It Grew

I’ve been printing out more quotes from the material in the archives and they were dry enough to finish arranging and pinning onto the backing cloth yesterday. It now measures about two yards long.

 The original sample was stitched to scrim. I thought that that would be too flimsy for the final book so I’ve decided to go with old sheeting with a backing of hessian. The sheet will give support and the hessian, with the stitching visible, will add texture to the back of the scroll. I think this will look more finished than just the white cotton.

 The following image is a quote from a letter from the Rev Clay. It was this that made me decide to work with pieces of recycled and left over fabrics. I didn’t think that during the middle of the lockout that these girls would have lengths of new material to play with, much more likely to be patching, darning and making over.

 I’m not sure how long it will take to sew but I’ve a deadline of somewhere mid September I think.

New Book

I went to the Liverpool book fair last week partly to see the entries for the Frankenstein exhibition (my wire bound book started off as a response to the call for entries and although it soon morphed into something else I wanted to see what others had done with the theme) but mainly to meet the North West Book Artists Group. They were very welcoming. I joined in with their open session at the exhibition making scroll books. I hope to be able to join them again in the near future.

I’m not going to show what I made in Liverpool but working on the scroll book there gave me ideas for the archive project.

Usually I try and find a story that grabs me in the mass of information that the archive holds on the subject that is chosen. I’m struggling to do that with the Preston lockout. But what has struck me is the language used in handbills and reported in the press. I’ve decided to make a book ’Voices from the Lockout ‘focusing on the words used by people at the time.

One of the things I did come across was a letter written by the Rev. Clay describing the effects of the lockout on the people of Preston. In it he describes a school that ladies from his church set up giving lessons in literacy and in sewing to girls who would normally have been employed in the mills.

I’ve decided to print the words onto cotton fabrics and stitch them into a scroll.

Early experiments in printing...

And assembling.

Puppets and Currants

Still not a lot of art work done this month but I have been busy elsewhere.

Our production of Peter Pan finally finished on Saturday.  As a prop maker and scenery painter, married to the scriptwriter/director, it tends to take over your life especially when we had a full stage ship and a movable bed/ship/campsite to make and my solution to flying in a church hall was using puppets instead of installing trapezes’.

On the growing front this glorious weather means a bumper crop of blackcurrants, now harvested and nearly all put in the freezer (except for the ones that just happened to get turned into blackcurrant brandy and blackcurrant gin). The redcurrants are now ready to be picked.

I’ve been researching the Preston lockout and the effects of the cotton famine at the Lancashire Archives trying to find a way in for a print. Nothing visual yet but I did reprint my previous bit of letterpress, this time with the N the right way up. Thanks Fiona, it looks much better. Though I don’t think the colour is really appropriate. I used the tail end of a rainbow roll that I’d used to make a father’s day card.