It made my day to find this and 14 other little pieces in the Plaza Matriz market on saturday last. The market runs every saturday, and some stalls are there on weekdays particularly when there is a cruise ship in port, which is every few days in the summer months.
Here are found mostly second hand and bric-a-brac stalls, some featuring things like old table and bed linen (I never tire of rummaging here for treasures great and small) others feature glasswares, table ware , a little antique silver, more plated though, and some lovely pieces of very little value. You can buy anything, including an old wind up gramophone with a box of 78-play tango records, an old fashioned manual food mincer, ancient keys and tools, old spectacle frames, old fashioned things like cigarette holders and cases, kid leather gloves, ladies cocktail hats, old sheet music , theatre programmes, lanterns, postcards, prints, costume jewellry, antique cutlery – although there are some traps for the unwary here. I have often noticed there seems to be a lot of a very popular embossed design around – the penny dropped the other day, finally , duh, as I realised someone has a nice little line of putting new antique-style handles onto older cutlery parts – of course !!! to replace aged and dingy damaged bone handles! The jewellery is fun, although, too there are some modern antiques here and there. But if I were into beading in a big way I would be scooping up stuff here – the word is out that necklaces are big accessories this year, there is lots of old stuff re-threaded, and lots of pearl beads, so those selling actual pearls are now putting signs up that their pearls are genuine cultured… actually one one stall I was tempted but had little money left…..and realistically I’m not a pearl operson although I love looking at them on someone else. You could buy a politically incorrect fox fur collar, or even a couple of actual minks I saw the other day – such things were very popular draped over the shoulder of a suit jacket in my grandmother’s day, and were seen through into the ’50’s in Australia. They are sometimes worn here, but maybe more so this winter; since at a fashion parade I attended here last week, fox furs dyed all kinds of lovely colours draped around models’ shoulders in many outfilts. Since most foxes in the world are wild, I do not endorse hunting and using those wild animals’ fur, unless,of course, one just happens to be an indigenous human occupant of fox terrritory.

Around the outside edge of the plaza are some restaurant tables, and areas where dancing displays , folklorico and tango, are given, soldiers march and musicians play at differnt times most saturdays . Also on this outer perimeter and stretching along the peatonal Sarandi towards the city gate are lots of artesan stalls, selling all kinds of craft items. One stall took my eye; a woman was selling lovely felt hats in beautiful colours for winter, very stylish, and very well priced – I’m going back next week. Bring on that winter wind.

While stitching the above quilt, I listened to several recorded books. One was Dan Brown’s “The Da Vinci Code” I’d both read and listened to it in the past couple of years, but this is perhaps in training, preparation, for the release of the movie later this month. I feel as if one needs to be really alert so as to not miss any little thing, just like in the book. It will be a great disappointment if the movie is in fact ‘too easy’, IMHO. I also listened again to “Blue Horizon” by Wilbur Smith, a terrific family historic saga/adventure story. And the book I am reading just now is Anne Tyler’s “An Amateur Marriage” which has held my attention well. It’s an interesting title when you think of it though: most people at least when they begin married life are amateurs at “marriage”. Some get better at the whole thing, but others never seem to get beyond amateur status, even with repeated tries with different partners. This book has caused me to think about some of the great and ghastly marriages I know, and pondering the question of when one moves up from amateur to professional ? Another book I enjoyed a couple of weeks ago was “Last Days of Dog Town” by Anita Diament, what a terrific story teller, exploring human individual and community relationships against a historic background of early colonial North America, totally different from but equally gripping as her earlier work “The Red Tent”, set in the middle east in early biblical times .

The whole quilt is done, but since I don’t show anything new in full until it has been exhibited in public, this is all you can see at this time…. eventually it will all go up on the blog.

Once I began, and once I had tuned in to the recorded books again, the work was not so daunting and tedious as I feared when samplising.

While doing this one several ideas have gelled for another, and another….

Another of the little treasures that appear from time to time on the antique market stalls – this one bears the rust marks of pin or staple and the pencilled number 9 and other pattern markings clearly visible. I’m not going to try to wash these things out – previous experience with a similar blue marking in and around the monograms on some old serviettes I recently bought showed it to be quite inert to bleach, and it isn’t sooo obvious when the fabric is dry.

On fine handkerchief linen, the fillings seem to me to be either counted ( needing 12 year old eyes) or very accurate eyeballed sense of even spacing, for the patterns all depend on that. I have always been admirer of the various counted thread works, and among my books in Australia are numerous ones with patterns like this – I went through quite a phase, but on larger count fabrics and smaller objects like book marks, or tray cloths with one edge or a central motif…

One of my favourite books since I bought it in about 1979 is “Needlelace and Needleweaving” by Jilly Nordfors. A modern embroidery classic, of course it’s far away, on the shelves in Aus, just when I would really like to be dipping into it for inspiration – wonderful photography – but instead I am mentally going over how I used it for inspiration in the 1980’s creative embroidery. But perhaps it is better that I draw on my memory and experience without it, and I feel sure some of it is going to be appearing again in some way in the leather lace theme that is developing just now – so, I realise I am already under the influence of what has gone before; and pleased being able to see things in a different but related way. A quilting friend commented the other day on my new work, saying how naturally it seemed to follow on what has been my inspiration with the fine details of landscape.
The geologists around me are commenting that the little stemmed french knots coming out of the lacy holes in the leather are looking very dendritic in character. (little lace-like intrusions often black (due to managanese) sometimes even gold, in tiny cracks in rocks….. no doubt about how one’s background of knowledge influences the interpetation of what you are seeing with your eyes.

On one of the quilters lists to which I subscribe there has been quite a bit of discussion recently about how quilters go about naming their works – someone commented that ‘Untitled’ is a bit of a cop out – and yet, at least with such a title the viewer’s mind is then free to roam around the impressions created by the work without being influenced or inded puzzled by the title.

One quilter even asked other readers to check her website and help her name a recently finished piece pictured there ….. does this mean the work is a collaboration between artist and the one who supplied the final name? To me, choosing a title even a blah one like ‘Untitled’ is part of the creative process, as important as signing the completed work. I enjoy all the processes of making a piece, and I jot down words and ideas in my mind while I am making it, so that generally by the time I get to the end, the title has worked itself to the top of the list. To me, a satisfactory title is like a mini-statement, and IMHO all that is needed to assist the viewer regarding a particular work. People who know me know that I don’t care for wordy artist statements about every work, since so many of them are literary fabrications, so often a whole of of artspeak that may or may not offer the viewer any connection to what they are seeing. And a major pet peeve is the confusion many quilt artists display with them, often filling the allocated space with technical construction and process details, for want of anything else meaningful to say in terms of inspiration or personal feeling contained in the work. Climb down off soapbox…. er hem.

Very big this winter in the leather shops here in Montevideo are suede outfits, blouse amd shirt type tops and skirts with decorative punched hole edges ….. these and my growing collection of lacy samples are clearly influencing me … plus many fibre artists are making ‘lace’ out of all kinds of stuff, so why not leather … I am thinking seafoam, coastal landforms and topographic maps … landlace perhaps? Anyway the pile of little circular cutouts and slivers trimmed from what I am working on grows by the hour. the hands are aching a little, or perhaps this is the onset of cooler weather… but the leather punch is such fun. 

Hmmm – these need more work – all the edges of the large number of these need to be hand sewn down, from the back, and even then, although I have done with the composition I am not sure of what the final impact will be –
but since it has ‘potential’ I am not showing the whole thing just now – and again, I have put it aside in favour of the next thing…