Art student once again!

The next chapter begins ...

A glorious Monday morning. Masses of house martins whizzing round the house welcoming the sunshine. A jolly good morning sent to my lovely girls to make sure they are out of bed, my school bag packed and raring to go- and on the road to college... some very pretty meadows strewn down the central reservation of the A689 and the odd roundabout on the way to Hartlepool making for a scenic journey.

First week nerves kicked in a bit, but all in all it has been a very productive and interesting week.
There are a small number of new students joining the year twos in the textile class, six newbies from various places - 3 of us from Newcastle - all with foundation degrees but needing to resit our second year as this is a requirement for the Northern School of Art. This isn't a problem for me as I just want to do this for as long as I can so an extra year is actually a bonus for me!

Our first week is aimed at introducing the new direct entry students into college and giving them a chance to find their bearings before being thrown in with the full class. Day one was about introductions, a whistle stop tour, and then a dying workshop in the dye lab... great fun, very informative and has yielded some basic yet interesting cloth samples - I loved it!!!

fabric dying

The next day we used the fabric we had dyed to create some embroidery samples, we had two workshops - one on machine embroidery in the morning and in the afternoon a refresher on hand Embroidery - I say refresher but i n fact I learnt quite a lot as since rediscovering embroider a couple of years ago I have been largely self taught using the interweb and various experiments so it was good to have some actual tuition!!

fabric drying

The rest of the week saw more workshops on screen printing - including the basics of setting up the screen from scratch a process which had seemed incredibly complicated at Newcastle suddenly became easy and clearer - and some basic screen printing - still definitely not my thing - I don't quite know why but I don't really care for the process at all- I will keep revisiting it to see if my impressions and in fact my prints improve but even made simpler it still didn't work for me.

basic embroidery samples

Finally at the end of a busy few days we were joined by the rest of our year group and we had our first induction session and were given the outline of our first brief - plus a time table which seems quite punishing after the lackadaisical affair form the previous establishment - this course looks like its going to be great fun and quite challenging - Its both scary and exciting at the same time but bring it on is my motto...watch this space!!

By the way I am still playing with the new format for the blog layout - it just that his kind of thing defeats me from time to time - comments and constructive criticism are welcome - I already know one regular doesn't care for change!!! I'm working on it 😊

Scotland part 2

The second half of the week continued in much the same vein. We had one rainy afternoon which was actually quite nice to be holed up in the house with the rain lashing the windows. It probably wasn't quite so nice for the two visitors that came on their bikes but they're tough cookies - and its only water- but I did feel sorry for them having to cycle six miles back down the track in the wind and rain, but given Scotland, it wasn't as bad as it could be. The big quest for the 2nd half of the week was to find some deer antiers! The chap that owned the house dropped in to visit - he was a very friendly fella and was chatting about how this was the time of year when all the Stags lost their antlers (he collected them and sold them) so after that we were on the serious lookout. It's always been Fred's mission to find some dropped antlers.... The Monro baggers continued with the mission to bag the remaining three Monros... there is discussion as whet...

Vigo

We left the ship to explore Vigo. Its a much larger place then we expected... although tbh I hadn't given ut a lot of thought. Its a real mish mash of old and new and having got a map from tourist info we decided to follow the walking trail to the Monte Castro... the highest point of the town. Most of the town was pretty much as everywhere else... lots of traffic... lots of people... one or two interesting buildings and a lot of shopping. We headed to the art gallery - this has been a year of gallery visits so we we seen o reason to change now. The Museo de Marco is housed in the towns ex prison building and its very grand. In fact, I think that on this occaision the building might have been more interesting than the art.... Although the visiting exhibition by Susanne S D Themlitz was strangely compelling. It was a huge varied collection of eclectic items... found, salavaged, manipulated and arranged in lots of ways - weirdly inspiring - and mostly enjoyable to look at...

verdant lushness

Its a never ending island hop... today we hopped of the boat at Kingstown, on the island St. Vincents and Grenadine. Once through the usual port duty free - cheap booze and diamonds to go milarkey we were straight into the town... crazy noisy smelly chaos... refreshingly no tat shops for tourists, just local markets and street traders all vying for local sales. Music blasting from everywhere, cars (very battered and often very pimped) all over the roads - parked in the middle of the street, loading, unloading, chatting seemingly oblivious to the total traffic jam caused behind them... We walked through this mayhem - the temperatures were rising probably about 30 degrees - tourists evident by trying to walk on the shady side of the street - even when we turned off the main drag and there were less people it was still like carnival time with music blasting everywhere. Its very atmospheric and mostly promotes a good vibe although I have heard '3 little birds' everywhich way a...

Planet Ruby Starrs

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