Fine Cell Work Selling Exhibition This Thursday!

In or near East London this Thursday (the 19th) between the hours of 1pm and 6pm? Go check out Fine Cell Work’s selling exhibition of their wares! Their new film (below) will also be shown at the event, so hop to it!

Leathersellers’ Hall
15 St. Helen’s Place,
London
EC3A 6DQ

Having seen their work in person before, I definitely recommend going! This charity is one of my favorites the world over. The quilt shown in the video will be part of the V & A Museum’s exhibit Quilts 1700-2010, which will be from March 20 – July 4 2010.

There was a video here but it seems to have disappeared? Keeping the link in case it miraculously goes back up.

Want more?

*A Stitch Doing Time
*Doing Time: Patchwork as a Tool of Social Rehabilitation in British Prisons

on remembering…

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Lately, all my thoughts have come back to this photograph. Not just at the actual image, but also the way the top seems to fade into nothing. I’ve been trying to dry a delicate felt rug that I made in the bathtub for days now. It’s made of fleece and due to some thinner spots, I don’t want to hang it up before I can mend it with a felting needle. The beginning of southern humidity is doing little to expedite the drying process.

Sunday night I gathered the fleece on the rug before me, stacked in fuzzy piles of various color and breed. Once I was done assembling the fiber, I took the lot to the bathtub to begin the felting process. As the hot water hit the fleece, the room smelled like sheep and flooded my mind with memories of the farm in Sussex, rural North Carolina flocks and even the land deep in Georgia my grandfather owned when I was a child.

The ridiculous juxtaposition of natural fiber and mod cons was laugh-inducing as I sang along to The Reindeer Section while stomping to mesh the fiber just like that old “I Love Lucy” episode with the grapes.

Already somewhat mawkish at this point, I thought of why I was making this particular piece- in order to find ways to recycle fiber that has become almost surplus in some areas of the United Kingdom due to a steadying decline in market price. I remembered an afternoon spent hiking in the North Carolina mountains where we came over a rise to find the entire landscape before us clearcut. One of those moments where you just feel a stomach-dropping sadness for what could have been.

Seeing the photo above gives me that exact same feeling I had that day in the mountains. Where you feel like you stumbled on the scene too late, unable to do anything truly useful. Despite my recent article getting nice remarks from friends and colleagues across the world, I’m still getting sad news from England regarding farmer’s incomes.

And as I do things like look at photos and stomp wool in the bathtub, I can’t help being struck by the fear that maybe it is too late for the English wool industry. But simultaneously being enlivened by the idea that perhaps in time, we will start to reclaim our cultural legacies instead of eschewing them for more, more and more.