Jane Brocket's Blog, page 10

press ahead

The idea has been brewing for a while, maybe a liftime. I love books and I love making things so I was probably always eventually going to want to make books. (I did make little books all the time when I was young but there was never more than one copy of each and they were usually abandoned before they were finished.)

So I have set up Yarnstorm Press. I chose the name because I am still very attached to 'yarnstorm', the  word I coined for the blog in 2005 and which is still in the URL. I don't have grand plans, but I do have plans. The first is to republish The Gentle Art of Domesticity as an e-book and this will be happening very soon. And then I'll press ahead with a printed project. Although I've written books, I've never made a book, but I know I'm going to enjoy it. 

[The logo was designed by Sam Brewster who also produced the brilliant quilt illustrations in Quilt Me! I wanted Baskerville because it's an absolute classic, is very highly regarded by serious typeface fans (as I discovered when researching it - there's also an interesting section on it in Just My Type), and because it has a wonderful 'y'.]

ordered universe

 

 [Columbia Road market]

I'm not sure about theories of ordered or random universes, but there's plenty of evidence to suggest that people like to impose a little order where they can. Patterns, arrangements, stacks, lines, groups, rows - they're everywhere once you start looking. (I wrote a book on the subject - hardly Einstein, I know, but nevertheless).

 [Allpress]

Shoreditch has been pretty run down for years, and of course historically it's always been a place of mixed and contrasting fortunes. Even now, with the huge influx of creatives, coffee drinkers, and independent businesses, there's still a great deal of poverty and dilapidation that can't be disguised.

 [Albion]

But there are little pockets and glimpses of order all over the place that show someone cares, someone wants to stave off chaos, someone wants to make things happen.

[Albion]

Fruit and vegetables and flowers and coffee cups.

[Brick Lane street art]

Tidy, planned graffiti and stacks of rhubarb.

[Columbia Road]

Most things can be ordered, even if it's only for a brief moment.

ace

Yes, it was. 

A while ago, I won a night in the Ace Hotel in Shoreditch simply by choosing a good seat at the Women's Room Salon. On Saturday we packed our best hipster clothes (sadly there wasn't enough time for Simon to grow a beard, buy a beanie and turn up his best dark jeans) and went in search of Shoreditch style.

The place oozes it. The hotel is full of attention to detail, textures and interesting materials. Concrete, cork, denim, wood, poems on walls, newspapers everywhere, serious coffee, and beautiful hipster people on beautiful mid-century modern furniture. It's a photoshoot without a camera, a hymn to styling, and not a spot of pink or purple or orange anywhere. It's all very 'curated' and it works.

It's humming (buzzing would be too energetic for hipsters, I imagine) and the huge social area in  the lobby is packed.  The rooms are incredibly tasteful, too, and we loved the way they are like apartments rather than sterile transitory places. 

And even though we are not exactly target market age group we did not feel uncomfortable or even out of place without a beard between us. The staff couldn't be nicer, and the relaxed atmosphere extends to all guests who are actually a pretty mixed bunch. (This is as it should be, but it doesn't always happen in cool/smart/posh hotels.)

Tom, Alice and Phoebe joined us in the evening. We had pizzas and and they took photos in the photobooth in the hotel lobby, inspected the room and used the hotel stationery, and disappeared into the night. 

We had a wonderful twenty four hours in Shoreditch, but the real highlight was the hotel. Thanks very much to the Ace for their generosity, and to Jane and Amanda at The Women's Room for making it happen.

[ I took this article about the hotel's design to read in situ. It made me appreciate the incredible amount of thought and planning that goes into creating a place like the Ace.]

favourite fabrics

[Needlepoint Quilt in Quilt Me!]

I enjoyed reading about your favourite fabrics. So much Tana lawn, gingham, brushed cotton and old linen, and so many polka dots. Thank you for taking the time to leave a comment. Frida at Anova Books will be contacting the five winners by email.

I'm doing two workshops (9th Feb and 13 April) at Ray-Stitch based on the Wardrobe Quilt in the book - a great way to put a favourite fabric or two into a quilt.

