Flamingo Festival at Matthei Botanical Gardens

Matthei Botanical Gardens is having a Flamingo Festival. Set among the vegetable gardens are a number of whimsical creations, all started from the same standard pink lawn flamingo base.
It was an unexpected delight :-}
Enjoy!

Unexpected Knitting

While reading Anne Hansen's blog a few weeks ago, I learned about Debbie New and her lovely perspective on knitting as art.

I found a reasonably priced copy of her book, Unexpected Knitting (Schoolhouse Press), and it arrived yesterday.

Wow. Better than 1960's drug culture, my mind was blown.

Long time readers may remember that I used to do a bit of art quilting, but switched to knitting when I could no longer sit up for long periods of time, and was unable to set up and put away my quilting area as I used to do. (I am working on a permanent sewing station for my reclining wheelchair, which will mean I can quilt again, for short periods. I have the table, just need to reorganize the studio a bit).

Knitting is great, and I love making up shawls on the needle, but there was an element of artistic serendipity (doo-dah) missing when compared to my art quilting. Until yesterday.

Just reading Meg Swanson's introduction and leafing through a few chapters showed me knitting has every bit the potential as my art quilting did for expressing myself. Perhaps more. I never did enjoy turning 2-dimensional woven fabrics into 3-dimensional items. I could DO it, but I didn't really enjoy the seaming and tucking and thick layers to sew through. But I love the increases and decreases involved in doing something similar with knitting.

Debbie New also has a very humorous slant on things, making the book a lovely reading experience as well. I hope the book is republished soon, so more people have a chance at it.

I am not sure where all this inspiration will take me, but I love being so excited and rejuvenated.

(Oscar is being patient, and has listened to me read aloud from the book most of the morning while taking his bath.)

I had thought I'd not encountered Debbie New's work before, but reading through more thoroughly today, I spied the lace coracle she made for Meg Swanson's 'A Gathering of Lace'.

Oh, THAT Debbie New! Cool.

(images above and below from my art quilting days)

Dangerous Dancing

One of my favorite sites is Extreme Craft (see link to the right).
Yesterday I saw a link about half way down their page to an art form I've been interested in for awhile, but never really looked into.
Chain saw sculpting. (link is to "Masters of the Chainsaw")
I think what I love most about it is not the finished sculptures (although they are in fact way cool) but watching the artists at work. One of the elements of chain saw sculpting contests is speed.
I am mesmerized by the three-partnered dance of artist, wood and chain saw, the changing song of the engine as the precise bites of wood fly off the log, bringing into reality the sculptor's vision.
If you want an idea of how difficult it can be, grab yourself a jug of water and do a few jumping jacks (and try not to hit yourself in the head with it).
The chainsaw preferred by many competitors weighs 7.5 pounds. And it's got a lot more teeth than a jug of water.

More Yarn Art- Yarn Bombing

I love this week's organically developed theme here on Otterwise of yarny arty stuff. Niftyknits linked in a comment to her blog entry about Yarn Bombing in the UK, which led me to this article, which caused me to search for more info online, where I found a pair of Canadian authors who created a website; Yarnbombing, Improving the Urban Landscape One Stitch at a Time . I look forward to thier upcoming book, due out September this year.

On the way, I found this really great article on Weburbanist.com, including (among many other weird and wonderful fiber creations) knitted dissection models, which I must say I liked better than the real thing. I had not heard of this 'zine, and have signed up to get new issues on email (am not yet set up to take advantage of a blog reader service, any suggestions?)

Re the image above: Don'tcha love this Japanese bus? When I lived in Japan, it was great fun just to sit and watch truckers go by on the highway. The drivers spent a lot of time and energy lashing thier trucks and trailers with blinky colored lights. It was like Christmas every day :-}

Wow!!!!!!! A Knitted Village.

With thanks to my pal Rhyannon, who sent this link.

From The Daily Mail, a newspaper in the U.K.
(full article with all photos at link above.)

A close-knit community: Meet the ladies who've spent years stitching their entire Kent village

By Jane Fryer

At first sight, this looks like a classic British village.

There's a beautiful Norman church, two pubs, a shop, a school, a village hall, a huge Georgian manor house with landscaped gardens, teenagers slouched around the bus shelter and dozens of red-brick cottages with gardens in full bloom and vegetable patches bursting with cabbages, cauliflowers and sweet peas.

Woollen wonder: The ladies of the Mersham Afternoon Club , Daphne O'Donoghue, Joy Pearson, Joyce McDonagh and Margaret Goldup

There's even a cricket pitch, with a match in full flow and the offside stump leaning drunkenly to one side after a particularly unplayable spinner.

But on closer inspection, things don't look quite right. The fielders are a bit wobbly in the leg department and far too fat to fit in the very smart pavilion for lashings of tea and egg sandwiches. And the roof on the manor house is rather saggy.

The Mitchell house, complete with stone wall and arched doors

And the chimneys are wonky. And most of the television aerials look like they've been caught in a nasty storm. And the smoking teenagers are a bit misshapen.

