A homecoming for the patchwork quilt

I went to North Uist at the weekend with Claire Hewitt taking the school patchwork back to one of its original locations in Lochmaddy.  The local heritage society had helped gather interested people to come to Taigh Chearsabhaigh, an arts and heritage centre, and see the quilt, hear some of what we already knew about it and to see the names.  Powerful things those names, they recorded grannies and great aunts for a surprising number of the people in the room.  Just about everyone was related to someone on the quilt, including children from Lochmaddy primary school. It was very moving to hear about the lives of those women and even to see photographs of some of them. We heard about a lost way of life too from Angus 'Moy' MacDonald, who had lived on Heisker until 1942, sixty years after Isabella Christie taught there and started making her quilt.  Those islands are uninhabited now.  The quilt holds many stories of loss and abandonment, but the people in that room also showed how it records continuity too.  It was an inspiring day.  We are hoping that the heritage society, and others, will help us gather memories and memorabilia together for an exhibition sometime with the quilt at its centre.

We camped at Balranald while we were on North Uist and I took the chance to explore the machair and take a closer look at the wildlife.  The flowers were past their best but there were still plenty around for insects, including some wind-tattered butterflies.  This bumblebee was a bit more robust and not quite so battered looking.  It's a Great Yellow, Bombus distinguendus, a species like the corncrake that has found a refuge on the Outer Isles from the intensive agriculture in the rest of the country that has driven it extinct elsewhere. It's not just people who keep their roots in these islands, the wildlife does too.



Chasing butterflies

I was at Treswell last week and spent a couple of mornings chasing butterflies, trying to take photographs.  It's a bit of a zen pursuit.  I know I will get one eventually but it can take some time.  It's very meditative in its way.  This small skipper was relatively easy to catch compared to the gatekeepers and meadow brown that were also feeding on the knapweed amongst the long grass of the field that edges the wood.  The field is like a chunk bitten out of the wood (an asart I think, taken from the wood in medieval times, at least). It has a great view of the nearby Cottam power station, belching CO2 into the morning sky.  Notts Wildlife Trust are hoping to buy it and incorporate the field into the nature reserve. Judging from the butterflies it's already a valuable habitat.  Grassland that hasn't been fertilised, cut and reseeded into relatively sterile uniformity is increasingly rare, so I hope the Trust do manage to get it.

A full calendar

Fortingall Art finished yesterday, and I took my first opportunity to see it, having decided on a last minute holiday before it was all printed and hung. Unfortunately for my viewing experience but not for our sales, the whole calendar print with all twelve blocks had been sold and picked up.  This was great news for the Splinter Group and I did get to see, and photograph, an unframed print.  It's an impressive piece of work, rich in detail and some well considered design, well done us.  We're moving on with our wood engraving and it shows how the technique brings its own character to our diverse styles of mark making.  We're planning a trip to Aberdeen Art Gallery for our next meeting to take a look at their wood engraving collection and to see the Ravilious exhibition there. They also have lots of Clare Leighton, who did many richly textured engravings for her own books on the living world, so it should be an inspiring visit.

Fortingall Art... again

High summer and the Splinter wood engraving group is back in the beautiful Arts and Crafts, James Maclaren designed Molteno Hall as part of the annual Fortingall Art exhibition.  After last year's animal alphabet we were slightly less ambitious with our calendar, 12 images instead of 26.  But we've gone a little bigger to 7 x 7 cm for each month.  It might not sound big but with such concentrated mark making each block feels like a substantial piece of work.  We're still to print all the blocks, there's some last minute scratching to do, but it should be a great showpiece for the six entirely different styles of the six of us in the Splinter group.  My months were June and December, inspired by a Picasso lino of Bacchanalian revels and a Ravilious wood engraving of Saturnalia. I have naked ladies for June, dancing with midsummer madness and, more decorously, men in a midwinter Saturnalian scene for December, no Christmas in sight.

We have an entry on the website:
http://www.fortingallart.co.uk/artists_m_z.html
And the exhibition runs from Saturday 28th July to Sunday 5th August 2012. 

Fire and Juniper

I spent a chilly weekend in the woods last week, warmed by fire-making, a good tweed skirt and lots of stories. I was on a bushcraft weekend with Willow Lohr, an inspiring woman who was teaching us to make amidu, the tinder carried by Otsie the iceman, lighting it with flints and steel, making feather sticks and lots of other incendiary tricks. So if I’m in a survival situation I now appreciate the preciousness of a box of matches.   Claire Hewitt was telling stories too, which blended beautifully into a weekend spent sitting around fire.   Our fire circle was under the cover of an old parachute strung under a majestic old pine and we scavenged for dead juniper twigs to make wonderfully fragrant, almost smoke free fire (which is why juniper was so liked by illegal distillers in the days of whisky stills up in the hills).  It was a beautiful piece of woodland at Crathie, near Balmoral and with the biggest goat willow tree I think I’ve ever seen amongst all the old pines, birches and juniper. And it was almost too cold for midges, so an added treat for an already great weekend.

Lost and found

The patchwork quilt has been found! I wrote about it in January on this blog, with a very grainy photograph reproduced from a newspaper, and now I’ve got the real thing.  My storyteller friend Claire Hewitt, who was with me when I first saw it at Kinloch Rannoch primary school prompted its rediscovery when she was on a journey around Highland Perthshire, doing the eighty odd miles of the Etape in eight days and collecting stories on the way.  She found a good few stories, and she found the quilt.  The Etape is a timed cycle race on closed roads that the keen cyclists put their heads down and do in a few hours, but Claire decided keep her head up and take her time, and I’m very glad she did.  She went into Kinloch Rannoch school and had them telling stories, then took out some red and white squares for the kids to sign in homage to the quilt we thought was lost.  But thankfully it was still in the school and Claire and I have now got it.  We’re looking for a good home but it needs somewhere that can show it and help gather and tell its many stories.  

Bamff beavers

Beavers are back on the Tay after a gap of a few hundred years and very welcome they are too as far as I’m concerned.  Although I’ve heard lots about them being around Aberfeldy I’ve yet to see any sign of them so I was glad to have the chance to go to Bamff estate near Alyth where there are beavers aplenty.  Paul and Louise Ramsay brought European beavers onto the estate about ten years ago and have let them do their thing ever since.  They now have two families of beavers thriving in two separate areas on the estate.  We didn’t see beavers, they’re nocturnal and we were there in the middle of a very bright sunny day, but there was plenty of evidence that they were around.  They’re impressively ambitious, gnawing at a huge old beech tree and making a dam 100 metres long and digging canals to swim down from the further reaches of their territory.  All their activity has transformed a rather dull bit of woodland (part of which I helped plant 20 years ago) into an intricate, thriving wetland, a rare thing in our increasingly drained and tidied countryside. There’s been a fair bit of controversy about these beavers.  The Tay beavers are not officially sanctioned, despite the official beaver reintroduction project currently running in Argyll.   These easterners are all escapees, not from Bamff Paul and Louise were very quick to point out, despite much speculation to the contrary.  I suspect most of the objection to them is that they’re rather untidy by our increasingly obsessive tidy standards and they did it in their own way with a bit of help from knowledgeable enthusiasts without the involvement of officialdom.  Good luck to them I say.