(Needlepoint is one of my favourite fabrics so I made a quilt out of old pieces of hand-stitched needlepoint.)

 

a whole new light

I'm seeing stained glass in a whole new light. I have no idea what's precious and valuable and am not bothered about age or rarity value, so I can only go by what I think is excellent.

Mostly I like colour, artistry, interesting details and preferably something beyond saints, which is why I like these so much.

(Fantastic range of hats and headgear over the ages.)

It's also good to see women other than the usual female Biblical figures in windows.

These are all in St Mary Redcliffe and were created 1960-1 by Harry Stammers (1902-1969).

quilt me now!

I've been told by my publisher that the copies of Quilt Me! have now arrived and should be sent out very soon (the same applies to the US). I know that the publication date changed from January 2nd and was put back to the 16th but I just want to say that these things are completely out of my hands, that publishers and stockists do all they can to get new books in and out as fast as they can, and that Amazon publication dates are often set months and months in advance when a listing is created and that the whole process is not an exact science.

But anyway, Quilt Me! is Quilt Me Now! It's full of quilts made from all sorts of inspirational fabrics and there's a fabric directory that covers a huge number of possibilities you may not have considered (needlepoint? tweed? cord?). There is nothing complicated in here; the designs are all simple, there are lots of strips, squares, rectangles and lengths, and once again it's the fabrics that play the leading role in the quilts. They all begin with a fabric that has shouted 'quilt me!' and I have gone from there. (And there are some very nice words from Kathy Doughty on the back cover.)

Collins & Brown have very kindly offered five copies of Quilt Me! to give away here and are happy to send the books anywhere in the world, so this is open to everyone. All you have to do to be in with a chance of receiving a copy of the book  is to leave a comment below letting me know what your favourite fabric is. It doesn't have to be a fabric for quilting, just a fabric you love. And please leave your name and an email address. The comments will close on Friday 24 January at 6pm GMT.

good company

The book situation has reached a critical point and some sorting had to be done at the weekend. We just don't have enough book shelves and while piles work to a point, they have to be dealt with eventually. Matters have been made worse by the fact that we've had to bring in the boxes of books from the garage to avoid them getting damp and wavy, and now there are new piles all over the place and there's even more demand for shelf space. I keep wondering if I can squeeze books into corners and whether I could free the shelves in Tom and Alice's rooms - would they notice that their books were in the garage getting damp and wavy?

Although we have have books on books and books behind books and wonder if we'll ever get straight, I actually enjoy a good book sorting session from time to time. It's like meeting old friends again after a long while and realising how much you missed them. All those poems, stories, photos and paintings, all those wits, imaginations and interesting minds, all those words and images, all held inside a box of books. I immediately start making piles: must re-read, to be shelved, meh, charity shop. But this takes so long when you stop to rediscover what John Betjeman wrote about Exeter, re-read your favourite poems on the Underground, make a new crime section, see if a cookery book has a good recipe for Seville oranges that won't make your mouth ache, and find out why you kept the C20 Society book on Seventies architecture.

[An Interior with a Woman Reading (c1930) Anton van Anrooy (1870-1949), National Tust for Scotland]

At the weekend I also read Sara Maitland's article on solitude which raised some interesting points about being alone and why it's difficult for some people to accept that others are quite happy on their own, and why it's difficult for some (probably a big overlap with the first group) to be alone.  Now I am quite happy to be alone, but not all the time. But this may be partly to do with books because a room full of books, or a book in a bag or a pocket means good company. So I'll keep sorting occasionally and do my best not to let my books get damp and wavy, but in the end I'll be happy whichever way they are shelved or stored or piled up because as long as I have books, I'll always have company.

through a glass, brightly

I once worked for Sanderson, the company that makes fabrics and wallpaper with floral patterns and William Morris designs, and I often had meetings in the swish Sanderson showroom on Berners Street in London. So how many times did I walk past the huge, two storey stained glass mural designed by John Piper (early 1950s) as I climbed the stairs to yet another chat about chintz? More to the point, how many times did I walk past it and not really appreciate it? 