In fact, the whole thing looks rather, well . . . home-made. Which is no surprise, because every inch of this village - Mersham, in Kent - has been lovingly knitted by a small group of very twinkly ladies who started 23 years ago with a couple of cottages and some pigs, and ended up creating more than 60 properties, complete with wheelie bins, outdoor loos, gas tanks, cars in the driveways and even a smart red telephone box.

The shrubs at Longthorne Farm have grown a bit since it was knitted

And on Saturday, the entire village - lock, stock and beautifully knitted barrel - will be up for sale in the (real, not woollen) Mersham village hall. It has caused quite a stir, and not just in Mersham. The ladies and their woollen houses have been on the news, in the papers and interviewed by TV companies from all over.

'It's all been rather extraordinary - we've been a bit taken aback,' says Joyce McDonagh, who is clearly enjoying all the fuss and is hosting our meeting in the village hall.

Has someone moved the pillar box from outside the village store?

It all started in 1986 with an article in Woman's Weekly and a small group of ladies from the Mersham Afternoon Club ('We're linked with Age Concern, but we don't like to think about that because it makes us feel old,' says Joyce, who is 82 and a retired market researcher) who had a bit of time and a few balls of wool on their hands.

'We read about another village that'd done it, and we thought we'd give it a whirl. But we'd no idea what we'd bitten off, it just sort of grew and grew and grew.'

The Edensor bungalow has had a couple of skylights fitted

Indeed, between them, the ladies have spent thousands of hours knocking up everything from pecking chickens to chimney stacks, impenetrable Leylandii hedges to gravestones.

'The lady who did the church knitted most of the graves when she was on a sunbathing holiday in Spain, which gave the other guests a bit of a jolt,' says Margaret Goldup, 80, the club's treasurer.

The Old Gate House, complete with a plume of smoke from the chimney

There's more to knitting a village than you might think. While they might look a bit woolly around the edges, all the buildings are knitted to scale, courtesy of a lot of painstaking work by the late Ron Stead, husband of one of the founders, Sheila.

Ron traipsed round the lanes with his camera and, after weeks of cutting and sticking and measuring, produced immaculate cardboard three-dimensional templates of each building.

The woollen version appears thatched rather than tiled, but otherwise the Royal Oak pub is easily recognisable

'We just sort of knitted round them - after we'd spent a lot of time peering at people's homes, front and back, to get the colours right and the gardens spot on,' says Margaret.

When it was finished, the village was put to work - displayed at fetes and craft fairs, where it raised more than £10,000 for the village hall fund. Sadly, the numbers of original knitters in the Afternoon Club have dwindled. 'There were about 12 of us to start, but most of them have popped off now,' says Joyce.

Even the bus shelter on the village green was not missed out from the knitted village

'Did you see the phone box? So lovely . . . she's gone now . . .' says Margaret. 'And the cricket team? Yes, her as well . . . And the big house is a beauty - the work that went into that, goodness! She was a wonder with her needles - God rest her soul.'

And that's part of the problem. Just hauling the village out of the huge wooden drawers in the village hall is a step too far, not to mention keeping on top of the refurbishments (many hours have been spent patching up roofs and chimneys and sprucing up.

Flanders House sits in pretty gardens both in reality and in the knitted village

From woolly chickens to the 'thatched' pub, they're perfect in every detail. Meet the ladies who've spent years knitting their entire Kent village the cabbages) and transporting it to fetes and craft festivals.

And what of the real Mersham, which has a population of 1,022 and sports countless extensions, conservatories, satellite dishes and an awful lot of cars? Has it changed much as a place to live?

The knitters make sure their re-created the brightly coloured doors of the row of red cottages

'Oooh yes!' they all exclaim. 'We used to know everyone, but it's grown so much. . . And the bakery's gone, and the haberdashery and the slaughterhouse. . . All those big 4x4s - we call them funeral hearses. And it's not nearly as tightly knit.'

Er. . . tightly knit? I say, looking up to see if they're pulling my leg.

'Oh yes, dear. Speaking of knitting, people just don't do it any more,' says Joyce. 'I've a left-handed daughter who doesn't want to know and grandchildren who couldn't be less interested.'

The school house is seen from a different aspect in the picture below but is a recognisable feature in the village

'They don't like knitted stuff,' chips in Daphne O'Donoghue, 75. 'It's too scratchy - they prefer T-shirts and hoodies - they'd rather go to Next. I used to knit such complicated stuff, but now I watch television instead.'

And on Saturday, how will they feel as their extraordinary village is split up, never to be displayed together again?

Well bowled... the cricket green wasn't missed out in the knitted village

The picturesque high street of Mersham village complete with a natty striped car

'Ooh, I'll be shedding a tear,' says Margaret. 'It'll be a very sad day.'

She has a point. It might all sound a teeny bit daft, but there is something splendid and charming and really very British about their version of Mersham. Even if it is made entirely of wool and the cricket team look rather hopeles