinema seats.
Inside Libertys (Oh how I love this shop):
We went to the V&A as we had tickets for the Quilt show. Sadly no photos allowed, so I've scanned in some of the postcards I bought afterwards, (experience has taught me that to buy the accompanying book is pointless as I so rarely look at it again!) I enjoyed the exhibition much more than I thought I would. The old quilts really did steal the show and the opportunity to see them up close was great. The 'Changi quilt' bought a lump to my throat and I felt for the 'convict' women stitching the 'Rajah quilt' on the ship to Australia (sorry no postcards of those) I agree with many other quilters views in that I too think the curators missed a trick with the choice contemporary quilts. What a shame they didn't choose quilts from the many fine quilters we have in this country. I gave most of them no more than a passing glance - I thought it was sad that they chose to exhibit modern work by a group of prisoners from Wandsworth and yet the work by so many ordinary (and extraordinary) women was completly ignored.  One of the few contemporary quilts I liked (and stupidly I didn't note down who made it,) was made of 38,000 x 1cm squares of plain newspaper, to represent the number of civilians and 100 x 1cm square photos to represent military personell who had died (up to that point in time) in the Iraqi war. I found it very moving.

I'm sure I've either seen this quilt before or something similar to this idea before....... Liberty Jack by Janey Forgan:

Small Cot quilt - Welsh wool -1860's Red diamonds in the centre are satin and the hearts are a fine knitted fabric, they may have once been stockings.
Patchwork by Elisabeth Chapman - 1829. Unfinished, all the tacking threads and paper backings were still in place - we were allowed to see portions of the back showing the papers, many with beautiful copperplate writing.

4 comments:

  1. Well, if it hasn't been finished since 1829 that makes me feel a lot better about some of my work that has been waiting a mere year or two !! ;-)
    Just found your blog via sewkaliko.

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  2. Hi Fran, thanks for both reading my blog and taking the time to make a comment. I agree with you about not feeling so bad about UFO's too. Maybe one day they'll be finished eh?!

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  3. I loved the V&A exhibit; as you say, the one that really sticks in the mind, was the paper one about the Iraq war deaths. I cried when I saw that (not open bawling, just a few silent tears). I will definitely go again when my mum comes over in June.

    I didn't get to Liberty's this time, but I really like the strippy scrap quilt on the second photo of the Liberty's quilts - great way of getting rid of scraps - I HATE scraps. Why I don't just chuck them all is beyond me. They sit in the corner of my subconscious, nagging me.

    Tina

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  4. Hi Tina
    Thank you for reading my witterings! My photos of the quilts shown in Liberty didn't really do them justice - they almost all looked better in real life. I just wish we were allowed to take photos (even non flash ones) of the quilts in the V&A.

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