I was definitely aware of it, otherwise I wouldn't have remembered it so clearly. But the fact is that I regarded it then as something terribly dated and far too Fifties for my liking. It's only now that I have come to realise that it's a really beautiful, colourful, abstract work of art, that John Piper was an incredible designer of glass, and that Patrick Reyntiens (b 1925) who made it is an incredible maker of stained glass (together they also produced the glass for the new Coventry Cathedral as well as many more commissions). 

It's odd how you can come to like something you once dismissed as old fashioned and even downright ugly. It's taken me a long time to even begin to consider the Fifties and the Festival of Britain and all that as anything other than horrible. But one of the advantages of getting older is that you live long enough to change your mind, and be persuaded of the value of something you once dismissed, and John Piper's work is one of these things I've changed my mind about.

I now seek out his watercolours and prints in galleries, enjoy his splashy, mixy, crayony, watery scenes with thunderously dark skies and nobbly, stony buildings. I like his black and white photos in the Shell Guides and the way he and John Betjeman went on epic 'church crawls' and documented them in words and pictures. I like his murals, his enormous tapestry in Chichester cathedral, and think he painted one of the finest views ever of the same cathedral. I'm less keen on some of his thinking and writing, and some of his watercolours are decidedly slapdash, but I'd now be very happy to pass the Sanderson window on a regular basis, and I like to think I'd be a little more appreciative of the brightness it must have brought into what was really an underlit and underheated decade.

[I went to have a look at the window a little while ago. The showroom is now the Sanderson Hotel. The man in reception couldn't have been nicer, and let me go in to what is now a billiard room at the base of staircase and the glass. These are iPhone photos, so not marvellous. JP also designed some fabrics for Sanderson and even small pieces now cost a fortune. I bet they were languishing, unloved in an age of wild florals and chintz, somewhere in a dark stockroom when I was working there.]

flowers in january, too

I've sent scented narcissi from the Isles of Scilly in the past, but never had any myself (although I have seen them). So I've heard how pretty they are, how lovely they smell, how wonderful it is in January to receive a long, blue box filled with freshly picked flowers that have been grown outdoors.

And it's all true. I've got a big bunch of the whites and creams (the yellows and golds are equally cheering), and I see that it's also possible to order specific varieties. 

They arrived in perfectly parallel order and not just wrapped but swaddled in tissue paper to prevent damage to the tiny star-like flowers, and they are already opening up and smelling good on the kitchen windowsill (next to bargain garden centre white hyacinths - I took my own advice).

It all feels terribly old-fashioned and old Covent Garden flower market-style with flowers 'sent up' to London from places like Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly (more here on flower trains), but I can see exactly why this traditional type of flower-growing survives.

seville marriage

'Civil' oranges, as someone here keeps calling them, are in the shops. For the nth time in January over the years, I have bought a bagful with good intentions of making something with them. Not marmalade as we don't eat it in large amounts, but something that celebrates the incredibly short Seville orange season and makes the most of their acidity and flavour.

So this year I haven't thrown away a mass of oranges after seeing them reproach me for weeks every time I open the fridge, and I haven't thrown any away in September when needing to reclaim space in the freezer. No, this year, I made a huge orange meringue pie using this recipe and used up a box of oranges and 500g of sugar in the process. And the next day I slid most of it into the bin.

I hadn't quite realised just how incredibly sour Seville oranges are. Tongue-blowingly, bitterly sour, with an almost chemical aftertaste. (I now know where they get the Toxic Waste sourness profile from.) So it seems the only thing to do is add enormous quantities of sugar to offset the acidity, and then when you think you've added enough sugar you should probably add some more.

Even with half a kilo of sugar in the pie, it was still toe-curlingly sour (not surprising when you squeeze eleven and a half oranges to get 400ml of juice - way too much), and matters weren't helped by the horrible, gloopy, cornflour-thickened filling (I've always totally avoided cornflour as a thickener but decided to stick to the recipe - I shouldn't have bothered). But you live and learn. And I've learned that Seville oranges and sugar are probably the best partners, and that marmalade probably is the best expression of this Seville marriage. Well, there's always next year.