lavender heart
Originally uploaded by Flyingsquid.
I haven't put up any crafty posts for some time, so here's what I've been working on since getting back from Scotland. While goofing off at work web-surfing, I stumbled across Chains Of Hearts on Yahoo. It's a group for swapping 6" crazy hearts. I'd never done crazy patchwork before, but I had all the materials and embroidery threads, so I couldn't resist joining.
These are the first three I've made. The embroidery toys are happy to be played with again!
Because, after all, I shouldn't leave out the parties. The above was taken at the Xerps party, easily the best I went to. Also the only one not held in a large, brightly-lit function room. I don't know, I find it hard to get into a party mood in bright light.
They've got my vote for 2010!
I walked in here and was instantly nine years old again. Don't go bringing any little girls in here. You'll never pry them out.
What you're looking at is the piano, incidentally.
This was Trev's favourite room at House for an Art Lover. It's impressive, but I prefer the dining room at Mackintosh's own house, with its more subdued colour scheme. The end wall, seen at the right in the photo, has a large painting of pink roses on a bright blue, to my eye clashing, background. I couldn't help wondering a teeny bit if it was really what Mackintosh had intended.
It has the same inhabited feeling as the Mackintosh House. I kept expecting someone in period costume to walk in and be startled at our outlandish appearance.
House for an Art Lover was designed by Mackintosh, but not built until the 1990s. If the Mackintosh House is a dimension-warp, this one is a time-warp. This is my favourite view of the exterior, looking towards the front entrance.
Looks pretty surreal, doesn't it? This is the outside of the Mackintosh's own house, which has materialised inside the Hunterian Museum in such a way that bits (such as the front door and windows) stick out.
Despite being interdimensionally entwined with an art museum, the place feels lived-in. You expect the Mackintoshes to walk in at any moment.
Once again, I have no interior photos, but the Hunterian Museum has a virtual tour .
I mean it about wanting to live here.
Our Mackintosh Feast began with the Glasgow School of Art. Most of my photos of the outside didn't come out very well - this one is the best. The GSA's website has a virtual tour with some good pictures of the inside.
Have I mentioned yet that I have a new favourite architect? You have to take a guided tour here, which turns out to be a very good thing, or at least it does if your guide is as good as ours was.
Trev and I both agreed that it must be inspirational to study here. I mentioned to my boss (who is from Glasgow) that we'd been, and he said that in fact, he has taken classes there, and it was. You can imagine my envy!
This giant marble machine was my favourite thing at the Science Museum. For an idea of scale, the balls are about six inches in diameter.
I want one.
This is probably the best photo of the whole trip. We went to the science museum on our first day in Glasgow. It's pretty much geared for children, so we had fun being ten again.
We also saw Charlie and the Chocolate Factory on the Imax screen. I am now forever spoiled for watching movies in normal cinemas.
*spoiler alert*
Neil Gaiman says on his journal that the new Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is really Willy Wonka's story, not Charlie's. He's right. It's also a fantastic movie. (The real show-stealer is Deep Roy, as the oompa-loompas.)
As some of you may know, the reason for the long break in posts is that I've been up in Glasgow, at the 63rd World Science Fiction Convention. The con was terrific, and we managed to fit in some sight-seeing as well, including lots of Charles Rennie Mackintosh architecture. The detail above is from the back wall of the Scotland Street School.
There won't be as many pictures up here as I would have liked - I'm still getting to know the digital camera, so while many things came out better than I would have expected, pretty much all of the low-light ones came out too blurry for even Photoshop to rescue. Clearly, I need to experiment more with the manual settings.