Salisbury Museum - June 2017

I've wanted to visit this particular museum for some considerable time, as you'll be able to see from the next few posts, its well worth a visit and I've promised myself to return...

I'll start with the needlework images.  In this first batch they're all from the same mirror.  I believe this design was originally sold in kit form, from house to house, where the supplier would also provide the threads you would need.  

If you Google 'Restoration Embroidered Mirror' you'll see many more, especially if you refine the search to only 'Images', at the top there.  

This typical design incorporates a huge variety of stitches.  The piece doesn't cover the period that I'm most interested in, as I prefer to see needlework from roughly 30 years or more earlier. 

Its my personal observation with these mirrors, that not all the examples of Cloth Stitch, which is a lacemaking stitch, were made especially for the piece, but in my view, collaged from samples.  I could be wrong, but scale, apart from anything else, seems to be the giveaway?  Comments most welcome.  

However, apart from the odd piece of collaged fabric, the rest still needed an incredible amount of work to stitch and then put together and must have taken years by a single stitcher, or perhaps less if there were say 3 or 4 sisters working on it together?  

The colour is obviously very faded, which is a shame, but at least it must have been displayed and enjoyed over the years, instead of put away, never to be seen again, as can so often happen to heirloom pieces.   

I decided to leave the image below in its original orientation, to preserve the detail.

There are more in this series, but I'm exhausted at the present time, so will have to grab some zeds...

Salisbury Museum was Incredible - Highly recommend Wessex Gallery

Since returning from our holiday in Cornwall, I've been inundated with 'stuff', you know the kind, the kind that keeps coming at you, no matter how much you want to avoid it or get rid of it quickly, including having to finally succumb to massive operating system upgrades.

I've taken lots of pictures recently, as promised but I ran out of battery in the museum and had to switch to iphone.  Then realised I should have just used the iphone, but at that time, I knew my operating system needed replacing, so several pages later reader, I'm now in the process of drafting a museum post.

But for now I send you something really special.  Everyone knows I practice organic gardening, permaculture, make my own compost and compost tea etc, well here is a picture of my lawn, as it is now, two months after applying Alfalfa Meal natural fertiliser, then spiking the lawn, then applying compost tea with a watering can, after dividing the lawn into 4 with markers.  Should mention I also rolled the grass, back in March, after the frost.  You only need to do a light rolling, they say.  I went over mine twice, with a three quarters filled roller.

So here it is:

In a word: lush!

See folks, Believe in Better and it CAN be done!

Next time I'll show you pictures of pre-Beaker people hand-axes, that are circa 480,000 years old, found around the Stonehenge area. Only goes to show just how long people have been making stuff and making it always as well as they possibly can, given their circumstances.  

IMO, its only when you make stuff you truly connect with all of mankind.